RIP, Ray Bradbury

One of the best days I ever spent working at the Park was the one day I spent at the summit of the Alpine Slide. The sun was shining. It was warm, but not too hot. I brought my lunch with me and I had plenty of water and sunscreen. The lead ride attendants rode up to visit for a bit, under the guise of "checking the bullwheel." That was nice. But nicer still was the luxury of being able to sit and read all of "Fahrenheit 451" without interruption.

NY Times Obituary

Stranger than (Science) Fiction

Cyriaque Lamar's post on the cannonball loop over at io9 included a lengthy quote from the COTA. I am delighted, as the site is a daily read for me and my go-to source for Doctor Who news.

What I Did on my Summer Vacation, or, Days in Rodanthe

I spent the last week on Hatteras Island, North Carolina. On the way to the rental house, I passed through a town called Rodanthe, setting of a Nicholas Sparks novel. I have not read "Nights in Rodanthe," nor have I seen the Richard Gere/Diane Lane-starring film adaption, but I did stop to take pictures of what, to me, was the main draw of the town- Waterfall Action Park.

Two Amazing Videos of Abandoned Parks

These two videos deserve more prominent placement than they'll get in the larger post I'm working on.  The first has been circulating for awhile now, but it's well worth watching again.

Six Flags over New Orleans never reopened after Hurricane Katrina:



Via Gawker, Joyland in Wichita, Kansas, which closed in 2004:


No Joy from Mike Petty on Vimeo.


Amazing.

Park Talk on the Best Show

Oh, hey there! Last night, I was listening to The Best Show on WFMU, as is my Tuesday night tradition. One of Tom's callers mentioned the Park and I called in to offer my expert opinion. You can listen here. The call starts at about the 1:45 mark, but you owe it to yourself to listen to the entire three hour show, because this was a particularly good installment of what is always three of my favorite hours of the week.

The City That's Running Wild

While the Park may only live on in sanitized form, another Sussex County institution perseveres. I am referring, of course, to Wild West City. If you grew up in or around New Jersey, I'm sure you remember the Uncle Floyd-starring commercial:





Yeah, you're going to have that stuck in your head for the rest of the day. Sorry about that!

Meet the New Boss.

Same as the old boss.

Mountain Creek resort in N.J. sold to developer Gene Mulvihill

Showdown at the Transmobile

Very few perks to working the Transmobile. It was the ride of the lazy, the lame, and often, the drunk. (The fact that it was maintained by the stoned should be of no surprise to anyone.) It was simply a slow, one-way trip to the other side of the park. Sideways. No one was ever happy to ride the Trans.

We ran into problems when people tried to make their own fun. Let's stand up and surf our way across the park! So what if we're 12 feet above the concrete path? Or, Let's pull on the brake halfway up the hill to give our buddies in the next car a chance to catch up! (And then what? Were they planning to hold hands?) What they didn't realize was that pulling on the brake caused the sad little car to lose all momentum and break down-- shutting the ride down for 40 minutes while we waited for the techs to stumble out of their smoke-filled shack to climb a pole and work their magic. Cheech and Chong repair machinery. Hang tight!

One of my jobs at mid-station (which wasn't actually a stop at all) was to yank the offenders off the ride and mark their wristbands so they couldn't ride again. That'll show you! No more riding slow and sideways for the rest of the day!

I got to the point where I could anticipate trouble. It sounds awful, but it was a bit of racial profiling. Black guys would just chill and look as cool as was possible riding sideways in an orange tram. Latinas would laugh and pretend they were on a scary roller-coaster. Rowdy white frat boys were generally a problem. They’d rock the car, give each other noogies, or whatever guys do when they’re pretending not to be gay, and call out obscenities to any girls that had the misfortune to walk underneath them. I’d yank them off the car, write on their wristbands, and decline their invitations to Staten Island. Then I’d go about my day.

The worst patrons were, without a doubt, the white women. (I can say this because I am a white woman.) White women, very often, weren’t in a good mood, didn’t want to be in the park in the first place, and didn’t believe that the rules applied to them.

Which leads me to my showdown. The number one rule of the Transmobile was that it was a ONE-WAY ride. This is important, as it would get very congested at the end of the day when people needed to get to the side of the park where they left their cars. It was always crowded on the Motor World side, because after a long, hot day, people didn’t want to climb a massive hill in order to go home.

