They Nail Cheaters, Don't They?

I will give you the Standard Six Flags Guest Service Disclaimer: most of our patrons play honorably and responsibly. The one percent that don't are a pain for two reasons. First, it's hard to catch them in the act. Second, when you do, they'll find a way to claim that you didn't, and in the name of guest service, you'll have to politely give them a pass.

"Ring-A-Thing" is the easiest for cheaters. The perpetrator doesn't have to lean over very far to secretly plant a ring on top of a soda bottle employee and claim a gargantuan plush animal. It only takes a second.

A little kid tries it one day. He flags me down from another part of the stand, indicating he's a winner. But it doesn't feel right. He's done it with his very last ring, and it's on the front row.

I turn to a woman who has just walked over and ask, "Did he lay this ring on there?"

She nods yes.

"This woman says you laid this ring on there," I addressed.

The kid gives me a cute smile. "I did."

"Don't do that! We nail cheaters!"

He and his buddy run off after the tactful but first dress-down.

Another guest wins the grand prize at Highland Hoops. So far, no problem. But then he comes back later and tries to play again, violating our policy of one grand prize per guest per day. That's when he claims he's not the guy who won, but actually the guy's twin cousin. In the name of Guest Service, I can't call him out on it.

The foul line is supposed to keep some order in the universe. But if I enforce it, guests complain. At one of the ball-tossing games, I calmly remind him, "Make sure your hand doesn't go over the foul line."

"Man, gimme my money back."

"Because I told you can't go over the foul line?" I query.

"Because I can tell you aren't cool."

Aren't cool -- that's a code term for, "I'll turn my head the other way while you cheat." I give him his money back.

He later comes back and starts leaning again. When I call him on it, he hurls all the balls away in a huff.

"I'm only doing my job," I explain.

"Why don't you go on the other side?" he gripes, pointing to some guests standing in another line at the same stand.

I do, and a co-worker lets him play again. He wins and collects his prize. I find out he was leaning again, but the co-worker -- a green tag -- doesn't want to cause trouble. And we both think this guy's a jerk.

One guy isn't content to cheat; he just flat-out steals. We find him sitting on the counter at Highland Hoops and politely tell him to get up, because we don't allow people to sit on the game counters. Later, we learn he has been reaching behind him to grab stuffed bears out of the stand and pass them to his buddies. It took another guest to tip us off, long after the fact.

Occasionally, some people think we're the ones cheating. At "Spot Pitch," we require a tossed quarter to get completely inside one of the small circles on our game board to win a prize. One guest thinks he's entitled to something for making it half-way. We have the forepeople and supervisors eyeball it, but they won't give in.

The steamed patron goes down to Guest Relations to complain. They call us and tell us to send down a prize. We send him a gigantic plush Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle -- with a rip in it.

Get Me A Bleeping Supervisor

ADVISORY: This contains mature content. Read with caution!

Managers, as I understand and I believe, should not only lead but inspire. In the Games section of Six Flags Over Mid-America, many do lead and inspire. Many also denigrate and defile.

The phone rings in the Britannia backroom.

"Brit -- Chris speaking."

"Who the [bleep] are you?"

"Chris Francis."

"Well, get off you [bleep]head and get a [bleep]ing supervisor right [bleep]ing now!"

I get one. I should've just hung up.

Fast forward now to a sick joke from a foreman named "Cliff," the name changed to protect his identity.

Shortly after opening one day, he gives me a fake write-up for "not shaving face and legs. This is against the grooming code and uncool." If only I had my historical mindset then. I would've come to work in 18th Century knee breeches and stockings and told him they get girls. Cliff, meanwhile, has Ten O' Clock Shadow, stubble, and gorilla legs. So much for setting the standard.

Later, after I come back from break, Cliff throws me a question straight from left field.

"Can I see your wallet?"

He'd seen me locking it up.

"What, you wanna rip it off?" I jab.

"Nah, let me just see it."

So I let him have it. He flips through my numerous cards before spotting a circular bulge in the back, which may have been what raised his eyebrows. It turns out to be change, but Cliff has a dirty mind.

"You got a condom in your wallet?"

I spend the next few minutes fighting a losing battle as I try to convince everybody in the backroom that I don't carry birth control next to my bills. I keep cracking up, though, because every so often, somebody comes into the backroom, hears the conversation, and asks, "Who's got the condom?" Or they poke their head in the door and ask it. Then I can't stop laughing.

Another girl gets ticked because I make it clear I'm not going to use it on her.

Guests Behaving Badly

Most Six Flags guests behave. A few complain. They take issue with the prizes, the rules or the foul line. As best we try to head off disagreements, some people are born disagreeable. Usually I can kick disputes up to a foreperson or even a supervisor. But even if we're in the right on the rules, the guest will often prevail out of the need for good PR. More than a few Games workers catch onto this and bring it up at a staff meeting.

"We know," a supervisor says. "But now that Time Warner owns us, they're really stressing guest service."

"So let's just get rid of the foul lines," I remark. "Because obviously they don't mean anything."

The foul lines stay. But we can't call a foul on a the problem guests unless they get flagged for unnecessary roughness.

One night around closing time, a stand worker in Britannia is giving a refund to a guest who had run into a machine malfunction. Another man walks over and snatches the money. Naturally that starts a ruckus. The second man gives back the money, but then a third man runs over, shouting "That's my money!" Fists fly into a three-man battle royale.

Soon the area is crawling with Security officers. They're still there a half-hour later when I go back to close up and count my till. An Eureka, Missouri police officer steps in takes a statement from the girl running the stand. It doesn't look like anybody is seriously hurt. At least I don't see any blood.

Sometimes fights break out at the basketball tosses. People make side bets on whether they'll hit a three-pointer from half-court or beyond. Some people try to shoplift, forgetting they're in a controlled area that can be closed down. It's like trying to rob a casino.

When the video arcades fill up, we send up the most irascible personality types to police the crowds -- which mostly means keeping girls and boys from hanging over each other and breaking up shoving matches. I once ask why everybody else seems to be working an arcade shift. A forewoman tells me it's because they need nasty, mean and tough people... and I'm not any of those. I don't know whether to be insulted or flattered.

Money Madness

As a Six Flags worker, I sometimes get caught in situations that leave me wondering whether I will have a job at the end of the day. These are cases where a small mistake creates a butterfly effect of consequences.

July 18, 1992: Britannia, day shift. I can't stuff dollar bills down the pipes at the Churchill Downs horse-race game. They won't slide down to the bottom like change. If you throw a wad down, it'll just stick in the pipe. So when I run out of change, I have to fold it into the top of the pipe, not shoving it down, until somebody gets around to sell me change. "Thor," a foreperson whose name I'm changing to protect his identity, arrives when I'm at least $6 over. He and I start fumbling around with my till while he's selling me change.

"How much are you over?" he queries.

"I dunno," I tell him. No way am I going to count the till in my stand -- a consistent no-no -- and risk more wrath.

Thor takes the wad from the top of the pipe along with the bills from my belt. I also have money from guests in my hand, as they try to talk to me in the middle of all this.

"Pull five from that," Thor directs, giving my till wad back. "Drop six." I do it, using change he's just sold me.

But what about the money in my hand? I didn't realize he had accounted for it. He asked me if I'd pulled the five, which I had, but with him fooling with my money and guests itching to play and interrupt my thoughts, I'm losing track of things. Thor hands over some rolls of change and collects some money from a few more guests.

"Drop this," he says, handing me a roll of quarters. I do it.

But afterwards, I have a feeling something isn't right. My till feels too light. I go on break a few minutes later, and after a backroom count, I find I'm $6 short. Time to tell Thor.

I go over to him and explain what I've done, according to his instructions. He puts his head in his hands when I tell him about the first drop in addition to the second one.

"I'm trying to do my job," I tell him. I've followed his orders and he has the audacity to get upset with them. Or maybe he's just realized he's messed up. But knowing Thor and his longtime reputation for being a posterior orifice, the former is more likely.

"Go on your break and I'll talk with [the supervisor]," he says.

When I come back from break, the sup has a solution: remain at $6 short. "I'll write it down in my book that you're excused. Obviously you misunderstood something he said."

That does little to comfort me as I fret over what Cash Control or somebody else can do to me as Six Flags deals with a wave of till thefts. My hands keep shaking, and another foreperson nearly scares the stuffing at me.

"Need money, Chris?" he says, coming up from behind.

I nearly leap a foot in the air.

As for Thor's attitude, the sup tells me not to worry. He's "having a bad day."

Or a bad attitude... and enjoying it.

