Where A Kid Can Be A Kid

Last night... I discovered... the Springfield... Chuck-E-Cheese!

Whitney is here, she drove down from Chicago last night, and on the way to dinner at D'Arcys, I noticed it for the first time. We got on a little conversation on how that place seriously never changes. When I was growing up in Maryland, there was one we went to all the time. They had those anamated, automatic robot characters up there that would come alive every so often and do little songs that would entrance the little kids (myself included, when I was a kid) and the kids would be-bop around. Before my cousin, Shelly, moved here to Central Illinois and I visited her and her kids in Maryland, we went to one for lunch. Nothing had changed from my fragile 5-year-old memory of the land "where a kid can be a kid." Nothing. The characters were the exact same, in the exact same positions on the stage, and they might have been doing the exact same songs. Talk about consistency and maintaining the status quo. And furthermore, the characters looked like they very well could have been the same ones there 15 plus years ago.

Rock on, Chuck-E-Cheese, rock on.