Summer Movies and The A/V Cart

When I was in school (back in the day), one of the highlights of our young school lives was the arrival of the A/V Cart.

If you're not old enough to remember this from your own school days, A/V is shorthand for Audio/Visual (you're welcome) and the cart would usually hold a movie projector and possibly a record player. Eventually the A/V cart held a TV. I know. Mind blown.

Something wonderful was sure to happen when the A/V Cart arrived.

Also, there was always one impossibly nerdy kid who got to be the A/V Cart Monitor and wheel the wonderful promise of fun into the classroom. He was usually the smartest kid, who usually happened to also be the teacher's pet.

For the record, that was never me, but that's not important right now.

So, let's talk Summer. And movie nights. Specifically Darby Summer Movies which, in case you cared, is also an Instagram Hashtag - #DarbySummerMovies. So there's that.

But back to the A/V Cart. Last summer, Lucy's boyfriend Marc - who was instrumental in the building of my awesome farm table - built us our very own A/V Cart. Because we're not nerdy enough without having our own A/V Cart. Right?

He painted it black and put wheels on it, because A/V carts should just roll in, blend in and do their job without calling attention to themselves. I'm in love with it.

Isn't it a beautiful thing? The Optoma projector usually sits on top of that big black receiver thing. The 2nd shelf is for the dvd player and the speakers travel in the cart as well.

In fact, now that we have the A/V Cart, setting up for an outdoor movie is relatively painless, which is awesome because there are nights where we decide to do the movie thing about an hour before the sun goes down and we send out a text...

"Hey guys! Movie tonight? Be here at 8:30."

And we usually manage to get a pretty full house. Outdoor Movie Nights are very much a part of our own personal summer celebrations.

Most movie nights we have concessions - that's movie talk for "snacks." Candy and sodas and water bottles and chocolate bars and the brown paper bags hold popcorn. We usually include some fresh strawberries because they're super abundant around here in the summer.

We bought 3 dozen plastic stacking adirondack chairs from Lowe's to use as theater seating and we roll out a carpet under them which dissuades crawly things from biting bare feet. See how thoughtful we are?

Some Darby Movie Nights (#DarbySummerMovies. If you don't already, you should totally follow me on Instagram. I'm @Smrtqbn) we manage to come up with a theme and serve food accordingly.

*Hot dogs for a screening of '42' - The Jackie Robinson Story*

Sometimes we are really super organized and can get everyone here in costume. Yes. You read that right. Like we did for our Hercules Sing-Along.

I know. We would totally be winning the Gold in the Nerd Olympics here. It was a fabulous BYOT* night.

Other nights it's just us and our hard-working A/V Cart and that's okay, too.

I'm so glad Summer is finally here. The weather has warmed up to where we can comfortably do our movie nights. (#DarbySummerMovies) In fact, this coming weekend we're having a Summer Celebration kickoff which will include the movie, 'Chef,' which we seriously love, and a food truck type menu, which I'm super excited about. (I'll write about that next week in delicious detail.)

For now, I wanted to share about how awesome our summers are and how much #DarbySummerMovies (our own hashtag, people!) and how much we've come to count on our trusty A/V Cart.

We recently had the following conversation (about A/V Carts) around the dinner table:

Me: "There was always that one impossibly nerdy kid who got to be the A/V Cart Monitor. He was usually the smartest kid, who usually happened to also be the teacher's pet."