Monday, June 27, 2005
Partylands
Here’s a post about how you can’t really go back, even if sometimes you’d like to. I have my reasons for saying so now. More on that later.
I really didn’t experience it this way, but looking back it would seem that I went to a lot of parties when I was growing up. There were birthdays, commencements, workshop events, jewish youth group events.... I’m not talking about big lifetime changes and major religious stuff, they’re independent of this - they’re “real.” Mostly, these parties were sort of made-up, except for birthdays, which were semi-industrialized anyway. For these other minor sorts of celebrations, there were places designed to host parties, and people who needed to have a party for their kids went there to have them.
Now, apparently, those places have been supplanted by the threateningly quasi-eponymous Chuckly Cheep Eatsa, a menagerie of overstimulated, undersupervised children and carbo-lactoid foodstuffs. I haven’t been; maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to judge - but it sounds like the Hooters model, for kids. There’s probably some feeder system between the two, with a “special delivery” pizza from Chuckly’s hot Hooters friend for your 16th birthday.
But anyway, this is about the earlier parties. All the parties I went to when I was a kid. I remember that they weren’t all at the same loud, garrish, chaotic place every time - they were at a variety of different loud, garrish chaotic places. I remember some of those places with particular fondness, and so, of course, today you’re stuck with them too. I have no reason to think you’ll care about these places, but I have deep associations with each of them; they each play unique roles in my own interior iconography and nostalgic cartography. They are places of freedom and mystery and escape. I often wonder how they would look to me now.
Ponyland: A tiny amusement park at Beverly and La Cienega, with pony rides I found inexplicably depressing as a three-year-old, and a funhouse/scary ride that made me shriek with anxious joy. Even when I was so very small, I knew this place was modest in the extreme, but its scale suited me and I enjoyed it in inverse proporation to its size and my own. The site is now occupied by the beverly center, the epitome of the elaborate commercial ghetto, the mall that sets the standard for malling internationally. Meantime, I still sometimes find myself at old Ponyland in my dreams.
Flookeys: this was a dogs and burgers place with garish yellow and black striped walls, and batting cages. It smelled of mustard and ketchup, and people tended to shout there. Despite my lack of baseball-hitting skill, it was fun to go there and endure the batting cage experience. It made me feel liked and competent. In retrospect, I have no idea why. Additionally, I think it was used as the location for the video shoot for “Roscoe’s Theme” from Tapeheads, which is a great song in a deeply underappreciated flick, which only makes me appreciate Flookey’s all the more.
Farrells: this was a throwback joint that sought to emulate some idealized version of 1905, with candystriped red-white wallpaper and bent wire chairs - more an ice cream parlour than a restaurant. They specialized in parties for kids who liked to gorge on butterfat till they puked, with special rewards for overeating - if you finished all the ice cream in a certain wooden serving trough, for example, they’d give you a badge honoring how you “made a pig of [your]self”. Even more impressive was “The Zoo,” a massive concatenation of, what? 24? scoops of goo, with toppings and sauce and a menagerie of small plastic souvenier animals scattered throughout - undoubtedly now recognized for the choking hazard that they were, but then truly prized commodities. They’d run “The Zoo” out on a stretcher carried by two be-vested creamlackeys, accompanied by a third banging on a shoulder-bourne bass drum. (here is a link to a clip of The Zoo being presented in full glory, like piping out the kiddy haggis.) The whole place was a noisy sticky mess, and we all loved it.
Travel Town: Up on the Burbank side of Griffith Park, a bunch of old rail sidings have been set out as a sort of museum of rolling stock. You could climb all over the engines and tenders and cabooses, all reasonably secured against the most obviously forseeable tragedies. Nearby were live 1/8th scale steamers (of the non-cleveland variety); you could sit astraddle them and they’d take you on a quick circuit of a small track. Some of my favorite parties were in special T-town dining cars reserved for the revels of youth. Trains are, by definition, cool; and old trains, that much cooler. T-town was a great place to party.
Mystery Theater: I don’t recall what this place was called, or exactly where it was. It was in the valley somewhere, unobtrusively sited near the nice houses south of the boulevard, or in a light industrial area, or something. It was a theater in which a simple, surrealistic show would be staged with puppets and what the brits call pantomime characters - people in goofy fuzzy suits. There were blacklights and songs and the birthday kid got to sit on a magic toadstool; all the action was aimed to honor the lucky celebrant and then, after the show, everybody got some candy. I always thought it was a weird place, but it was fun anyway. I often wonder now what the hell really went on there.
Since those days I’ve developed an aversion to “party places;” I prefer home-based celebrations. There’s something about a special place set aside for partying that seems so artificial as to deaden my celebratory spirit. But when I was little, such qualms did not trouble me. I have reason to believe that I’ve lost something precious in the transition.
Today is a good day to revisit these recollections and ruminations because I leave early tomorrow for a week with my mom and extended family down in south florida. It’s a new home for mom, and a mostly-unexplored world for me. I’m expecting to have a nice time, to stay busy, to eat well, and most importantly, to reconnect with people I love. Mom took me to all the places I’ve written of here, and many more; now she’ll take me to new places in a community unknown to me. I’ll keep the old partylands in mind as I acquaint myself with these new realms, and I’ll try to make each one of them as much of a party as I can. I’ll be back on July 5. Till then, try to have fun. Safe and sane is good too, but make sure you enjoy yourself. I’ll return with a nice story about setting fire to things.
