I risked coronavirus for a drive-in movie

And it was so worth it.

It’s been two months since the quarantine caused society to pick up its ball and go home, and now, even if you don’t live in a state that has reopened, one can feel things starting to change. The virus is just as deadly, just as mysterious, just as contagious as it was in mid-March, but people are becoming undeniably bolder. When I informed a friend this week that I hadn’t hung out with another human since quarantine, I was met with shock. “So you’re following the rules after 2 months?”

It reminds me of a story I read in Malcolm Gladwell’s “David and Goliath,” describing the devastation during Germany’s bombing of London in 1940 and 1941. Bombs fell day and night for eight straight months, killing 40,000 and injuring another 46,000. Yet citizens, curiously, didn’t panic or flee to the countryside. They stayed, they worked, they lived amongst the wreckage. One of them is quoted as saying, “And miss this? Not for all the tea in China!” Gladwell explains, “A near miss leaves you traumatized. A remote miss makes you think you are invincible.”

Perhaps some of us are restless. Perhaps some of us are reckless. Only time will tell.

I could not deny my craving for a collective experience. So this week I drove 75 minutes out of town to Montclair, CA, one of the few…