McClosed

In the summer of 1992, Time Warner (before AOL) owned Six Flags Over Mid-America, and they made a generous proposal. They allowed McDonald's to take over three of the park's restaurants. An eatery in the center became a full-service Golden Arches. A burger joint on the east end transformed into "McDonald's Hamburger Express," and another one on the west end near Old Chicago transformed into "McDonald's Pizza Express" at a time when the burger behemoth was thinking outside the bun.

Immediately, the park's self-run hash houses felt the pressure. When kids had the choice of an unknown dive and the familiar happy meal, guess where they pulled their parents? Banners went up outside other Six Flags restaurants offering combo meals for supposedly competitive prices. Guests weren't swayed, and they packed the central McDonald's. Even park workers went there, snubbing the food at their private "All-Star Cafe" for Big Macs and the famous fries. Getting a 50 percent employee discount wasn't bad, either.

Two months later, McDonald's found out they were losing the two Express locations. Immediately, conspiracy theories emerged. Were they too successful for their own good? Had Time Warner, in a fit of corporate stupidity, set them up to fail to protect the park's own? The theory had legs. Food Service workers got an extra fifty cents an hour to sling the grub where grease was the word. Even so, it still wasn't much of an incentive, considering most Six Flags workers made less than minimum wage because they were technically part-timers: they worked a steady job during the summer, but only during the summer -- and weekends in the late spring and fall.

Further rumblings down the rumor wire revealed a contrary story. The express locations weren't pulling their weight in sales, especially compared to the central location. The park could support one Mickey D's, not three. Food Service took back their former territories, continuing to serve hamburgers and pizza -- just not from McDonalds.

The central location immediately boosted its staffing and raised prices, making the park's location more expensive than their outside stores. Six Flags axed the employee discount. McDonald's remained a few more years, outlasting my stint with the park.

Now, even the central location is gone, turned back into a Food Service location. This Google Maps photo from 2011 shows it:


View Larger Map

In the battle of corporate giants, it truly is eat or be eaten.

Spare The Rod, Or I'll Hit You With It Myself

Come to Six Flags Over-Mid America and enjoy all our rides and shows. Enjoy all our comfort food and ice cream. Try your skill in the Games sections. But don't ever, ever beat your children in front of me.

I see it more than once. And when I do see it, I see it egregiously.

Most of the time, parents just yell at their children. Or one parent yells, and then another parent yells at the other parent for yelling at their children in public, swearing at the other parent in the process.

One time, a child cries in front of a Skee-Ball ticket counter, and a parent lifts him up by one arm to swat his behind several times before letting him fall to the cement floor in a heap of agony. The parent does this over and over again until the child lies in a fetal position.

"Where's my camcorder?" I whisper to a co-worker. "I'm gonna bust these people for child abuse."

The irony is, there's no good way to do that. The park has lines for security and anonymous tips if we spot guests behaving badly, but suspected child abuse is touchy. If I falsely accuse a guest, it comes back to bite my behind, and then I'm open to legal or disciplinary action if I'm wrong.

I should've reported it to a foreperson, quietly. I didn't, and I still wish I had to this day. I really wanted to confront this parasite of a parent and bellow, "You are a guest in this park! That means we don't have to watch you exercise corporal punishment before a live audience! Beat that child one more time and I'll shove my quarter rolls down your throat!"

We are still years away from the see-something-say-something era of self-policing. I probably had the final mentality of "it's none of my business; it's a parent punishing a bratty kid."

Years later, in the news business, I'll hear about parents arrested for public spanking. Mom or Dad's charges go away, but the humiliation doesn't. Whether the kids straighten up or run wild is left to speculation.

Nowadays, I probably won't call the cops on you. But kindly beat your children someplace else.

Till Theft Do Us Part

On any given day, thousands of dollars pour into the Games section of Six Flags Over Mid-America, passing through the hands and till belts of dozens of young employees before ending up in the drop boxes of some two dozen games before ending in the vaults of Cash Control. But along the way, scores of dollars will end up in pockets and purses, skimmed from the operation to pad the pay of employees who think they can quietly rob their bosses.

It's officially called Till Mismanagement, and officially, it's a firing offense. It's a crime, too, but in my four-summer stint, I never heard of anybody going to jail for it. That's probably why it continued.

Till theft is treated as a fact of life by our department head. "We've said goodbye to a lot of you," he says at one employee meeting. "We'll probably say goodbye to a lot more of you before the summer's over."

It's easy because drops are made with each game, no security cameras are around to catch people on tape, and the sections have various nooks suitable for moving cash around in secret. The actual technique varies, but many will short-drop: taking a dollar bill but dropping 50 cents into the box. Some will take wads of money at a time at a group racing game, but only drop half that in change, instead of dropping each dollar in change as it's collected. Later, they'll duck into the hiding place and pocket the excess. A few bold quick-buck artists will slip a dollar into their own pockets every so often instead of the till belt. Remember, the amount of money in the till belt is not supposed to grow or contract at any time -- it's solely there for making change.

Forepeople figure out ways to skim, shorting stand workers a few dollars each while selling change. Each worker thinks they've just gone short of the $80 that's supposed to always remain in the till by making a mistake in dropping. Meanwhile, the excess dollars add up and end up in the foreperson's pocket.

Six Flags does have its own undercover detective agency, but Internal Investigations are only as effective as their anonymity and their technique. A rookie gumshoe will stare constantly at somebody in a stand, and it's an obvious tell. One employee I know confronts a girl with eagle eyes.

"Do you work for Internal?" he queries.

"Yes," she says, breaking down nearly into tears, cover blown.

Sometimes I notice people walking around with camcorders held in awkward positions. They pass through, wait a few minutes, and then they pass through again.

I nearly catch two people in the act while training as a foreman during the summer of 1991. "Jared" and "Scott," as I'll call them, already had a dodgy reputation because they always worked together and walked together, leading people to think they did other things together as well. Enough said about that part.

As I'm selling fresh change to my comrades, one of the forepeople takes me aside and tells me not to sell to the racing game where Jared and Scott are working. Another tells me to ask if people need change before selling it to them -- which I was already doing.

While I make my rounds, a foreperson and a supervisor meet privately in the Britannia backroom, presumably discussing something that didn't seem right or something they saw. The foreperson calls for me, and I cautiously knock on the door.

"Pull a guy quick from Fishin' Hole," she tells me, "and send them to Bedrock Bedlam."

"You didn't see any of this," the supervisor says as I'm walking out the door. She and the foreperson head straight to Jared and Scott's stand, have them take off their till belts, and escort them out of the section. I never see them again.

Most busts take place out of my sight, and out of the guests' sight. We hear about it later through the rumor pipelines, long after the guilty parties are gone.

One summer later, Six Flags decides to get tougher on the skimmers, and so they deploy a battalion of till auditors from Cash Control into Britannia. They come up the back way, from the Thunder River dock. They stand around, discuss some strategy and wait until the crowd of players has thinned out a tad.

"GO!" somebody shouts, and the swarm of auditors splits up and spreads out to each stand like an FBI raid. They order every employee to hand over their tills with their nametags. Some auditors nearly rip the tags off their targets. Everybody gets fresh tills, temporary nametags, and probably a few dirty looks. The same operation goes down in Old Chicago.

Forepeople aren't exempt. One auditor takes his $3000 change till and hands him an $80 black-tag till.

Hours later, when our shifts end, we're summoned to a mandatory meeting in the training center, where we're all debriefed by two full-time Games honchos, a security officer, and a Eureka Police Department detective who speaks of an "ongoing investigation."

He tells us they're building hard evidence on people, but nobody in the room is a "suspect." He reminds us till theft is a crime, but he offers us a deal: any skimmer can some to Security within 24 hours, fess up, and be terminated without prosecution. After that, skimmers face a crap shoot.

I voice a couple of thoughts about the way it all went down. "I'm concerned about people's civil rights being violated," given the way the auditors went about their business.

The department head empathizes, saying that these weren't the best people to have going out doing audits. He reminds us not to count our tills in our stands, as seen on some of the covert camcorder tape. The other honchos give us an opportunity to see whether we were over or short at the time we were shaken down, and I find I'm two bucks over, which management tells me is nothing to be concerned about.

I never hear if anybody takes a deal, although we joke about whether we're going to surrender or not the next day. The auditors don't return for the rest of the summer. The investigations continue.

And skimmers continue to game Games.

The Elusive Superstar

Many workplaces have their employees of the week, month and year. At Six Flags Over Mid-America we have Service Superstars, those who perform at the proverbial mark way above the level. But in many ways, just like in many other workplaces, it's just another popularity contest cloaked as an incentive to work harder.

I learn the truth after a few weeks. And an incident in May 1991 further convinces me, just as I'm beginning my second summer in the Games section.

