An Open Letter to Sonic Drive-In

March 20, 2016                     

Sonic Drive-In

300 Johnny Bench Dr

Oklahoma City OK 73104

Dear Sonic,

If taken literally, your promise to deliver “service with the speed of sound” has never been fulfilled but my experience generally has been service with an acceptable wait. Any wait when you are hungry is hard to endure, but our food always arrived well before we began to think concretely about cannibalism. Just as I was thinking, “Please, please, please, we’re dying out here!” two feet would appear under the sign and happiness would ensue. 

It was the promise implicit in your name that brought us to your Springville, Utah store.  We had left an event in a neighboring town and the children, hepped up on adrenalin from being a part of a huge celebration for the new LDS temple, didn’t want to go straight home.  They wanted a treat. As we drove by the BYU Creamery we saw a huge line and, remembering past waits in the ice cream line, decided to go a little further out from the venue and find a treat closer to home. We pulled into the parking lot at Sonic and saw six or seven cars at the drive-up window and several parking spots open. I decided I didn’t feel like idling for 10 minutes so I pulled into a parking spot, ordered, and paid.  And waited.  

At the point where, on any other visit, those two feet would appear under the sign, my seven year old daughter announced that she had to go to the bathroom. We had never had this issue at Sonic before so I didn’t even know if they *had* a public restroom. Plus I thought our food was imminent and I could neither send my 7 year old alone to find a bathroom nor leave my other daughter alone in the car while we did. And what would happen if our food came and nobody was in the car? I asked her if she could possibly hold it just a little longer. At 25 minutes into our wait I pushed the red button again to see if our order had been lost. He assured me they were working on it and would bring it out as soon as they could. 

At 30+ minutes, we all got out of the car and went to the door of the kitchen. A man in a headset came out quickly to see what we wanted. I told him about my daughter’s bathroom need and how long we had been waiting for our food. At this point we had spent 45 minutes trying to get out the parking lot of the Marriott Center not because it took that long to exit after an event but because the car at the head of the lane I had parked in was not willing to inch forward and nuzzle his way into the lane of cars that had a direct exit onto the road. Essentially, he was waiting for the entire parking lot to empty before trying to get out and we were all held captive by the parked cars on either side of our doomed line. It was incredibly infuriating. Also, we had been up and working on the presentation at the Marriott Center since 6 that morning.  You can imagine, then, how exhausted I was at 10:30 pm. You can imagine how forcefully I let the guy in the headset know how unacceptable this long wait was. He asked which order was ours and assured us he would hurry things along. We went to the bathroom and then back to the car thinking that at any minute our order would arrive. It would take another 15 minutes. 

I was pretty much boiling by the time those two feet appeared. She explained that there had been a large event (which we well knew) and that they had hoped some people would give up and leave but nobody did. I told her that we absolutely would have left if they hadn’t already TAKEN OUR MONEY. Also, did the people at the drive-up window wait 45 minutes to an hour? She was silent on that point but I knew they hadn’t. So as we sat there waiting for our food, who knows how many people butted ahead of us in line simply because we chose to park instead of idle? Is this honestly how Sonic does business? Choosing to turn off your car (an environmentally friendly thing we are encouraged to do) means choosing to be the LAST priority? You don’t have to answer that because I already know it is true. Not only did I watch it play out in front of my eyes, I crowd sourced it on Facebook. It’s not just a Springville, Utah thing. It’s a Sonic thing. And it is completely unacceptable.

How Much of This is Based on Real Life?

Keeping Clocks
Microburst Theatre Festival
BYU
January 13-16, 2016

I was in the car, driving, when my daughter said, "Mom, are you doing that conversation again?" That's when I realized I had been muttering under my breath, taking a second look at all of my responses, trying to make sure I hadn't sounded like an idiot.  I do it all the time.

It's basically mental/verbal proofreading, except I can't hold off on hitting "submit' until after I give the conversation a once over so it's more like proofreading your IMs, which I also do. My coworkers have learned to humor me when I resubmit a message to correct typos. I'm a writer. Revising is what I do.

That's why a talkback session after a show of mine is both exciting and daunting.  I want to hear your impressions and field your questions, but I also want to ponder everything for a while and get back to you with my third draft response. So here it is. In the hopes of mitigating how much this reveals about my personality, I will only address one of the talkback questions (the one I blundered through the worst).

Thoughtful Audience Member: How much of this is based on real life?

