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Life of Colleen: July 2006
Hmmm...
posted by Colleen Shirazi
2006-07-20
at 10:18 PM (Pacific)
We went to a little old-style amusement park today. I went on all the rides, at least all the scary rides :) It's so different from Six Flags or the other big corporate parks. There are no lines. At most you have to wait for the current ride to stop, then you get on. And if you want to ride again, you can usually just sit and go again.
I'll guess this is something you only truly appreciate when you're my age. It's like...just get on the ride with all the kids on it and just scream and do absolutely nothing but have fun. It's the sheer mindlessness of it...I went on the bumper cars, the bumper boats (it's a round boat with an outboard motor on it), the roller coaster of course (there was only one), the scrambler, tilt-a-whirl, that thing where you stand up inside it and it spins around, the other round thing that spins, the four story drop (it looked more like two stories to me lol)....
What will happen if the last of these parks close down? The mindlessness will be gone. The corporate parks are not mindless; you have to wait in a ginormous wraparound line forever for one short ride. You have to pay two figures to eat a tiny paper dish of food you waited forty-five minutes in line to get. Here I stepped up and paid less than five dollars for this huge softserve ice cream cone and a big lemonade.
So I got this funny feeling...again because of my age, because I've seen this sort of park just disappear (there was one at Ocean View back home in Virginia that was immortalized in one of the crappiest tv movies ever, "Death of Ocean View Park")--to be replaced by--nothing. Yes, there were Kings Dominion and Busch Gardens--your corporate theme parks--and we went to those as well--and I'm sure they're still there. But they're not the same.
I realize I've already become one of those old fogeys who remembers too much...but...let us hope we can preserve this kind of mindless escapism.
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