It starts after I get a coin box key meant for Skee-Ball accidentally stuck in a basketball-toss machine while trying to give a guest a free play for a lost coin. I get some guff about it, which I expect, but what gets me is the attitude of a supervisor, promoted to that rank out of foreperson: "Well, no Service Superstar for you."

He's probably playing with me. He probably knows I'm thinking about it because he's just asked me a few minutes earlier whether I got one last year. He and another sup were trying to figure it out, since the slate starts clean every season. Or maybe that's what they want me to believe. I can't trust anybody anymore. Nonetheless, I buy into the hunch that I might be getting it. Boy, am I young and gullible.

Yet in all this, the ironic twist is that the act was committed in the name of serving the guest. The guest had accidentally put his money into a machine that had no ball -- and was not marked "Out Of Order," either. I tried to fix the problem by giving him a free play. Yes, a key got stuck, but not out of malice. The Skee-Ball key works on the crane machine and Boom Ball, so maybe it should work on the hoops game too. One can't fault my logic.

And then come times when I want to help the guest, but regulations throw up a block. Many times a guest will win a stuffed animal but want it in a different color that what we have in stock behind the stand. They'll see the color they want with the numerous animals tacked up on the wall (known as "flash" in Six-Flags-speak), but I can't get it down for them. I need a foreperson's permission to do that because first, it will leave a gap they have to fill again with more plush. Second, they have to recount the plush on the wall again if you take something down, which they don't like to do. Third, much of the plush is dirty, dusty and deformed due to hanging on the wall for an extended period of time.

Guests don't buy this logic, and they shouldn't. You're there to serve them, not make excuses why you can't. Still, I have to explain all of this to them, because often a foreperson isn't around, and they often don't give permission to raid the wall.

"It's something you and I both have to live with," I tell one guest. Sometimes I can appease them by letting them trade in a big stuffed animal for several smaller ones, something I can do without anybody's permission.

I would never earn Service Superstar through four summers of Six Flags. No special luncheon. No letter of praise from the bosses. No gold engraved nametag.

If only I had a relationship with GOD during those years. I would've remembered Hebrews 6:10: "GOD is not unjust; HE will not forget your work and the love you have shown HIM as you have helped HIS people and continue to help them."

Swimming Lessons

Without a permanent shift in any of the Games sections of Six Flags Over Mid-America, I worked in Pool, which some of us called "swimming." I had a lot of latitude to set my own hours. I would usually sign up to work extra open shifts in sections that needed them or fill in for others when they needed time off. Most of the time, it worked flawlessly, but I accidentally double-booked myself a couple of times and had to work it out with the office. One time, though, failing to handle things the right way the first time led to a lot of needless frustration.

Monday, June 24, 1991. I call into the office to scope out open shifts. The first time I get a lady who isn't even working the desk. She says somebody will call me back, and you can figure out what happened. I call back a second time, and I'm told to call back around noon, in the likelihood a night shift will pop up. I call again and come up dry.

But I have another issue to settle: Jody's shift. Her and I made a deal a month ago -- I'd work for her on a day shift from June 28 to July 14th. It sounded like a done deal, but not completely. I need her to get it on a form so I could sign off on it and put my Social Security number on it. Now time is running out, and it needs to get to the office to get processed so the forepeople are aware of the change. I'd had repeatedly asked her to get the paperwork to me, but she says no rush, she wants to wait until her time off got closer.

Now I'm getting annoyed. A day earlier, I'd put up a note on the Britannia bulletin board:

THE PERSON (BROWN TAG) WHO WANTED ME
TO WORK FOR HER JUNE 28 TO JULY 14
NEEDS TO GET THE PAPERWORK (TSC) TO ME
PRONTO OR ELSE THE DEAL IS NULL AND VOID!
--Chris Francis
MY NUMBER IS ON THE POOL LIST.
THIS MEANS YOU JODY [REDACTED]!
I shouldn't have done it. But I need to get it taken care of, and I'm getting desperate. My plan is to get the paperwork done today while working. But without a shift, I have to get it done another way. I talk to the desk girl and get her to verify Jody is working. I ask to have the call transferred to Britannia. That's when I hit another problem: the junky phone in my room accidentally cuts me off. I call back right away and Desk Girl tells me Jody will call back on her break.

Hours pass with no call. I get back on the phone and explain. The girl on the other end tells me she'll work on it be back with me in a few minutes. She calls back to later saying I don't need to do anything; Jodi will turn in the forms in on Thursday, and I don't need to put any of my information -- including my Social Security number -- on the paperwork. They can get it from the office files. I should've known, but I didn't think office managers could crib that information, even with my consent.

Jody calls back later and I apologize for the sign, explaining how hard it's been for me to get shifts lately because Six Flags is cutting back on extra workers. She's good about it, very good, but in a way that makes me feel worse.

"I owe you big," I say just before the goodbye.

The XY Affair

ADVISORY: This entry contains mature content.

Occasionally, men do fall victim to sexual harassment. Maybe that term is a little strong for what you're about to read, but it fits. Although what happened was done in fun, not spite, it ranks as my most memorable uncomfortable moment from my time at Six Flags Over Mid-America.

Quoting from my journal of July 15, 1991:

Midway through my stint [spieling at Ninja Invasion in Old Chicago] two girls who shall be known here as X and Y started giving me some problems. They were fellow employees, and they must have had nothing to do because they both entered the stand at the same time and started coming on to me -- right in front of the guests. All this time, I'm trying to keep my concentration and run the game. They'd back me into corners, asking me questions that girls usually don't ask boys:

"Have you gotten laid yet?"

And then they'd feel me up, right when I'd be trying to spiel the race. I'm lucky I didn't make a Freudian slip. I'd break up at times when they'd rub my legs, but at least I didn't say anything embarrassing. I was embarrassed, though. Guests shouldn't see [bleep] like this -- and that's just what it was, [bleep]. I know somebody put them up to this. [Redacted]? She's a sneaky little [bleep], I think. She was the one who was fondling me during the time I was giving out stands while working as a yellow tag [management trainee] in O.C. Both X and Y left the stand occasionally to gab with others around the way, perhaps to spread the world about what they were doing to me and how I was reacting to it.

The two left for awhile after nearly a half-hour of this nonsense, and then Y came back to send me on a break. She said X was waiting for me in the backroom. When I got there, she was waiting for me all right. She half-dragged me outside and made like she was going to rip my clothes off, starting with my till belt. This girl was crazy, gone with the wind and the wind wasn't even blowing. After doing that, she led me back into the backroom, and the next thing I know, we're both on the soft and she's pretending that she wants to do the wild thing. When the steam cleared, I lay spread out on the sofa with the top button on my shirt undone and one shocked expression on my face."

This backroom incident, by the way, took place in front of several other employees, including a foreperson, laughing all the way. For the record, nothing happened below the belt.

Back to my journal, where nothing shocking happened after that until the last 15 minutes of my shift:

That's when [redacted] came up to me like I was her boyfriend and nearly hugged me. A few minutes later, she told me my face looked swollen, and maybe it did. I wouldn't have been surprised after the hijinks of X and Y. She asked for a second opinion from Kurt [a foreperson]. He didn't agree. She told me I looked sexy though. I told her it must be the glasses. She told me she thought I looked better without the glasses. Anyway, she gave me her phone number on a piece of tape as I was leaving...

Or so I thought. It turned out to be one of the numbers for Six Flags. Later I confronted her, playing around.

"What are you trying to play me for, girl? I'm not going down as a sucker!"

She said she messed up and miswrote a digit, something she always did. Yeah, sure. How does a person continuously forget how to write their own phone number?

Yet there she goes, swearing to GOD she messed up. If I had been closer to GOD at that time, I would've told her to leave GOD out of it.

And keep her hands to herself.

The One That Got Away

As many of you know, my high school years would pass by without any semblance of a dating life. I should've started wearing tricorns and knee breeches in high school and learned a minuet, staying true to what I would later liberate from my heart and mind. I'm not going to dive into the pity pool, but let me point towards a possible love connection from June of 1991.

Angie and I are working together at "Fishin' Hole," a stand we put in for little kids to win something with every play. The object is to drop a fishing line with a magnet into a pool and pick up a prize for fifty cents a drop. The kids get excited and swing their lines around, meaning we have to dodge flying magnets. You'll put somebody's eye out, kid!

During a break from rugrat infestation, she asks a jawdropper:

"Do you have a girlfriend?"

"No."

I ponder my next words for several seconds before finally letting them out of my mouth: "What, do you want to be mine?"

"How did you know?"

"Know what?"

"That I liked you?"

