Three Days of the Mouse

In the past week, I have found myself at Chuck E. Cheese THREE different times, for three different kids' birthday parties (one was my son Ryan's seventh birthday). I may deserve a medal.

For those of you who don't know, Chuck E. Cheese's is a pizza place with video games where kids often have pizza parties, often for their birthday. It smells like greasy pizza, flat coke, and sweaty kids. It's noisy and pandering to kids and geared to whip them into a frenzy, but they absolutely love this place. Parents generally wear a very tired-looking expression and are relegated to the role of stuffing dollar bills into a token machine so the fun doesn't stop. This place gives me the overwhelming urge to bathe in alcohol-based antiseptic lotion.

The parents tend to form a sort of support group at these things--we hang out and watch the kids running amok and talk about insipid things like "How's work?" and "What do you do?". I hate that type of throwaway question from a stranger, because I have one of those weird jobs that can't be summarized easily. I hate boring people to death, but don't want to be rude and not answer the question, so my speech gets faster and faster so I can cram all the necessary words into the smallest time frame--before long I'm rattling along like an auctioneer, painfully self-aware but unable to stop.

So it was interesting at the first of these parties to find out that one of the parents was essentially in the same field of work as I am. In fact, it turns out that we had a distant business association that was mutually beneficial to further, and we made immediate plans to have a meeting later in the week. I've known this person as an acquaintence for nearly a year, now, so I feel almost negligent that I didn't get to know him before now.

At the second party, I saw a young lady going to the table right next to us. I recognized her face, but was worried about freaking her out with my crazy memory so I decided to avoid looking at her and just focus on Ryan's birthday. Sure enough, she came up to me a minute or so later and asked in amazement: "Mike?!" Yes, it took a second to register, age her twenty (plus) years, give her a perm, and subtract the fact that she was pregnant. But within seconds I recognized that it was Shannon, and that her family had lived across the street from my parents when I was two and I've known her all her life (well, except for the past twenty years). We used to carpool to the same private school. Her mom carried my limp four-year-old body after I was attacked by a German shepherd (dog, not a guy). Shannon had her wedding shower at my parents' home. And her husband was seriously giving me the stink eye the whole time I was talking to his wife...Dude, get a grip.

Party number three could carry the subtitle "Revenge of the Mummy". My wife has a friend that she just loves, named Jamie, and her husband, Todd, brought their son to the party. Their son has been in the same class with Ryan for two years. Additionally, Fran and Jamie held a garage sale together last year. I have never heard Todd put five words together in a row.

This type of non-conversationalist makes me kind of nervous. I always joke that I approach all subjects with an open mouth...it's not really true, but I'm just naturally drawn to good conversation. However, when I realize that I'm the only one talking, I start getting self-conscious and usually act like an idiot.

Knowing that Todd fell under the category of "boring as shit", I prepared myself for a mute standoff. So I found myself sitting at a table, munching disgusting pizza, and pretending that the Chuck E. Cheese puppet show was the most fascinating entertainment on earth which commanded my full attention. In the meantime, the sounds munching pizza echoed in my head and I got bored, bored, bored.

Eventually, another guy at the table managed to get Todd to admit that he was an accountant, which, I suppose, explains some of the problem. I thought Todd was perhaps just shy, but he made a comment about his wife, saying he "had to be careful" about what he said to her in regard to accounting (because she wouldn't understand it). That kind of bugged me. I thought "Hey, you chauvanist bastard, don't go from acting like you wouldn't care if I lived or died to imposing on me to listen to you bash your lovely wife. By the way, what is she doing with YOU?" I was impressed, though, because it took about 8 or so words for him to express this thought, which was a record for him up to this point. Otherwise, he's just a big lump of mute flesh.

But I replied, "I have to be careful about what I say to my wife, too, 'cause she'll kill me!" (this is funny because I'm more than a foot taller than Fran and she is (mostly) very sweet and graceful).

Blank looks.

So, I let him sit there unmolested by me and mummy-out for the rest of the party. When I got home, Fran mentioned that she and Jamie had made plans for us all to go out of town together for a few days next month. Joy.