The Dukes of Sussex

In the Park's heyday, Cobblestone Village was filled with gift shoppes, food concessions and a "Broadway" stage. But as attendance fell off, more and more of them were shuttered. Some were repurposed as offices or used for storage and some, well, some were used for other purposes.

The Park was located in Sussex County, a red pocket of an otherwise Blue State, and as such, there was a certain, uh, disregard, for the federal government and their pesky rules. So it shouldn't have come as a surprise that one night, during a routine sweep of the area, security found a functioning still in one of the vacant shoppes.

Moonshine. Apparently, it's making a comeback.

Parkular Mechanics

Popular Mechanics posted a piece recently titled 5 Theme Park Rides that Pushed the Limits of Common Sense. Guess which park featured two out of the five?

At The Movies

So.  Adventureland.   

I liked it much better than I thought I would.   The director, Greg Mottola, worked at an amusement park on Long Island in his youth, and he really captured the tedium and soul-sucking nature of the job.   The kids with their life ahead of them, trying to figure out their place, trying to live up to their parent's expectations, or free themselves from their parents' mistakes.  Wondering if they'll ever get out of Pittsburgh.  Get to New York.  Get the girl.  Figure out who they are, who they want to be.  Figure out that the strangely clean and well groomed maintenance guy is full of crap- he never jammed with Lou Reed and he's never going to leave his wife, in fact he'll never leave Adventureland, because that is where he's the king.  

It's not a new story Mottola's telling, but he tells it well.  And he fills it with great little touches- like the flirty hot girl isn't called Lisa- she's Lisa P.  Because in a place like Adventureland, there's always going to be people with the same first name.  Or when James, the protagonist, bursts into the manager's trailer trying to escape an angry patron, and without speaking, or even looking up, Kristen Wiig's character throws Bill Hader a baseball bat and he runs out to confront the problem.  It's a dance they've done before.  

Mottola did a Q & A after the screening and talked about how he had to fight to keep it a period piece, which was one of my favorite aspects of it, since it really put it in an almost parallel timeline with my Park experience.  And Adventureland is the type of park that doesn't exist anymore.  Besides, setting the film in the '80s allowed them to start off the film with the Replacements' Bastards of Young.   In fact, the soundtrack (and Yo La Tengo's score) was dead on throughout.  

Except for the roadhouse jukebox that featured the Velvet Underground.  Emotionally, it worked, but VU in a bar like that?  Never.   The coolest thing you'd get is Neil Young.  

 

Adventureland opens Friday.  Hopefully, it will screen at the drive in.  

Adventureland

Oh great, someone beat me to the Park movie.  Though this looks more like Bowcraft than the Park:

I pledge to you, Dear Reader, that I will go see this film and offer my professional opinion on the staff's shenanigans.

The Center Goes To Brooklyn

If you like your blog posts in a more dynamic, audio visual format, please come to Union Hall in Park Slope on Tuesday, March 3.   I will be participating in the Adult Education lecture series, theme for the night is Safety Lessons.    And afterward, you can apply what you learned on their indoor bocce court.   

From the Police Blotter

Of all the rides I attended at the Park, the only one I actively hated was the Transmobile.  It was hot, it was boring and the office manager usually staffed it with losers.  Like this guy Ron.  When he wasn't in uniform, he sartorial choices ran toward track suits and Oakley Blades.  He was a Jersey dumbass in the Christopher Moltisanti vein.   In fact, the one solid memory I have of him is particularly Christopher-esque.   

One night, after the Park was closed for the day, he and another dude happened to be in the Spa parking lot as they were getting a beer delivery.  Ron had the bright idea to steal one of the kegs. (Kind of like when Chrissy and Tony stole the cases of wine in Pennsylvania.   Except they had guns.  And were fictional.)   Ron was promptly arrested.    He was still wearing his Park uniform, something noted in the local paper, much to the staff's delight and management's chagrin.  

That's how we do it at the AP...

I got a text from Stacey the other day.  She told me she had just explained the Park's version of water polo to her husband.  It wasn't much different from regular water polo, really. (At least, based on my quick skimming of the sport's Wikipedia entry, I don't think it was....)  Games were held after hours in the Wave Pool and teams were loosely organized along departmental lines. Though sometimes, if a side was short, players were recruited from outside the Park. Like the time Bree showed up with two dudes she met at Burger King, who played while wearing cardboard BK crowns.    There were a few differences between our method of play and what you saw on the OC or in Beijing, the most noticeable one being the fact that we played in tubes.  No treading water for us.   I suppose it was to give the other teams a chance to be on par with the stronger swimmers from Waterworld,  though it could also have been because most of us were half drunk during the games.  Which would also go a long way towards explaining why the Motorworld team always played in their jumpsuits.