I pause again. "Wild guess."

As I read back over my journal, I'm still not sure why I asked that question, other than the moment was right and the words were right.

But I have to be careful. If this girl is playing me, I don't want to go down as a sucker. Teenage hearts break easier, and not just in the ladies. But Angie tells me she and another girl had talked about me earlier in the day. It sounds legit, but I don't let down my guard.

At the time, it doesn't seem right, anyway. Years later, I realize why: I'm 19 and she's 15. I'm in college, and she's in high school. It reeks of illegality, even if everything's above the belt. She's nearly the same age as my kid brother's girlfriend. I don't push the relationship.

A month later, Angie falls through the termination hole amid questionable circumstances. I hear she gave out the grand prize at the "Golden Grail" game for a ball that landed right next to the grand prize cup without it being a winner. I gather she took pity on somebody.

I did it once too, giving a little girl a small prize at another game when she was only a hair away from being a winner.

"You just saved me a lot of problems," her grateful father told me.

It Is Written (Up)

It's all fun and games until one of the Six Flags Games people breaks the rules, or they get on the wrong side of some foreperson's ego, or they become a target on somebody's list. Working in Games parallels what we would later call Survivor, where the object is to outwit, outplay and outlast, or just good-old-fashioned high-school politics. Get out of line, and you get "written up."

I quickly learn the regulations count for no more than 50 percent. When I work my first shifts in the Old Chicago section, I find out their forepeople have little margin for error, or a miniscule sense of humor. People get written up for taking the top off a water cooler to get some cold ice for their drinks. Maybe that explains why others are begging me to work their Old Chicago shifts.

At one point, I see this sign in Britannia's backroom:

DO YOU ENJOY BEING WRITTEN UP FOR:
--Taking the lid off the water cooler
--Talking to a fellow distressed employee
--Having any fun at all?

IF SO, TALK TO AN OLD CHICAGO PERSON ABOUT SWITCHING SHIFTS.

Later, when word gets around about O.C.'s reputation for write-ups, the forepeople try to write everybody up as a joke as their sense of humor finally emerges.

Some people get written up arbitrarily. Some people commit felonies under management's sight line or get a pass. It's life. It's Games.

In June 1992, I find out a newbie gets written up twice and chewed out once in the same day, at least one for questionable circumstances. The first is for a black shirt under a white uniform. That's understandable, even though one can hardly see the black shirt, anyway. The other is for throwing a wiffleball across the section from one stand to another, although nobody seemed to notice all the throwing going on between stands yesterday. The chew-out is for letting a non-Games employee shoot a basketball at long Range, never mind that Security officers do it all the time, along with forepeople.

"Start keeping book on people," I tell him.

He whips out a notebook. "I already am. I think that's why I'm getting all this [bleep]."

I advise him to wear a tape recorder, if he can.

About a month later, I talk to him again, and he opens up his notebook. What I read is detailed and damaging. More than anything, it documents the antics of one particular foreperson for:

• Staging a "puppet show" behind a fence in Britannia using prize plush animals, and throwing ice and water over the fence to observe the reactions of guests standing in line for Thunder River
• Yelling at a Green Tag for counting his till in the backroom without permission when he didn't need to ask for it, because he's out of sight of guests

Fortunately, he wouldn't have to be anybody's problem much longer, and I play a role in his downfall.

At the end of one shift, I'm counting some change, stacking those notorious Susan B. Anthony dollars into neat little pile. Along comes Mr. Foreperson, who starts messing them up, insisting on counting them himself. I insist he stop.

"Don't you trust me?" he says.

"I'll take the fifth," I reply as a joke.

"[Bleep] you," he spits back.

"You can dish it out, but you can't take it," I say, and I recount how he comes up to me at Ring-A-Thing one month ago, screaming in my ear as I was bent over, trying to pick some rings up off the floor.

"Achhhh... easy!" I groaned. "I have hearing loss in both ears!" (I'm not sure that I actually did, but days upon days of loud games, loud guests, this loud foreperson and the realization that other people can talk to each other clear across the section and understand each other while I can't led me to this conclusion.)

"Well, then it shouldn't have hurt you," he grinned.

"It sure doesn't help it!"

He still thinks it's funny, one month later, especially since I tell him I've documented it all in my journal.

This incident might've evaporated, had it not happened within the earshot of a supervisor. The loud-mouthed foreperson is canned within hours, if not minutes. Finally, justice prevails.

The Art Of The Spiel

Mere days before I set foot in Six Flags as an employee, when I visit as a guest with my family, my aspirations locked in on the horse-racing game in the Britannia section. "Churchill Downs" features a dozen mechanical horses controlled by alleys of golf balls rolled into holes by contestants, similar to Skee-Ball, flanked by two vocal gamemasters calling the race at the same time in boisterous stereo.

"I want to do that," I told Dad.

It's called "spieling" in Six Flags terminology, and it's an art. I get to try it for myself on one of my first days on the job, when my trainer-buddy agrees to let me step up to the mic. He quizzes me on the rules.

"You need to have three balls in the tray," I ferret from my mind. "You need to remain seated at all times, and nobody starts rolling until I ring the bell."

He smiles as he ticks off the points on his hand. Grasshopper, you are ready.

I pull the battered gooseneck down to my level and let it fly.

"We just need three people to start this next game of Churchill Downs!"

VU needles on the backroom amplifier hit the red zone. People turn their heads.

"You can win yourself a little jockey monkey!"

Forepeople wonder, who's that guy?

"Just roll those balls up the tray and get your horse to the finish line! Only a dollar to play!"

And so begins a journey that becomes my trademark. By the time my Six Flags games career wraps up four years later, I will call more than one hundred races between "Churchill Downs" and its Old Chicago counterpart, "Ninja Invasion." Ring the bell, and we're off and running.

"Annnnd we're off! Out of the gate into the lead is Number Three, Number Three! Here comes Number Five out of the gate! Seven and Six now showing. Three makes a big move! It's Number Three, Number Three by a length!"

The key is to mention everybody's horse at some point in the race to make things sound competitive, even if some people just can't get their stallion surging.

"And it's Three and Four neck and neck as we come to the halfway point! Three and four! On the outside coming up, Number Five!"

If it's a weekend or a weeknight, and we've got people around, a crowd is drawing in. As I pump up the intensity, the guests are cheering the horses on, and it's truly turning into a day at the races. We just need the hats and mint juleps. The horses have names we can give to the guests, but it's easier and faster to call numbers.

"Coming down to the wire, Three and Five, we're gonna have a photo finish!"

People are going bananas behind the players, who are now nearly throwing their golf balls up the trays, despite my admonitions, trying to hit that big three-point hole that will put them over the line.

RINNNNNNNG!

"And it's Number Five! Number Five! Congratulations! The rest of you, we're getting another game together in just a minute, so stand by!"

I quickly hand out a prize to our champion of the moment. Hands with dollar bills jut out in front of me, and I hastily grab the money, activate the lanes, go through the rules again and hit the starting bell.

It's a grueling gig. More than once, I'll come into work hoarse because my voice is depleted from a spieling marathon. The forepeople -- at least the good ones -- take pity on your humble spieler and put him in a stand where he doesn't have to talk as much. Some days, I'll just don't have the energy for a four-hour talkathon. But one day, I'll have a mysterious excess of energy and need to burn it off.

It happens on August 11, 1992, when I work "Pork Chopper," a motorcycle-themed race game in Old Chicago which gives away Harley-Davidson swag. The crowds aren't enormous, but they pile up after I start rocking the mic. The stand sucks in money like a rampaging Hoover.

And on this night, it's not just the guests getting prizes. From my journal:

I'd just finished spieling a game when a guest suddenly got my attention.

"You're familiar with the Mystery Guest program, aren't you?"

"Yeah!" I replied.

And, boom, he handed me a pink mystery guest card. Just like that.

"Good job!"

Now Games people don't usually win Mystery Guest cards, so this was an honor indeed. And believe me, I was high as a kite.

I wasn't so high later on when I redeemed it in Personnel. All the good stuff, like the Best Buy and Music Vision certificates, were gone. I got two Wehrenberg movie passes. The trouble with those is that, for a lot of big name movies like Batman Returns, you can't get in with them all the time. But I guess I shouldn't complain. It's getting selected that counts, and I'm one of the chosen few.

I won "Spieler of the Year" for at least two years. The first award landed me a gigantic cigar, which I couldn't smoke, and I didn't even try until I was living in Texas many years later. It disintegrated, and I coughed all the way through nary a few puffs before putting it out and trashing it. I'm glad I got a plaque the next year.

