Deconstructing Chuck E. Cheese

The other night, at Chuck E. Cheese, as Daniel was playing Skittle-Ball, a.k.a. Ski Ball, I saw Mr. Chuck E. Cheese himself come pitter-patting along, and I decided to step back and watch the interaction at a distance, so as not to alter the drama by my obvious presence.

Chuck E. put his furry paws over Daniel's eyes. Daniel looked a bit startled, then turned around, recognized Mr. Cheese, and broke into a smile that bordered on a laugh. At that point, the mouse-host held out his arms, and Daniel gave him a proper big guy on queue.

Last night, on our way back from the Daniels' Excellent Day-on-the-Town, Daniel was re-examining the whole interaction, putting the pieces together. He asked me why Chuck E. Cheese covered his eyes. I explained that, in American culture, this is a ritual game in which one party spontaneously approaches their subject and places their hands, or mouse-paws, over the eyes of the subject, implying that that person should guess who it is who has covered their eyes.

Daniel suddenly recognized the game: he told me that Nick, James and John's father has played that game with him. (Nick, James and John's father is my brother-in-law, but he has another, more personalized name.)

In the meantime, Daniel was making an effort to establish a term by which to refer to this Chuck E. Cheese quasi-persona. First he called him "Chuck E. Cheese," then he corrected himself with something like "a guy who was wearing his [Chuck E. Cheese's] costume." Then he mentioned that Chuck E. Cheese was at Shonner and Caun's birthday party. [Shonner and Caun are otherwise known as Connor and Sean, Ian's friends who are twins.] For awhile he seemed to think that the Guess-Who character was the impostor and the Chuck E. Cheese at Shonner and Caun's birthday party was the real thing. But not for long... Meanwhile, he was perplexed by the utter silence of quasi-Chuck E. Cheese from the other night: he remarked, quite correctly that (outside of Trappist monasteries, etc.), people normally speak, and yet Chuck E. didn't say a word. This seems to have contributed to his suspicion that things weren't quite adding up. Finally, he started referring to the entity as "the guy in the Chuck E. Cheese costume", or something like that. I pointed out that it could have been a girl, but he discounted this absurdity out of hand. I asked him why this wacky proposition was so much out of the question, and he said that boys wear boy-costumes and girls wear girl-costumes.

I asked him whether the Chuck E. Cheese that we saw Saturday night was the same one a Connor and Sean's birthday party; he confirmed that he was, and I think I got a follow-up confirmation out of him that even the persona at the birthday party was not really Chuck E. Cheese.

So, of course, I couldn't resist my follow-up question: "What about the Chuck E. Cheese.

Daniel set the record straight: "He's not real, and you know it."

(February 20, 2011)