Slot Machines for the Elementary School Set

I hate Chuck E. Cheese. It's a dark, dirty soulless casino for young children. If you have never been there, let me explain. You buy tokens for the price of about a quarter a piece. Every video game at Chuck E. Cheese costs one token. You and your children can easily blow through $20.00 worth of tokens in 45 minutes.

Then, when you play the video games you get a string of tickets, depending on how well you do at the games. And at the end of your gambling time at Chuck E. Cheese, you and your children turn in your tickets for the cheapest, lamest, tiniest toys you can imagine. 200 tickets will get you two tiny tooky plastic tops, an orange plastic spider, and 3 Smarties. Whoopee. All of that for maybe $15.00 or $20.00 spent in tokens. And the children act like Santa Claus just brought them a brand new bike.

Oh, and let me go on about how much I hate Chuck E. Cheese. The one I went to recently only played Justin Bieber the whole time I was there. If you don't know who Justin Bieber is then there is nothing I can do for you. And there are TV screens everywhere you look, in every corner, playing a stultifying mix of music videos and Nickelodeon TV shows. And have I mentioned the food? The pizza is overpriced and is greasy enough to pollute the Gulf.

Jacob and Casey have been begging us, and I mean BEGGING us for a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party for the last year. After Jacob's AWESOME inner tube birthday party I asked him, wasn't that better than Chuck E. Cheese? And he answered, in a word, "no."

So my compromise was to take Jacob and Jacob’s friend Conner and Casey and Casey’s friend Julia to Chuck E. Cheese for a few hours on Casey's birthday. And that would be, I hoped, the last I would hear of the Chuck E. Cheese wailing, screaming, and begging.

It was a good strategy, for all of us. Casey and Julia needed the most help and supervision; they needed a boost up on the lamest carousel of all time, and help with the toddler "video games." Jacob and Conner disappeared into the older kid area. Occasionally I would find one of them, glassy eyed, trying to beat their own record on a video game.

I had two incredibly low moments at Chuck E. Cheese. The first was when Chuck E. Cheese, in the flesh, came out and asked us to "Follow Me for Tickets." He threw about 300 tickets up into the air, and the smaller children were supposed to get on the floor and pick them up. Casey and Julia got tired of picking them up, and so I found myself on my hands and knees, picking up tickets each worth about 1/100 of some horrible plastic nothing made by child slaves in China. Inches away from my face was the furry, fuzzy knee of Chuck E. Cheese. I picked myself up off the floor, shot Chuck a wry smile, and followed Casey and Julia back into the toddler section of my own personal Hades.

Next, I watched Casey playing a game in which you whack the heads of hammerhead sharks, similar to Whack-A-Mole. Casey gets 19. I see that the “record” for whacks to the heads of the sharks is 54. And so I wonder: Can I beat the record set by what I can only assume must have been another adult? I put in my token and I’m off! I get to 32 whacks. What is worse? Trying to beat the record of a toddler’s game at Chuck E. Cheese or FAILING to beat that record? By the way, I’ve since heard that the key to getting a high score on this game is use your hands, and not the mallet provided!

In the end it was a good trip. I pretty much hated every minute of it, but I could see how happy the children were. And that’s what matters, right?