Chuck E. Cheese's...where a grown up can get really bad pizza

Oh - and a kid can be a kid.

Our Sunday School outing for the month was tonight and we went to Chuck E. Cheese. I don't know that I've ever actually been to a Chuck E. Cheese before. Growing up in a little tiny town, we didn't have this - though we did have a Big Cheese Pizza (same concept, different rodents) come to town when I was 9 or 10. I have to say there is pretty much no point in going to such a place if you don't have small kids through whose eyes to experience the whole thing. Imagination won't cut it, unfortunately.

The one really good thing is that the games are all only 1 token. And if you get food, you get a cup full of tokens with it. (Again, if you have no kids and get food, you get way more tokens than you're going to easily use up.) So you can happily spend a large amount of time playing skeeball...and wondering when your bottomless pit of tokens will go away because each game is only 1 token. We were so happy to see the end of those tokens. Of course, then we had 159 tickets to turn in. The ticket munching machines are, actually, fairly cool. They make chomping noises while they suck in the tickets and then they spit out a receipt with a bar code. Unfortunately, while 159 tickets seems like a lot of tickets, you can get very little for them. They had clicky pens and erasers shaped like power rangers. That was pretty much it for the prize category at the 159 level. Sad. So we're donating them to some friends who are saving up for a disco ball. I think you need like 4000 tickets for the disco ball.

There is not enough money in the world to entice me to eat enough Chuck E. Cheese pizza to get to 4000 tickets. (yes, ok, you can buy the tokens outright but really...how much skeeball can you play?)

Oh. It was really quiet in there too. Which we both thought was odd. Then we realized...the video games were not blasting out the cacaphony of usual video game noises. Surreal. They did have animatronic (as well as a creepy, yet strangely sad looking, live) Chuck E. Cheese doing the birthday dance up by the stage in front of the birthday area. You know it's an off night when Chuck doesn't know the dance moves, so his handler is the cool one. She tugged him back into the back room at one point and I swear she was in there giving him what for - I mean really, how hard is it to clap your hands and wiggle in a mouse suit? You don't even actually have to be smiling. You can be swearing under your breath for all anyone cares because your face is covered by a HUGE molded plastic mouse smile. And really...you opted for this job. There are other, less demeaning, minimum wage jobs available, I promise you. So - Chuck - listen up, start wiggling, learn your dance moves, and put some effort into it, cause you really ruined my Chuck E. Cheese experience. And if you can ruin it for a 30 something year old...imagine what you did for those little kids who were there for their birthday parties.

I'll leave the food alone. Because you can read the title of the post and figure it out for yourself. Until this point, I had put CiCi's pizza at the bottom of the totem as far as pizza consumption. But now...CiCi's is gourmet compared to what they serve up @ Chuck E. Cheese. Bleah.

Now I will leave you because I must go see if we have any Zantac.