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An alderman in Milwaukee, a town not famous for sobriety, compared the local Chuck E. Cheese to "something out of a Quentin Tarantino film... there is alcohol and pistols being brandished." In Brookfield, Wisconsin, the children's pizzeria-plus-creepy-robot-theater gets far more police activity than a nearby biker bar, including a 40-person riot earlier this year. One participant in a 10-person brawl in Toledo's Chuck E. Cheese actually detached a velvet rope and started swinging the brass end at people. Intrigued? Good, because the Wall Street Journal is dying to tell you why you should watch your back inside the animatronic dystopia.
Law-enforcement officials say alcohol, loud noise, thick crowds and the high emotions of children's birthday parties make the restaurants more prone to disputes than other family entertainment venues.
The environment also brings out what security experts call the "mama-bear instinct." A Chuck E. Cheese's can take on some of the dynamics of the animal kingdom, where beasts rush to protect their young when they sense a threat.
Stepping in when a parent perceives that a child is being threatened "is part of protective parenting," says Frank Farley, a psychologist at Temple University and former president of the American Psychological Association. "It is part of the species — all species, in fact — in the animal kingdom," he says. "We do it all of the time."
That's fascinating in a Malcolm Gladwell kind of way. The Journal story admittedly doesn't have any statistics to "prove" with "evidence" that Chuck E. Cheese is actually particularly dangerous.
What it does have are
- some very choice anecodotes ("When the boy went to insert more tokens to continue playing, the woman grabbed the tokens out of his hand and told him to stop hogging the game"),
- a nifty six-item police blotter ("...during a verbal argument, an elderly female threw a shoe at him... He stated the fight started over someone calling his child 'ugly.' He stated he was not injured, his pride was just hurt."),
- and of course an infographic ("a man then pushed the mother by the throat into the video game").
- Also, some supportive quotes from police in various towns ("the [Susquehanna Township] police department gets called to respond to disputes at the restaurant as many as 15 times a year, Police Chief Robert Martin says").
Which isn't to say the story shouldn't have been written! It's great fun, and maybe it teaches us something about the power of paternal instincts, and how danger lurks in unexpected places or whatever, but seriously who cares it's just: Fun. Something to talk about with a stranger at a party! Or maybe not, because you'll seem like a perv obsessed with children's pizza parlors.
But, people, this is why you shouldn't hate so hard on Gladwell: Not every story has to be the final word. Sometimes it's enough to be an opening line.
(Image via) (Story via)
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Posted: August 5th, 2008, 10:52am CDT by Sheila
You might be wondering what Alternadad author Neal Pollack has been writing about lately. Oh, the same thing he's been writing about for years now—quotidian life with his five-year-old son, Elijah. (We've been on the campaign to make him stop.) Still? you might ask. Seriously? Yeah. But isn't Elijah going to hate him for this when he gets older? Yeah, probably! Latest essay: how he's trying to toughen up his son, who's a wuss like him.
A few months ago, I had a flashback. I was drunk and listless at a bar in Austin, Texas, 4 or 5 years ago, when I ran into a friend. He started giving me crap about something. My lizard brain stirred. I began to shriek, much like my son does when he's having a tantrum, and I flailed my hands crazily. I hit my ex-friend on the side of the face with a beer bottle, chipping one of his teeth. As the bouncer tossed me onto the street, I didn't feel tough. I felt like a drug-addled idiot.
I started thinking about what I'd tell my son in the future about that fight. Would he be proud of me? Probably not.
Actually, one drunken episode is fairly excusable. But Elijah ain't gonna be proud about the years of publicly-accessible essays chronicling his toddler foibles, including his crying jags and failure at karate.
Remember, privacy begins at home. The first step to stopping writing about your child is admitting you have nothing else to write about. Actually, Neal, you might try for a NYT Magazine story out of your struggle to stop child-blogging!
[MSN/Mens Health]
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Posted: June 11th, 2008, 12:39pm CDT by Sheila
Everybody has dysfunctional relationships—even those young marrieds who refer to themselves as "we." With that in mind, Gawker alum Doree Shafrir writes in the Observer this week about the power of the question-statement. Example: "Oh, I was just checking to see if you had a ring. But you guys aren't engaged?" Maybe that's for the best?
"I recently got back in touch with another friend—we'll call her Catherine—I hadn't seen since college, except a couple years ago when we ran into each other in the West Village, right after she'd moved back to New York from Los Angeles. Anyway, we've been hanging out. She's single. The other day she was telling me that most of her friends from college (except for me and a couple others) are married, and most of the married friends have at least one kid. Catherine was in a sorority, and I'm convinced that there's a correlation between sorority membership and getting married by 27 and having the first kid by 29. My younger sister, who is 24 and was in a sorority, seems like she will bear this theory out, though she got offended when I proposed it. Then I found out she had shown our mom engagement rings on the Tiffany's Web site, just in case her boyfriend should turn to my mom for advice.
...A friend of mine—we'll call her Natalie—is moving in with her boyfriend in brownstone Brooklyn, even though everything's so fucking expensive these days that you might as well just move back to Manhattan. She met this guy at work; at the time, she was involved in a torturous long-term relationship with another guy, one of those relationships people get into in their early 20s and then wake up one day and, hell, they're 28 or 29 and nothing has changed, he's still the same guy they were vaguely annoyed with all those years ago, except now they live together and he does things like punch walls when he's upset."
This Is When You Know [NY Observer]
