By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Saturday morning, Northern Virginia. The sun has barely been up 90 minutes, and the pavement is already squishy-hot. Drivers zoom up and down Vienna's Route 123 in their sedans, air conditioners blasting. The only exposed skin in sight is that of a lone, drenched jogger.
Until the 30 convertibles come breezing through.
They all pull into the Vienna Inn diner.
As they have every Saturday morning for seven years, the men and few women of the Capital Area Cobra Club loudly find seats at long tables filling half the diner: engineers, building inspectors, real estate brokers in T-shirts and baseball caps, swapping convertible war stories over bacon and eggs.
"So this huge thunderstorm hits when me and the wife are coming back from Lake Anna," drawls Ron Hawkins, an Annandale mortgage broker originally from Oklahoma. Rain's getting harder as they go under the Mixing Bowl, he says, his eyebrows raising. Bridge gutters are dumping -- dumping-- water onto his topless red-and-white-striped Cobra.
"I looked at my wife and said, 'Honey, as long as we're movin', we're okay,' " Hawkins says to nods up and down the table.
"Then the question is, do you have adequate drain holes?" Fairfax Station lawyer Gary Hughes asks, with the tone one would use to inquire about adequate life insurance.
The guys flirt with their regular waitress. Strategize for next weekend's autocross race. Thump chests over who drives topless more in the winter.
These are the hardest of hard-core convertible drivers: Cobra roadsters sit just three feet off the ground, and they don't come with tops (making them technically not convertibles). Going topless is mandatory. In brain-frying humidity. In snow. In thunderstorms. Even on the rare comfortable days that sometimes appear without warning in summertime Washington.
These are people who own waterproof luggage.
People who put on sunblock for a drive to the supermarket. People who have accepted that their hair is a mess.
After breakfast, the gang makes its way outside to gaze under each other's hoods. Colin Jevens, an Arlington County husband and father who teaches tactical driving for the State Department, talks in the hyper tone of an evangelist.
"Have you ever been in traffic and looked up at the dirty tiles underneath a highway bridge? There is NOTHING that compares to that!" the baby-faced 38-year-old proclaims. "Being able to take everything in: the city, the country, traffic! There are no outside elements we don't enjoy."
No doubt, driving a car that has zero protection from the elements and being part of a club based on that car puts these folks on the fringe. But Jevens's joie de vivre, his embrace of the come-what-may elements, his holistic appreciation of the visual universe -- including its dirty concrete -- is typical of people who drive convertibles, those enduring icons of summer.
Convertibles are ubiquitous at the dozens of "cruise-ins" that have been happening for decades at fast-food and mall parking lots around the D.C. region on summer weekends. That's when car lovers, especially those who long for the heyday of hot rods and classic cars, roar in, park and ogle at each other's wheels. Burger King at the Route 234 Bypass/Route 28 in Manassas, and Olney Town Center behind the KFC on Saturday nights. The Tastee Freez in Laurel and the Annandale Juke Box Diner on Friday nights.
Some spots attract a younger crowd, others see more drivers of imports. Some are more '50s America. Others '60s Britain. The cruise-ins have a throwback vibe: no blogs, no Facebook pages, just people leaning against their cars, chatting as the sun sets.
In this country of car lovers, convertible drivers have their own rep.
"They're the ones who are a little more up in the air, a little more out there," said Tom Lloyd, working the parking lot at the Fairfax shop he owns with his son, Bubba's East Coast Rods and Customs.
About 20 cars were lined up there at sunset on a recent Saturday as Lloyd served hot dogs and Ritchie Valens's "Oh Donna" wafted through the air. Shoppers trickled out of the Hudson Trail Outfitters, disappearing into a sea of freshly shined cars, most with their hoods up and owners milling around. In one aisle, teenagers with greased-back hair and tight T-shirts leaned against their hot rods and cracked jokes. In another, two manicured, 40-ish guys who looked like they just stepped out of a golf club ad chatted with crossed arms in front of a red antique Jaguar convertible. In another, an elderly couple and their wild-haired son drank sodas.
In the middle row was Lyn Adams, holding court beside her pristine 1965 forest-green Mustang.
Adams bought the car new, when she was a 25-year-old Californian. Now owner of a Christian bookshop in Fairfax, she still loves the attention the car brings and being in the weather. This night she looked textbook convertible, with her long blond-gray hair in a bouncy ponytail, tight jeans on her slim frame and bubblegum-pink lipstick. She sleeps on her deck at night so she can be under the stars and views convertible drivers as "a little more into living."
"I just love pulling up next to some young guy at a stoplight, and he looks at me and thinks, 'Old lady, old car.' Then I floor it and leave him in my exhaust fumes," she says with a Bart Simpson-like chuckle.
Her car has 432,000 miles on it, but you'd never know it. The white leather seats are spotless, and the only thing in the car are CDs -- all contemporary Christian music -- and Adams's Shih Tzu, Abby.
Convertibles became a metaphor for carefree summer living for a few reasons, some of which may be outdated.
Decades ago, they were made by cutting the top off a car and were largely inexpensive, fun cars. In the late 1960s, after auto safety regulations began, manufacturers stopped making convertibles, and people thought they would vanish. But they started coming back in the 1980s and have moved significantly up the food chain.
Research shows that today's convertible drivers are usually older, more educated and wealthier than most. Convertibles tend to be more expensive than the typical car -- "by at least $1,000," according to National Automobile Dealers Association economist Paul Taylor -- and make up only 2 percent of all new car sales.
Today, the convertible market has a lot of upscale models. Some say that suits buttoned-up Washington, where even an icon of play can be taken only so far.
"Convertibles are taken seriously on the East Coast," said Warren Brown, The Washington Post's veteran auto writer. "In D.C., you'll find women and also men driving convertibles with the top down but the windows up because they don't want the air messing them up. It's an abomination."
Ken Gross, a longtime auto writer for Playboy who lives in Loudoun County, says some manufacturers have wrestled with the new trend of hardtops that fold up. "It needs to look the same as a regular convertible when the top is down," he said.
But not every convertible owner fits the stereotype. Mingling Saturday night at Bubba's was Robert Taylor, who despite his shock of white-blond hair, tropical shirt and cream-colored 1966 Pontiac Bonneville (a boat, basically), said he tends to drive with the top up.
"It messes with your hair," he said. "And I don't like people looking at me. I'm very shy."
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