While these standing meals were pleasing, we often feel things most deeply — whether it's finishing an argument, listening to music, quietly holding hands — while peering through a car windshield. At the Fat Boy Drive-In you can experience meaty reverie without ever leaving your auto. You just park and turn on your lights to hail a teenage server. This cheeseburger is prepared a bit more in the modern style — bigger, and with lettuce and tomato. The house special "Whoper" sauce seems a lot like mayo. The crinkled fries were just so-so, but the thinly breaded onion rings seemed freshly cut.
There is nothing fresh about the old-timey spectacle of dozens of cars parked in concentric circles around the blockish Fat Boy building with its huge green awning. That is the appeal. A high-school couple dressed for prom ate in a borrowed Cadillac. Unlike the rest of us, they were cleaned up and dressed up and looking their best. But in peering forward instead of gazing across a table — in attending to their burgers rather than each other — they avoided the sort of scrutiny that often spoils the development of nascent affection. It was a wise, and time-tested, decision.
Brian Duff can be reached atbduff@une.edu.
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