It was the end of another scorcher and the air hadn’t yet cooled enough to render my sweat-soaked uniform shirt a comfortable clammy. I was pushing buttons at the Motor World Trans when the phone rang. It was Jen.

“Just so you know, the lady in the Sea World t-shirt in Car 14 was specifically told that this was a one-way ride, so don’t let her try anything,” Jen warned. “She’s going to try to ride round trip, and that’s just not fair.”

Damn straight, it wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t going to happen. My line was absolutely mobbed with exhausted, sunburned, and dehydrated New Yorkers, and I wasn’t about to let this lady jump the line, and have them lynch me. Besides, I had a sense of justice. I would handle this calmly, I thought to myself. I’m a rational person.

Then Car 14 rolled into the station, and there she was, already glaring at me. I approached Shamu Lady and lifted her safety bar.

“You can put that bar back down, girlie, because I’m riding back up.” Girlie? Girlie?

“Ma’am, this is a one-way ride. You were told so at the top,” I responded in my best my-parents-raised-me-to-be-polite voice. The crowd, lined up behind me, began to quiet down to listen to our exchange.

“I don’t care what you say. I’m not getting off this ride!” And she folded her arms over the image of the smiling dolphin.

The polite me vanished and was instantly replaced by someone who sassed, “And I don’t care what you say, lady, but I am not pushing this button!”

I heard a woman in the crowd behind me whisper, “Oh, no, she DI-int!”

“And,” I continued, “I don’t think all these people, who having being waiting on line for a long time, would appreciate you cutting in front of them! So I’m not pushing any buttons until you get off this ride.”

Then I folded my arms and stared at her. She didn’t move. I was nervous, but made myself look pissed off instead. I’m not a confrontational person. I started to worry, What if she doesn’t get up? Then what?

But the crowd was with me. They had my back.

“C’mon, lady! We’ve been waiting!”
“That’s not cool, yo!”
“Get off! Wait your turn like everybody else!”

They grumbled and hollered until finally, she stood up, and exited the station. I had won the standoff. It was silent. I slowly turned to face the crowd, paused for a second, and raised my arms above my head like Rocky. Victory! The crowd erupted into cheers! Yeah, girl! I felt amazing. I was a peon in a soul-crushing uniform, but I was not without grit.

“Next four people!” I called. “Next four people, step up! Have a safe trip home!”

One Summer At The Speedboats

You know what we don't speak of enough? (Besides ANYTHING, as the blog's been dormant since September?) Motor World. Please enjoy this dispatch from the Swamps of Jersey sent in by our good friend Stacy.

My time at the park spanned 7+ years. In the early years I worked in the retail department (where my friendship with Melissa blossomed). The later years were spent as the “Office Bitch” in Alpine Center, but somewhere in between, I worked as a ride attendant at the Speedboats in Motor World.

I think Tom said it best when he likened Motor World to Dante's circles of Hell. On most days it was unbearably hot; the essence of two stroke oil and stagnant water filled the air at the Speedboats dock. The ride consisted of a pond, or glorified swamp, with a small island in the middle. Single passenger boats, about the size of a bath tub, would be driven in circles around the island. Oddly enough, I sincerely liked working there.

We wore Water World uniforms which consisted of a transparent red bathing suit, tank top that read “GUARD” and terrible polyester shorts that caused a chronic wedgie unless worn extremely low on the hips. The “GUARD” tanks gave park patrons a false sense of security given that I probably couldn't save a rat drowning in a bucket.

The Speedboat pond was fuel infested and the only time we ever went in the water was against our will. There were times that we'd slip off the dock and fall in the water or get thrown in by fellow employees as was the tradition on the last day of the season. I can recall getting tossed in the water at the end of the day and then leaving a brown-stained silhouette of myself imprinted on the light gray cloth upholstery of my car.

A common source of fun at Speedboats was at the park patrons' expense. Many times before getting in a boat we'd be handed a camera and asked to take pictures. We would gladly take the camera and snap a few shots and then promptly duck into the boat house and expose ourselves to the camera – careful not to show our faces – and then eagerly return the camera. Thankfully the age of digital photography hadn't hit yet.

