where a kid can be a kid

Saturday Steven and I got together with his family to celebrate his brother Kevin’s birthday. It was a relaxing afternoon of burgers, beer, and wine.

As we talked over our meal, we brought up various birthdays of years’ past. Kevin had a birthday party at a McDonald’s once. My sister had one at the Pizza Hut. And we had all been to many at the Skate Time skating rink. Ohh, wasn’t that place grand? I liked the Skee-Ball there. Now that building is an annex for a church.

Then there was Show-Biz Pizza, before it became Chuck E. Cheese — blasphemy! There were many parties there with those creepy old animatronic characters, and ol’ Chuck was just a minor character back then. They had Skee-Ball AND Whack-A-Mole! It was always something special to go there — we had to travel all the way to Vestavia, which is such a long drive for a kid full of anticipation of greasy pizza and the ball pit.

Then the conversation turned into, “Hey, let’s go to Chuck E. Cheese!” I made a bet with Kevin and Steven that I could beat them at Skee-Ball with us all using our non-dominant hands. So we hop in the car and begin the long drive to Vestavia.

The place still smelled the same as we walked in. However, the place seemed to have shrunk a little. The stage where the animatronic characters were is now covered with a bunch of TVs and there was just one moving character — ol’ Chuck. Also, that room used to be closed off like a separate amphitheater but is now opened up to the rest of the area.

The ball crawl is also gone, replaced by a kid-sized hamster tube maze. Everything else was just about the same, including the game machines. There are a few there that I would almost guarantee were there when I was a kid.

We loaded ourselves up with Chuck E. Cheese tender coins and headed toward the Skee-Ball machines in the back. After a three-way tie, Kevin blew us away once he ringed the 10,000 hole in the corner. I owe him five bucks.

I had forgotten about the tickets the games would spit out at you for getting points. Some machines were more liberal with their tickets than others. At one point we stopped our ticket-collecting to chow down on some bonifide Chuck E. Cheese pizza, then we continued in our battle for the tickets.

They were well-won, too. We eventually exchanged our tickets for three rubber bugs that you can suction-cup to a window. Saturday evenings don’t get much more awesome than that.