On Friday night, the University Program Board (UPB) and Student Government Association (SGA) will be holding a drive-in event for students at Slippery Rock. The event gives them the ability to play a movie for students before finals week starts. Although they are hosting this movie event, it is going to be limited due to COVID-19 guidelines.
“We wanted to give students the opportunity to have some sense of normalcy, but make it safe and that’s why we’re calling it a socially distanced Drive-In, and SGA is being super nice and anyone who comes to this will get a pretty big snack bag,” Natalie Glenn, the UPB director of concerts, said.
The Drive-In will only be able to host around 20 cars, and this decision was made to make it as safe as possible for those who choose to attend. The decision came to limit the attendance from a possibility of 40 cars in the lot to only 20, because there has been a spike in the amount of COVID-19 cases. New restrictions will also go into effect on Friday.
“We just wanted to give students something to do on a Friday night before finals technically start and we wanted to be able to give them that sense of normalcy,” Glenn said.
Students will be given the opportunity to sit outside of their cars, but if they choose to do so, they must wear a mask and they must sit in areas where they will be socially distanced. There will be up to four people allowed per car.
“Rock the Weekend got an actual Drive-In movie screen that they can use to hold movies outside and stuff, but because it’s going to be cold we obviously don’t want to have students sit outside for two hours or however long, so we decided that a Drive-In movie would be a good idea,” Glenn said.
The organization process for getting the Drive-In set up has been a difficult one because nearly every day there has been new guidelines coming out. Due to these guidelines, there has been constant changes to the Drive-In event.
“We were thinking what would students want to do on a Friday night before finals and we thought a movie was the perfect idea, because students can come and eat food and watch a two hour movie before they start getting ready for finals and preparing to go home for thanksgiving,” Glenn said.
The Drive-In will be held before finals get going on Saturday for some students and the movie that was chosen was Disney Pixar’s Onward. To further simulate a Drive-In movie, UPB and SGA teamed up with Slippery Rock’s student run radio station WSRU to play the movie over the channel.
“When you come to Slippery Rock, you meet a ton of different people and we’re giving them something to do but in a safe setting and it gives them the chance to have one last hurrah, because all we’ve been able to do is virtual things and I feel like right now a lot of people are having zoom fatigue, so hopefully we can help students have some fun,” Glenn said.
