Corporate Bounce

This afternoon, Ian attended a birthday party for his classmate, Zachary, at "Bounce U": a venue that makes excellent sense in theory - a small indoor village of bounce-houses where small children can squander their nearly limitless energy in a couple of hours. It's not the greatest place in practice - kind of the McDonald's of bounce houses, in a blue-and-orange motif that University of Syracuse alumni might enjoy , where teenagers in red t-shirts marshal children from playroom to playroom, yelping out orders and instructions and streamlining the process by which all youth sing happy birthday on the same and march out exactly 120 minutes from start-time with directions not to open their made-in-China dollar-store gift-bags until they're properly evicted into the lobby at the close of the ritual. But I digress. All of this corporate ickiness was lost on the children, thankfully, and Ian bounced up and down in his too-cool party-dance mode

in a way that rather few boys his age would attempt...

In any case, I was properly horrified at Zachary's presents. When asked, his father made it clear that his interests were primarily Star Wars and Star Wars Legos, so he got a stash of presents that reflected precisely that vast spectrum. I know this is my own bias, but, as much as I am a product of the 70's, the high-point of which was that kitschy movie, but once they started on the "sequels" and "prequels," things really went downhill. So Zachary sat in the big birthday throne in the corner of the room, and opened a few thousand pieces of Star Wars paraphernalia, and on the way home, Ian weighed in on the matter:

"Zachary got the best presents I've ever seen."

(March 20, 2011)