I also got the opportunity to train the next generation of spielers. Our Games Guru invited me to write a guidebook. I called it "The Art Of The Spiel (or, How To Talk A Good Game)," for which I earned a few extra summer bucks. I'm not sure if some of that material is still in use, but I know it made it into the training materials for at least one year.

Last New Year's Eve, when I was at Disneyland with my family, we passed a horse-racing game, and I just couldn't resist having another crack at it, more than two decades leader, from behind the row of players and off the microphone, direct from the diaphragm.

"Annnnnnnd they're off! Coming out of the gate and into the lead..."

Still got it.

Let's Pack This Joint

Weekends are the theme-park equivalent of prime time TV. Concert weekends are prime time juiced. Six Flags has to have at least 1,000 employees on any given summer weekend -- and still we're understaffed. Thus from time to time, a poster would go up in the backroom informing us of a "mandatory work day." That meant everybody was required to show up, including your humble servant, even though I didn't have an assigned section -- or shift.

I operated as a "swimmer," my unofficial slang for somebody working in Pool, where new hires went instead of a regular shift. I found it both lucrative and flexible. I could nearly set my own hours because several games sections were always looking for at least one or two workers on any given day. I usually got Britannia, but I could pull a few shifts in a stretch in Old Chicago, an occasional one by the Ninja rollercoaster, or in Spanish Backstreet babysitting arcades if I wanted a breather. And people always needed somebody to fill in for them. I could work for three or four different people over the course of one week.

On concert nights, guests would jam the games in lines multiple bodies deep and just keep on coming. At times I would have to remind myself of the appearance checklist outside wardrobe, which mandated clean grooming, no gum and at the bottom, in capital letters: "BIG SMILE!" I had trouble doing it when pushed to the max.

As I wrote in my journal on July 31, 1990:

Saturday was a pain in the rear. We had Belinda Carlisle out at SF and, as usual, it was a mandatory work day -- and also, as usual, it was crowded. The day didn't start off so bad (I was working 2-10) when I started at Ring-A-Thing, but when I came back from break and went to King's Knights -- whoa. People just kept buying balls -- and buying -- and winning -- and buying. I think I told Bones [one of the forepeople], "Get me out of here!" They did, but I went to Highland Hoops.

Highland Hoops was that game where people won more often than a lot of us thought they should. The premise was easy: throw a hula hoop around a stuffed bear on a raised platform that's only slightly smaller than the hoop. If the hoop lands flat on the table under the platform, you're a winner. The physics of the game were supposed to make it hard for the hoop to land flat, but I suspected the bears actually helped straighten out the hoop, cutting the house edge.

All three sides were open at once and people just kept on buying hoops and winning bears and buying more hoops -- ack! I was getting worn to a frazzle, and when that happens, I get plenty ticked off. I don't do a lot of things I should do, like telling people, "Thanks for playing," or "Sorry you didn't win," or the things you're supposed to say when running a game. I was talking, yes, but under my breath so at least I could say some of the things I wanted to say and release them from my lips.

Welcome back to the grit of my scoundrel youth. But I found guests would walk up to a game with giant stuffed animals ("plush" in Six-Flags-ese) hanging from any mountable position, and still they would ask, "What do I win?"

When the smoke cleared and the damage lay among us -- 10:00 pm -- people just didn't want to leave. [This was known as a "soft close".] And we had to still keep taking money and giving away bears. Strange. The park can close and some of the rides can close, but we can't. I kept telling people who came up to play we were closed (which I wasn't really supposed to do, but I was so tired) and wished everyone would just clear out so I could leave. I must've looked like a genuine jackass, but at that time I didn't really care. Service Superstar I'm not, but so is about 85% of SF's employees. They're mostly black tags like me or foremen (oops -- I mean forePEOPLE), and I feel fine with that.

The next day, after giving away about 260 bears at Highland Hoops, they modified the game to make it harder to win. They ditched the giant bears and replaced them with small tigers that wouldn't improve the flight path of the hoop. Problem solved -- until the next concert night.

Other workers told me about the worst-ever concert experience: New Kids on The Block. The park sold out and stopped admitting guests. Lines everywhere. Games constantly busy. Rides constantly busy. Hours to thin the crowds out after closing. And who knows how many bears given away.

Let The Games Begin

It's time again for "The 30/30 Challenge," that bi-annual blog-a-thon where I give you 30 straight days of original content, whether you like it or not. For the summer edition, I'm rolling back to the early 1990's when I worked in the Games section of Six Flags Over Mid-America (Now Six Flags - St. Louis).  It's located in Eureka, Missouri, about 30 miles southwest of St. Louis -- and not that far from the infamous toxic streets of Times Beach. In the summer of 1990, just before heading off to college for my freshman year, I finally got a job that did not involve some form of fast food. But it did involve some fast times...

It's my first day on the job, and I don't know where to start. Do I go to the front gate, or to the office at the top of the hill? As a teenager sans car, my parents drop me off in the lower lot for the "guests," -- customers in official Six Flags terminology -- and I scramble up to the office.

After asking a few more questions of a few more people, I finally get myself to the training room located in the center of the park. I have only set foot in this sprawling funland once before, just days ago when my family decided to take a Saturday outing with a 2-for-1 coupon. Before that, I am only familiar with what I have seen long ago on Captain Kangaroo, when the good Captain did a show or two on location from Six Flags over Texas, the granddaddy of the thrill-ride family, the one dating back to 1961, when Angus Wynne opened his own version of Disneyland with more of an emphasis on thrilling rides. Six Flags over Georgia followed in 1967. The park I'm now working for rolled its first coaster in 1971 -- the same year of my birth.



Our trainer, a rotund guy in his 40's with blond hair, passed out the boilerplate forms for us to sign and the short employee manual. We watched a proverbial hazardous material safety video, even though the most hazardous thing most of us would deal with was "Fan-Fare," that mysterious industrial cleaning agent one only finds at Six Flags. After that, the time comes for the field trip outside. The park is sparsely attended for a Monday morning in early June but still running strong.

"What do you think is the question people ask the most?" our trainer queries.

"Where is X?" I volunteer, "where X is some ride."

Our trainer defines my variable. "Where's the bathroom?"

He takes us through the park's six themed lands, each representing a flag that has flown over the midwest through our history. We start in America, making our way through Spain, France, Great Britain and the park's nods to Missouri and Illinois, our trainer dutifully noting the location of each restroom along the way. As the story goes, Six Flags originally wanted to name the park "Six Flags over Missouri," but the company couldn't find six different flags in Missouri's history. Expanding the name expanded their options.


View Larger Map

I also had options. When Six Flags came recruiting at Eureka Senior High School, I applied on the spot during lunch. I heard nothing about my application for weeks. Days after I graduated from high school, I was talking to Dad about putting in an application at a Burger King down the street (despite my abortive experience with them in Kansas City one year earlier) while we were out running an errand. As we pulled into the driveway of our new St. Louis-area home, Mom was running out to meet us.

"You got the job at Six Flags!" she cried. She'd opened the mail. At the time, I really didn't care she'd opened my mail, too.

Six Flags over Mid-America has three games sections, all linked to ride areas: Britannia, coming off Thunder River; Old Chicago, coming off the Screamin' Eagle coaster, and Ninja, coming off the coaster of the same name. Spanish Backstreet is another game section, but it mainly consists of babysitting arcades and making change, so I don't count it as a real section.

With the basic training complete, I report to wardrobe to suit up for my starting section: Britannia. The uniform is a white short-sleeved smock with plaid lines that cut me across the bust and up my neck, bottomed with black shorts. I have to buy and wear L.A. Gear tennis shoes, even though they are one of the park's official sponsors. I expected an official promotional deal that wouldn't involve taking a payroll hit.

A savvy guy who has to be at least a year younger than me takes me on another field trip through all the carnival-esque games of the section: The King's Darts (dart balloons), the basketball tosses (both of them with big and small hoops), St. Andrew's Green (mini-golf), Ring-A-Thing (trying to toss a ring onto a soda bottle neck), Golden Grail (toss wiffleballs trying to get them onto a colored chalice), Churchill Downs (mechanized horse racing), Space Chase (a Jetsons racing game which has absolutely nothing to do with England), Wacky Wire (manipulate an electric ring around a moving spring without touching the sides), the ubiquitous Skee-Ball and the winner-prone Highland Hoops.

"Really watch the foul line on this," he says on the hoops game. "We lose a lot of money here."

I'm soon working one of the stands -- I forget which. But I will never forget the "till." Eighty dollars in change sits in a green apron of pockets tied around my waist. With all of the Britannia workers wearing tills and white shirts, we sort of resemble European peasants in tunics... sort of... all wearing name tags.