It was always fun when someone didn't fully grasp the concept of the engine's throttle lever. We would blow our whistles to signal when the ride was over and often have a boat speeding out of control straight for our dock. Many times that boat ended up either flying up on the dock or flipping over upon impact with the dock's loading area. Good times.

Also important to mention was the 225lb weight limit for riding in a boat. We didn't have a scale so we had many questionable patrons who claimed to be under the limit. My friend Missy and I spotted a very large gentleman on line, made eye contact with one another, shook our heads, but reluctantly allowed him to enter a boat. We were too nice to tell anyone that they were too large to ride. Instead we watched as the man shimmied himself down into the seat and sluggishly left the loading dock with a group of boats. By the the time the other boats were on their second or third lap, the man slowly appeared on the far side of the island with the nose of his boat underwater.

The boat was sinking quickly so I headed out on a boat that was reserved for dealing with emergency situations. When I got to him, his boat was almost completely underwater and the man was frantically trying to pry himself from inside the cockpit. This was one time to be thankful for the high viscosity level of the water because he slipped out of the boat before it completely submerged. With my boat, I dragged the man through the murky pond and back to the dock, but then came the task of trying to get him from the water back onto the dock. I think it took a ride attendant and two boat mechanics to get the man back on his feet, and the ride was closed for the remainder of the day so that the submerged boat could be rescued.

We expected to see a scale at Speedboats shortly after this incident, but this was the Park. We never saw that scale, and as a result I got really good at rescuing people from sinking boats.

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.   

That's Not in the Handbook

When I tell people I worked at the Park's Bungee Tower, one of their first questions is always, "So, how many people died on that ride?" When I tell them none, and that there were rarely even any injuries on the ride, they are both dubious and, dare I say it? Disappointed.

We would often assure nervous patrons that they were at one of the safest rides in the Park. Which isn't necessarily the most comforting thing they could hear, based on the Park's reputation, but it was the truth.

Over the course of my tenure at the Park, I worked in 6 different departments. The only time I ever received any real training when I worked at the tower. It was certainly the only time I ever received a 20-page manual detailing standard operating and emergency procedures. Everything on the tower was checked and double checked every morning before we opened. Three people checked each patron's harness before they jumped. We kept logs on cord use and retired them promptly. There were rules, and we knew them. Which isn't to say that we always followed them ourselves:

To be fair, the manual didn't specify that you COULDN'T jump from the tower strapped into your snowboard, but it's probably safe to assume that it would have been frowned upon.

Cold Trade for Warm Sunshine

Because I miss everything awesome, I was off the day Alice in Chains came to the Park to film segments for the Headbanger's Ball. Luckily, we can relive the magic via YouTube. Observe the band and Riki Rachtman fishing in Roaring Springs:



And Layne Staley losing his shorts on Surf Hill:



More clips can be found here, including Riki and Jerry Cantrell wrestling in Sumo suits. (In the Jungle Warriors ring. Yeah, I know. It makes no sense.) Those very same suits are still used at the Spa's annual Oktoberfest, proving that the organization is still not at all culturally authentic and/or sensitive and, more importantly, that you should never, ever put one of them on. It will take way more than a spritz of Lysol to vanquish metal sweat that's had 15 years to incubate. You can't snuff that rooster.

$3 off admission is no reason to patronize Pizza Hut

Okay, this seems to be just a normal 80s Pizza Hut commerical, featuring the comedy stylings of Rich Hall, until you get to the end:



The Park slapped coupons on everything for awhile. I also worked at the local supermarket, and would often witness people stopping in on the way to the park to steal coupons off Coke bottles. Come on people, 2-liter bottles were usually on sale for $0.99. Couldn't you just buy the bottle?

Another New Jersey Institution Needs Your Help

Okay, at the moment, the best connection I can make between WFMU and the Park is that they've both been featured in Weird New Jersey. They've both really shaped who I am today and they both probably shouldn't exist. But the Park did, and WFMU still does. And they need your money.

If the Park was open today, I would totally dive into the deep end of the Wave Pool and send them all of the loose change and jewelry I could scavenge. But it's not, so I'm just going to write them a check. You should too.

Don't beleive me? Ask the New York Times.