went to chuck e. cheese yesterday
So a girl I work with, who has become my smoke-break buddy, was a having a three-year-old bday party for her daughter and asked a bunch of us to come to Chuck E Cheese. I felt strange going to a small child's party, especially a girl I met once at lunch last week, but her mom said it was just going to be her boyfriend and her parents, so weirdly, I said "Sure, why not." The place was oddly packed, for a Tuesday night anyway, and much smaller than I remember. I used to have bday parties myself at Showbiz Pizza, the predecessor to Chuck E. Cheese, and haven't been since. Not much has changed: awkward mechanical animals, mediocre pizza, overpriced games, unenthused teen workers, and vastly unrealistic prizes for the amount of tickets you win. My brother and I used to take Will, Charlie, and Sammy to Enchanted Castle for their bdays, but at least that place has mini-golf, laser tag, bumper cars, and virtual reality games...Chuck E. Cheese is literally an enclosed playground with a few Freethrow games and a Whack-a-Mole. Oh, then there's the "entertainment" area, where they've eliminated all characters except Chuck E. and he pivots and blinks on a bizarrely inconsistent basis. Then occasionally a song like "Everybody's Working For the Weekend" comes on, and he lipsynchs, which is terribly creepy.The games were still as fun as I remember and I was way into them, especially the Freethrow game, even though the basketballs were flat and totally affecting my shot, and Skeeball, at which I scored a new personal best of 27000. Also as I remember was the fact that you get what seems like a zillion tickets, and then you take them up to the prizes counter and discover they're worth two erasers and a keychain. That's still a bummer. Especially when they had this amazing Tootsie Roll pillow I had my eye on. I have no idea how my parents ever afforded a bday party at one of these gaming places--you go through tokens in about 2.5 minutes, and can easily blow fifty dollars in half an hour. I kind of want to go back to Enchanted Castle and play laser tag. I wish I knew some 11-year-olds who would want to do that.
posted by SES @ 5:34 PM
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