They have a color-code system. Newbies like me are "Green Tags" or "Slime Tags." Eventually, I'll graduate to "Black Tag." Maybe I'll make it to a foreperson, or "Red Tag." Maybe I'll get to an assistant foreperson, or "Orange Tag." A few lucky persons will make it to "Gold Tag," winning honor of Service Superstar, complete with award luncheon and a gushing letter from the company suits.

The one tag you don't want to be is "Brown Tag," nicknamed "S--- Tag." They are the 15-year-old employees, the people on a tight leash because of Missouri's child labor laws.

"People are always asking me why I can't hire more 15-year-olds," our trainer says in the introductory session. "I have to tell them that only one percent of my workforce can be 15-year-olds." Their hours are capped below part-time status. Even if they want to work more, they can't. Most everybody else is either in high school or college, including the forepeople and the supervisors, making this workplace more like a frathouse.

The till is the first of many Six Flags Conventions I Fail To Understand. When a guest comes up to play a game, I take his or her dollars, drop them into my till belt and take out the corresponding value of quarters to be dropped into a metal lock box located somewhere in the stand. Or we drop a Susan B. Anthony dollar down there. After rejection by the general public more than two decades ago, they have finally found some useful purpose. I find it puzzling the operation can't handle dollar bills directly. Maybe it's because bills take up too much space in the box. Maybe bills get crumpled up. Whatever.

All of us function as both gamemasters and change machines, and when our tills run low of quarters or SBA dollars, the forepeople come around to swap our bills for more coins. At least once a day, an undercover agent from Cash Control comes in -- dressed in a t-shirt and shorts like a guest -- and takes wads of cash from the back room in a nondescript gym bag to a double-locked fortress in the center of the park.

Managing my till takes practice through working Highland Hoops, the golf game and whatever else I set foot in. On the first day, I come up at least five dollars short after counting my cash, which is supposed to add back up to 80 dollars.

"Don't worry," a supervisor tells me as I feel for my neck. "It's your first day."

I drown my sorrow in peanut-butter sandwiches and I Love Lucy after I get back home. Tomorrow is a new beginning, a new till.

The next day I break even, although I have an advantage of only working a half day.

"We have too many people on shift," our supervisor explains midway through my shift. Park attendance is not justifying the level of staffing, so some people have to get off the clock.

I don't mind. Back at Wardrobe on the hill, I change back into my regular attire and enjoy what I call "The Perk:" unlimited use of the park as a guest when not working. I just show my ID card to a guard at the employee entrance and slip in from the back, avoiding any ticket lines. It's going to be a nice three months.

These Are The Days Of Our Lives

Reel To Reel: X-Men: Days Of Future Past

Going Rate: Worth full price
Starring: Hugh Jackman, James McAvoy, Jennifer Lawrence, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart
Rated: PG-13
Red Flags: Sci-Fi Action violence, mild language, about 5 seconds of Hugh Jackman's bare bum

The X-Men franchise gets props for finding a way to crank out sequels and prequels with fresh ideas, mainly by disrupting the time-space continuum of its own universe. Days Of Future Past takes everything people liked about X-Men: First Class and melds it with the original films to create a mash-up of sci-fi summer blockbuster and 70's period piece with an American Hustle vibe.

Apparently, X-Men: The Last Stand wasn't the last stand. Mutants and any humans who dare help them are now facing extermination from a seemingly indestructible legion of super-mutant androids called Sentinels. They have DNA cloned and perfected from that shape-shifting blue mutant named either Raven or Mystique (Lawrence), but I forget and just keep calling her "Big Blue Nude Girl" in my head.

It turns out the current war stems directly from Big Blue Nude Girl's 1970's killing of a weapons researcher just as the Vietnam war is ending, thus setting off a process leading to the perfection of the Sentinel program. If only somebody could go back in time and prevent that from happening. The mutant team led by Professor X (Stewart) and Magneto (McKellen) find a mutant that can pull that off, but the job requires somebody tough enough to survive a trip back several decades. How about Wolverine?

So Hugh Jackman's claw-slashing character is transported back to the days of bell bottoms and polyester. He goes directly to Professor X's school for mutants, now closed and run down. Its former headmaster Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) is on the bottle and shooting up compounds that help him walk again at the cost of his mutant powers. Hank, the future Beast (Hoult), is his caretaker. Both have pretty much given up on trying to improve the world for anybody. Wolverine has to convince them that their future selves depend on their current ones to do the right thing, even if it means getting back together with Erik, the future Magneto (Fassbender). He's being held in a deep, metal-free Pentagon cell that nobody can break into. But where there's a will, there's a mutant with skills.

So we meet Peter, aka Quicksilver. That should give you some idea of his ability. Blink and you'll miss him swipe your gun, your hat, and just about anything else he wants to do to you. One inventive sequence, choreographed to Jim Croce's "Time In A Bottle," makes anything you've seen in The Matrix look like amateur night.

Jackman once again has to carry a lot of weight in this film, just like he has in his own X-Men spin-off films, and he handles it just fine. And once again, I like the chemistry between McAvoy and Fassbender. I like Lawrence's shape-shifting antics, but it's nothing without those performance chops honed in the Hunger Games movies.

X-Men has always been a comic-book movie series that continues to exceed people's expectations on multiple levels. That gets harder to do with every film. But because their characters are so compelling and watchable, and because we keep finding new mutants with new abilities, this franchise is not running out of gas.

Make sure you stay all the way through the credits for a hint of what may be to come -- something new that makes us want to see more.

Time To Put On Your Big-Boy Spider Pants

Reel To Reel: The Amazing Spider-Man 2

Going Rate: Worth matinee price
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Dane DeHaan
Rated: PG-13 (but really could be a PG)
Red Flags: Action violence

Several times during this sequel to the reboot of the Spider-Man franchise, I wasn't sure if I was watching a superhero film or a tricked up episode of The Young And The Restless. Spidey's newest adventure flirts with soap-opera schmaltz, but it seems to pull up just in time to get back to being the summer actioner people are expecting.

ASM2 quickly and conveniently refreshes our memory of some key facts from the first picture, notably Peter Parker (Garfield) suddenly left in the care of his aunt and uncle. Parker's dearth of information about his father continues to gnaw at him as he tries to balance his crime-fighting alter ego with his attraction to Gwen Stacey (Stone). She's at peace with Parker's double life, but he can't seem to love her the way she needs. Well, nobody ever promised being a superhero was going to improve your dating life.

This edition gets more specific on what Oscorp -- that megalith corporation Parker's father worked for -- does to make so much money. We learn it's heavily involved in pharmaceutical research and energy production, even powering New York City's grid. For all it does, however, it can't save the life of its founding father Norman, who's wasting away from a genetic disease. He passes both the reins and his affliction to his silver-spooned, mildly creepy son Harry (DeHaan). I wonder if Harry came from a secret Oscorp project to combine the DNA of Damien Thorn and Howdy Doody.

Harry knows Peter as a childhood friend, and he knows Peter knows Spider-Man. He's got a hunch Spidey is carrying the genetic material that can cure him, if only he can get to the webslinger. He also learns the down and dirty of what Oscorp is doing in its secret labs after an accident involving a nerdy technician named Max (Foxx), an embodiment of a grown-up Steve Urkel. Let's just say power corrupts.

The first 15 minutes of this film run tight and powerful. I saw more of the wit and sly asides Spider-Man is known for, along with some mind-boggling web-slinging. Every so often, the movie riffs on a landmark CGI technique from The Matrix to slowly wind us through an over-the-top moment of superhero prowess we'd miss if we watched it at normal speed. Indeed, some shots in this film seem more paced like a hyperactive CGI kid flick. Part of me misses the old days of optical effects compositing, where all shots had be grounded in some rough reality instead of the liquid smooth computerized perfection that gets better every summer. Don't get me wrong, though. Just like Spider-Man 2, that sequel to the previous franchise starter featuring Tobey Maguire, this sequel does a lot of things right and does them with heart.

One parting note: stay through the credits to see a clip of the upcoming X-Men movie. I'm wondering if this will start a new trend in film marketing by encouraging other blockbusters to bury a stealth trailer for another event film inside the credits. Thinking about it now, I'd rather Hollywood and the cinema chains run a few trailers in a squeezed format over the end credits, similar to network television, rather than lumping 15 minutes worth of trailers before the beginning of the feature presentation. But don't count on it.

A Modestly Hateful Proposal

I have an idea for a new magazine. Yes, a magazine. Yes, even though Newsweek stopped publishing on paper only to start again. This will be a magazine like the world has never seen, but it will follow the grand tradition of great magazines with one-word titles: Time, Life, People, Money, Fortune. Now, I bring you the next great thing: Hate.