Playwright: This show is actually unusual in that it is very closely tied to actual events in my life. Generally speaking, the truth of my plays is in the emotion and not so much in the literal details.  But, as it happens, I am a mother and I have rocked my baby and wished I could hold that moment forever.  And I am personal friends with Father Time.  Oops.  Ok, that part wasn't literal.  But I remember very distinctly when my youngest daughter was tiny and my world was pure chaos.  At three weeks old her father announced he was leaving, which came as a total shock to me.  My days were spent trying to process this and deal with a very rapidly changing universe. When it came time to rock my baby to sleep, I was exhausted. Rocking her to sleep was a sanctuary for me. The room was quiet and dark. I was holding a small, warm bundle of unconditional love. I had no desire to leave that moment and return to the craziness of the rest of my life.

It stuck with me as something to write about over all of these years. (Actually, many years ago I asked my friend Sam Day to capture the moment in a painting and he reminded me that I could write about it!  I blame Mommy Brain for that oversight.) I first wrote about it in the poem Rocking Baby to Sleep (see below). Then I let it percolate. I revised the poem. Percolate. Revised. Percolate. Turned it into a play.

My thought was that I was writing about the universal cry of "Don't grow up!" that is found on nearly every baby photo ever posted on social media. I wanted to pay homage to the loveliness of the moment when you rock your baby to sleep, knowing I was viewing this moment from the better rested position of a mom with older kids (7 and 12) and knowing the sentiments were tainted by chronic baby hunger.

Then I went to the first day of tablework for the play and saw it from a different perspective entirely. All around the table came observations and questions about things that absolutely were present in the text but that I had not yet stepped back and viewed.  I honestly thought I was telling a straightforward based-on-real-life type story (with that caveat about the fictitious character) but I was really writing about something that was not directly translated onto the stage. That play was considerably more interesting and rich than the sweet, direct homage I had started with.

This is not to say that I rewrote the play entirely based on the tablework, but observations like "there isn't a father in this play" pricked my unconscious thought to the forefront and I realized that I was also writing about the other big loss in that scenario: the loss of my husband. Looking at the choices I had made in the draft I could see myself grappling with the differences in the way we experience our children and my ongoing process of mourning the man I fell in love with. The play doesn't literally talk about any of that, but it's all about all of that and the process of writing and producing this play had an important impact on my actual life. So it's based on real life and it impacts real life and when my daughter, who I haven't rocked to sleep in years, cried herself to sleep about the father she doesn't know, I rocked her and kissed her sweet head and rather than wish for times past I relished a quiet moment where time didn't stand still but I could feel the tandem ticking of our heartbeats.

So this, dear audience member, is why the most truthful answer to your question is....

Everything.  And nothing.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rocking Baby to Sleep

I sit in the glider next to the crib, your tiny body heavier at the end of the day than at the beginning.

You settle your head between my chin and collar bone and we glide back and forth, back and forth.

One little arm wraps around me, one little arm rests on my chest.

Two big arms wrap around you with a hand on your pink pajama’d back.

Two little legs stick out to the left, two big legs point to the right.

Occasionally you kick your feet or raise your head, smile and thunk it down again heavily.

On wiggly days I stand up to prevent your escape from my lap.

Your legs splay around my waist and my arms slip under your bum.

When you are still too wiggly I ask, “Do you want to lay down in your crib and listen to your music?”

Some days you nod and I kiss you good night.

Some days you thunk your head down and snuggle up.

When your eyes are halfway closed I sit down again.

I rock you longer than is absolutely necessary.

Sometimes I take a little nap before charging into the rest of the night.

Mostly I breathe in your baby sweetness, kiss whatever is nearest my lips

and tell myself “Remember this! Remember this! Remember this!”

Keeping Clocks (final lines)

FATHER TIME

To you she is a living, growing, real person. All I have is a fraction of her in my pocket. You don’t want my view of the world.

MOTHER

My view is a window seat on a bullet train until I sit in this quiet room and you stop time so I can feel the ticking of her clock.

(FATHER TIME pulls out a very small clock from his pocket.)

FATHER TIME

Hold it for a minute and you’ll see that it’s better to have time than to just hold it.

(FATHER TIME reaches out to hand the clock to her. She takes it and their hands are still somehow tangled together.)

FATHER TIME

Is that yours?

MOTHER

It’s the same as hers.

FATHER TIME

But yours is still in my pocket.

MOTHER

I can feel it. Every second is there, present tense and past tense. In the rushing of my blood, the tandem ticking of our heartbeats.

Be my valentine?

This was the question the library asked:

This was my answer:

This was The Monkey's:

(E.L. abstained)

Well, I guess the love of my life remains unrequited.  Figures.