This past weekend I walked on the boardwalk, something I have done thousands of times in my life. I stopped in the arcade where during my younger years, I could be found often. It's all changed now; newer games, newest prizes. In my day, the place was filled with pinball machines. I didn't see any this time. There still was a Skeeball game. OK, it is called Iceball now, whatever that is. But I know a Skeeball game when I see it. It's changed too, of course. The numbers are digital, instead of the numbers that flipped your score. The lanes are much shorter, and there are cages over the holes. Oh well.
Skeeball is considered one of the first redemption games. That is, you would play and win tickets, which could then be redeemed for prizes they had hanging on the wall behind the ticket counter.
It was redemption for me in other ways. I grew up in this tourist town, and every summer everything changed. I had summer friends, just visiting for a week or two, or the whole summer. We played hours of pinball, and listened to the bands play in the bars from the outside when we were still too young to enter. We ate pizza, french fries with vinegar, and frozen custard. We played endless songs on the jukebox outside the bumper car ride, made hundreds of faces in the photo booth and hung out in the psychedelic room in the Funhouse. We wore faded low cut jeans so long they would get caught in the boardwalk's nails. Solution? Pull and rip. There were dances in the upper floor of a building near the inlet where they played records in a dark, strobe lit room for a 25 cent fee. I met so many people over the years, and there was always drama. I still look back on those days with fondness, and if my ear catches one of those old songs on the radio, I'm there again.
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