Hate magazine will tap that great untapped demographic: hateful people. Oh sure, Facebook and blogs and so much of the Internet serve this segment so well. But the time has come for a high-quality publication catering to this audience and their unique sophistication.

Hate will feature the highest quality of hateful articles, presenting hate in a crisp, unfiltered perspective. We will give no column inches to snark, mild dislike or debate. Hate will feature hate, and thus we will be brand-focused. Every month, you'll pick up a copy and read about the people, places and things we hate and why we hate them. We will track the pulse of hate, examining its ebb and flow. We'll profile haters and their favorite hates. Guest columns will let those who hate offer their hateful opinions. Of course, we'll publish letters to the editor in a regular department titled -- what else -- "Hate Mail." I'd tell you about a few of our debut issue's articles, but I hate teasing you.

Our Hate website will stay on top of fast-breaking hate and follow it to its hateful ends. You'll be able to hate with other haters as you read our hateful updates and respond with hateful comments, which you can hate with your replies in real-time.

We'll leverage our growing brand strength into television. Hate will easily find a spot on the dial, with hateful programs running around the clock, including our flagship "HateCenter."  We're hating when you are. And just maybe we'll find a spot on the radio, if we can find a niche that hasn't already been taken up by other haters. We hate getting squeezed out.

We'll sell millions of copies. We'll draw millions of viewers. We'll make millions of dollars. This won't come without competition, since haters tend to multiply. But our standards of hate will out-hate the wanna-bes, proving that we are often imitated but never equaled. Hate will become the most respected and honored brand name in the hateful world, just as ESPN is to sports and Rolls-Royce is to automobiles.

Hate will be more than a magazine. It will become a phenomenon, and in so doing, it will become an economic force. Hate will create wealth, which will create jobs and help propel our economy out of its current rut. Each new hateful position will create at least two others in turn, meaning even those who aren't hateful will benefit from trickle-down hate.

Hate and its hateful effects will confound the experts with its sheer power. But mostly, they'll hate themselves for not thinking of it first. It will have theorists and analysts hating that they can't comprehend its endless supply. Hate will transform economies like no other force.

In the end, Hate will impact our thoughts, our lives, our societies and our leaders. Hate will succeed where they have failed or fallen short. Through Hate, we will become a world bonded on hate, not divided by politics, religion, nationality, or anything else. And when we look back on the days before Hate, we will wonder how we survived before we hated so efficiently or so well.

Laird Christopher In Williamsburg

Your humble servant -- or Laird Christopher Francis Leslie of Edinburgh, if you will -- returns to one of his favourite balls:  The George Washington Ball, presented by the Williamsburg Heritage Dancers in Williamsburg, Virginia.  Here are some of his most memorable recollections of a glorious evening.

A FEW ADJUSTMENTS

For this ball, I have a brand new cocked hat -- gold trim with a gold cockade.  I have a brand new jabot, purchased just this morning in the historic shops.  Instead of my red satin balderic, I wear my Scottish Royal Stewart tartan with my clan pins and a brooch to fasten it.  I think it looks much better than the last time.  It certainly doesn't feel any heavier, and in the cold of the late winter, I do not feel excessive warmth.

COME JOIN US

Once again, I journey to the rehearsal session, where we walk through some 20 dances on the program in 2 1/2 hours.  Venturing into the room, I don't know a soul.  For a moment, I remember what it was like to be the outsider.  But I soon meet a lady, Mary, who is there alone, and we strike up a conversation.  She will be the first of several ladies who will help brighten my evening with their kindness and encouragement.

During the rehearsals, the group goes through a dance that the callers indicate you shouldn't try if you don't know it.

"We just want to practice," one of the explains as the caller questioned why four of us were off to our side.  "We don't want to ruin it for anybody else."

We walk through the steps on our own, messing up without fear of reprisal, but also realizing that the dance is too complicated to walk through in just a small set of four, where we need other couples on either side of us to help guide our steps for some of the complicated square weaving figures that involve other couples.

We would have just stood and watched the rest of the dance, but several in the other long sets then invite us to join them, so that we could dance and learn from one another.  We make it through with the help of the kindness of the experienced, who did not want to see us left out.

A LONG JOURNEY INTO HISTORY

I told several people I was "all in," not content to sit out any dances if I could help it, coming all the way from Tucson, Arizona.

"You came all the way for this?" people reply, jaws dropping.

"Yes," I nod.  "I don't get to do much Colonial dancing in Tucson.  I dance Scottish, which is great cross-training.  But as for English, it's just not there.  And it's not there with everybody dressed up as beautifully as they do here."

With that in mind, I gather the others went a step further.  It's important to find a good dancing group, one that will welcome newcomers.

"Some can be cliquish," one gentleman tells me.  I've heard of others where the amateurs and inexperienced are confined to their own set, the dancing equivalent of eating at the kiddie table.  Not here.  Not now.  And I pray, not ever.

ALREADY THERE

Midway through the practice session, a lady joins us in her Colonial day dress, apron, and mob cap, stepping right out of the pages of time.

"I just got off work," she explains to me, having scurried over from her interpreter role at Colonial Williamsburg.

"You're doing what I want to do eventually," I tell her, referring to a planned future chapter of my life: leaving the news business, becoming a CW interpreter, and joining a historic dance troupe.

GOING THROUGH THE MOTIONS

The minuet is always the first dance of the evening, in history and in historical re-creation.  Last time, I faked my way through one.  This time, I have a rough idea of the steps.  That is enough for me to quickly seek out a lady, bow, and lead her to one of the lines.

Unlike last time, whereas I stood in the back, a long way away from those in prime view, I am second in line in the middle row of dancers, meaning I'd better get this right, or at least look like I was.

A bow to "the presence," a bow to my lady, and we are off and minueting, in small steps around each other, three-quarter time, alternating holding left and right hands in a Z-formation.  I know I'm supposed to be stepping right-left-right, left-right-left, but my focus is shifting from footwork to figures.  One thing I have learned from two years of Scottish Country Dancing:  If I get the patterns right, nobody will mind if my footwork is wrong.

I have sympathy for my Colonial ancestors who danced at a ball many times before.  They have to measure up and dance perfectly, or else it is a mark upon their character.  Right now, I can taste their anxiety.

"Other hand," my lady quietly corrects me during a turn.

I have to wonder what people thought of those aristocratic gentlemen who couldn't dance a proper minuet.  Even here in Virginia, where people loved to dance, it's only logical to expect that some people's feet would not measure up to the desires of their heart.  Fortunately, I am with a good group, and my minuet is at least serviceable and elegant if not perfect.

"We honour the presence," she says, cueing me to another bow towards the front before we bow to one another once again.

I thank my lady with another bow and turn to see half the crowded room -- perhaps two dozen at least -- is standing and watching us, some with cell-phone cameras in hand.  I pass the first major test of the evening.

"Dancing a minuet in Williamsburg," I smile.  "Check that box."  Again.



ILLUSIONS OF ROYALTY

His Regalness, sharing a dance
with two beautiful ladies
(Source: Facebook/Williamsburg
Heritage Dancers)

He is the most period-correct in the room:  White ponytail wig, snow-white face powder, blue satin jacket and breeches, brooches and medallions, and rings on his gloved fingers.

I cannot help but compliment him on his attire between dances.  "I am glad to see that the French are with us!"

He recoils.  "The French?  Where are they?  I am King George The Third!"

He displays his regal medallion of England.  All the air escapes my body and I quickly fall into as low and courtly a bow as I can muster.

"My apologies, Your Majesty."  Under protocol, our eyes shouldn't even meet.  "All the portraits I have seen show you wearing gold instead of blue!"

Embarrased, I back away, not thinking it awkward that His Majesty would somehow be in Williamsb
urg, rife with rumours of revolution.  The ballroom is the great equalizer, where rank is set aside so that all might delight in diversion.  Yet that is little insurance for the awkward moment.

I explain to a lady how I might have just hurled Virginia closer to revolution more expediently than Lord Governor Dunmore.

"Oh that's not The King," she explains.  "That's Lord Foppington."

"Really?"

"Yes, Lord Foppington."  He apparently only thinks he's royalty, the classic delusion of comic history, of those macaronis long before Chef Boy-Ar-Dee with their egregious frilliness, buttons and bows.  Only in the 18th Century does gentlemens' fashion approach the beauty of the ladies.  Excess, however, is not elusive.




FOLLOW YOU, FOLLOW ME

Great Scottish dancing is great teamwork, as I have learned.  And such is true for English.  When the invitation for "The Punch Bowl" came forth, I went to sit down without regret, not knowing the dance and not wanting to ruin it for others by attempting a caper of advanced difficulty.

