Vegas for Kids

The LIGHTS, the SOUNDS, the hope and promise of turning your MONEY into thousands…of tickets. What heavenly place is this? Chuck E. Cheese, the Vegas for kids. Our niece celebrated her 3rd birthday at this pizza playland, which marked the first time I’ve been in a CEC since I celebrated my own 5th birthday inside one in Singapore (I remember a lot more Asians at my party).

This was of course Benjamin’s first run-in with Mickey’s very distant cousin Chuck. CEC has a very distinct smell – one part cafeteria pizza, two parts industrial cleaning agent, one part diaper. I’m not a germaphobe, but I wanted to run home and put on my hazmat uniform before I touched anything. All of the kids running around looked like little gremlins – wide eyed, showing off their tiny chiclet teeth and had mucus on their muzzles.

We took Benjamin around to check things out, but he was still too young to really do, play or ride anything. The cacophony around us did excite him enough to do his version of a touchdown dance a couple of times. I also put on a Skeeball exhibition for everyone there, 43000 points. I’m just sayin’.

My Skeeball efforts tallied up (drumroll please) a whopping 167 tickets. What can that get you from the CEC prize wall? A box of Nerds®. It is cliché, 80’s stand-up comedian material to complain about how the amusement ticket thing is a rip-off, but it is almost illegal how terrible it is. A $6.00 action figure costs 6000 tickets. I would have to Skeeball until Benjamin leaves for college to make that amount of tickets.

But just like Vegas is the siren’s call for middle age white guys, CEC revs kids up with the hope of walking out a winner. At least in Vegas the drinks are free and the food is subsidized. The CEC birthday show could also stand an update. I felt bad because they play a prerecorded version of the bash on all of the TV’s in the birthday area while they are doing the live version. And the TV version had kids doing cartwheels and Chuck was like Fred Astaire. But the live version had a 16 year old in a grey rat suit that either couldn’t see out of the suit very well or could care less about truly getting into the role of Chuck.

Again, I recognize that CEC is not for us, it is for the kids and they were eating it up. The party was a success. I gifted my Skeeball winnings to my nephew and Benjamin got his first taste of weirding out at the sight of a dressed up spokes-animal. I’d tell you more about the party, but what happens at Chuck E. Cheese STAYS at Chuck E. Cheese.