Lacey, Washington: Lacey Parks & Recreation Host Outdoor Movie Nights

Lacey Parks & Recreation does movie nights in our park Saturday nights in the summer and have been so doing since 1997. Lacey, Washington is located just north of Olympia, the state capital and we have about 36,000 in population. Our movie nights are great family events each summer with attendance ranging from 200-over 1000 per night. It is a part of our summer entertainment series that also includes Tuesday evening Children's Entertainment (Jugglers, magicians, etc) and Wednesday noon music concerts.

We have provided some entertainment prior to the movies like hosting the Lacey Idol contest and also doing Lacey Game Show nights to include the audience in interactive participation and bring them out prior to the movie at dusk. For 2010 we will precede the movies with music concerts by local and regional bands. We wrap up the season with either a double feature or All nighter showing movies that fit a theme, like Super Heroes (Batman, Superman, Spiderman), Harry Potter or the Twilight movies.

The Movie nights are sponsored and presented by the Lacey Parks & Recreation Department and supported by various community sponsors. At this time we use a retractable screen and our own projector & speaker system but are looking to add movies to another one of our parks without the retractable screen, so we would love to win a new screen! Photos above include one of our regular movie nights as well as a 3D movie night.

Another fun thing we did was to add a holiday movie on the big screen to our annual Christmas Tree lighting for the families to watch while they waited to see Santa. This fall we plan to add a scary movie night around Halloween with scary surprises lurking in the park.