One lady would not have that.

"Would you like to dance with me?" she asks.  In the real 18th Century, ladies did not ask gentlemen to dance, but this is one item of protocol happily dispensed of for the enjoyment and benefit of all -- or perhaps she saw through my eyes into my heart.

"My Lady," I say, "I do not know this dance, and I'm told not to try it on the floor."

She waves off my apprehensions.  "How can you learn it if you don't get to try it?  I can lead you."

And she does.  The beauty of "The Punch Bowl" is that it's highly symmetrical, meaning I can follow my partner, like looking into a mirror, and walk through the moves like I know them, provided I can react quickly enough to the changes.  She knows the dance well enough to lead your humble servant strongly.

"You're doing beautifully!" she cries mid-way through, even as I have made a quick wrong turn here and there.  Nobody in the set minds.  We are at the end, more adept for those adapting.  It ends with the two of us at the bottom of the lines, bowing and curtsying to each other right in front of another person's cell phone camera.

"HUZZAH!  HUZZAH!  Thank you, My Lady!  Thank you for Blessing me with this dance!  Thank you for leading me!"

My words can scarcely contain my gratitude.

A short time later, I return the favour for another lady in a three-couple set during "Trip To Tunbridge," a dance she does not know, but one I can lead her through.

"Do not fret," I tell her.  "I believe in you.  We will get through this.  It's not a mistake, it's a variation!"

The dance is filled with tricky diagonal moves of turning one corner than another.  We watch, wait, dance and try to learn.  This is where I realize I have danced this one before, several years ago at that Playford Ball in Nashville.  Now the steps and the feel of it are coming back.

"Lead down," I say, softly calling to her as we move about.  "Lead up, diagonal, diagonal, to your own side..."

Before we know it, the dance is over, and she has danced it like a champion.  She reaches out and hugs me before I can bow in appreciation.

Minutes later, I lead another lady through a dance with a "dolphin hey," a fancy term for a figure where a lady follows a gentleman around the other two dancers in the set in a weaving pattern.  Normally, the two leading the figure are supposed to change who's in front as we work our way around.  But I quietly simplify things for her, content to let her follow me.  It doesn't ruin anything about the dance for the others, and it looks elegant all the same.

"I believe in you," I tell her, just as I told the other lady, and other ladies throughout this evening who are unsure of themselves and their abilities.

We dance through it with nary an error, and she is abundantly grateful in the closing honours.

"Thank you!"

"Thank you, My Lady!"



ONE GOOD TURN...

After rolling though 21 dances with 21 partners -- plus at least a half -dozen more if one counts the circle mixer -- the final waltz arrives.

I seek out a partner, and I find one in an older lady.

"I was hoping you would ask me for a waltz," she replies brightly as we stroll back onto the floor.

I can't imagine why she might pine for your humble servant.  I give my standard advisory.  "I'm not much of a waltzer, but I am a two-stepper."

We step a few beats from side to side before I continue my thought.  "However, My Lady, I can lead you in a waltz-minuet, which is like a country dance we make up on the fly, where I call the steps and you follow."

In a beat, we are turning and siding to each other, circling around each other in an improvised celebration.  I have danced it many times with many ladies, and it has never failed to uplift.

"It's like a waltz tango!" she proclaims.

With a final bow and curtsy, the ball is suddenly over.  Months of anticipation, like the light at the end of a tunnel, suddenly over.  I have a few more moments to chat with newfound friends, some who did not know I had come all the way from Arizona to pursue my dearest diversion.

All I can think about is how tremendously blessed I feel at this moment: having the opportunity to dance with so many ladies, without sitting out a single dance.  I have not felt so much warmth since my very first 18th Century Ball.

"GOD Bless You!" I keep telling ladies and gentlemen as I bid them farewell.

Laird Christopher with a Lady of the
Jane Austen Society, the next day
(Source: Facebook/Virginia Lee)

A bonus day of dancing will follow tomorrow, as part of a Jane Austen Society meeting at a small women's club up the road, enough to satisfy any remnant afterglow that lasts through the night.

People can ask me why I love this so much.  I tell them it's beautiful, it's uplifting, and it brought me back to GOD.  Few things in this world bring me joy, and this is one of them.  I gather I some recessed Virginia genes somehow made it into me, because I don't know any relatives of mine who have ever enjoyed this.

Thinking about it, I feel the overwhelming presence of GOD in this ballroom tonight, and I realize what we've just done is what GOD calls us all to do.  We're to lift up and encourage others -- keep them from going astray and give encouragement to keep them on the path, not cutting them out, but bringing them in.  Mistakes will happen, but we just continue on.  Everybody gets to dance in this ballroom of life, with OUR HEAVENLY CALLER there to show us the way.

What happens in the ballroom should be happening to you! Find out more about the Williamsburg Heritage Dancers here.

Post by Christopher Francis.

Why Arizona's SB 1062 Deserves Failure

Nearly a year ago, I went on the record explaining why I thought government should ban gay marriage. But when the question is whether governments should allow people to deny services to homosexuals on the basis of religious belief -- and Arizona's SB 1062 is aimed in that direction -- we go off into a dangerous void.

Let's start with the bill itself [PDF]. It broadens an existing religious freedom law to include businesses, along with individuals and religious institutions. It does not specifically mention Christianity, or any specific religion. Neither does it mention homosexuality. Here's where the problems begin: this bill was clearly a response to situations outside of Arizona where people who provide services to weddings, such as bakers and photographers, ran into legal trouble because they refused to provide their services to same-sex weddings on religious principles. But this bill is not tailored that narrowly, and if it were, chances are it would not survive a court challenge, just as many states' gay-marriage bans are not surviving court challenges now.

With a bill so broad, it could potentially apply to situations its authors never intended. Does a hotel have a right to refuse a room to a gay couple, married or not, because the owner considers such conduct sinful? In that case, have the owners refused a single-but-unmarried couple because the owner disapproves of sex outside marriage? It gets worse: could some Christians legally refuse to do business with Mormons if they think the LDS is a cult? Going ad nauseum, could any business refuse to provide any service for anybody simply on the grounds that it violates their religion?

Here's another problem: the bill doesn't contain any language to test whether somebody objecting on religious grounds is actually a faithful practitioner as opposed to being somebody who just claims they believe in something. From the language of the bill:

"Exercise of religion" means the PRACTICE OR OBSERVANCE OF RELIGION, INCLUDING THE ability to act or refusal to act in a manner substantially motivated by a religious belief, whether or not the exercise is compulsory or central to a larger system of religious belief.

In other words, this bill says practicing religion is being religious -- a recursive definition that doesn't even require you to belong to any organized faith.

Laws live and die by loopholes, and this bill has doozies. In order to make it legally non-discriminatory, it's legally vague. Vague laws get challenged in court, leaving judges to deal with the legal heartburn of throwing out flawed legislation and complaints from groups who scream bloody murder about activist gavel jockeys.

Now let's look at the Christian perspective. First, we have to see what GOD actually says about doing business with homosexuals. As I found last year, the Bible references homosexuality nine times, but none of those references deals with rendering goods and services to gay people. So GOD is not telling us to avoid doing so.

Furthermore, we get insight from Mark 2:15-17 (NIV):

While JESUS was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with HIM and HIS disciples, for there were many who followed HIM. When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked HIS disciples: “Why does HE eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

On hearing this, JESUS said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

Here we learn JESUS knew HIS mission meant trying to minister to sinners rather than avoiding them. GOD doesn't tell us to avoid sinners completely, although 1 Corinthians 15:33-34 says: "Do not be misled: 'Bad company corrupts good character.' Come back to your senses as you ought, and stop sinning; for there are some who are ignorant of GOD — I say this to your shame." However, the context of these verses makes them more of a warning for people to stop hanging around people who are leading them into consistent, definable sin rather than just eating with sinners.

Some of you are asking, "Aren't we complicit in sin if we help others celebrate a sinful union?" Fair question. You can point to James 4:17 (NIV), which says: "If anyone, then, knows the good they ought to do and doesn't do it, it is sin for them." But, again, the context of the verse talks about those who put off submitting themselves to GOD, as earlier verses in this chapter implore us to do -- not moral dilemmas on whether something is a sin or not. And remember, we haven't even established that serving gays or gay couples is a definable sin in the first place!

With so much left unspoken in GOD'S Word and the wording of the bill, SB 1062 creates more problems than it solves. A lot of you will still have problems offering goods or services to same-sex couples, no matter what the law or the Bible says. You will agonize about it, even if the Bible doesn't say it's a sin. Your conscience will still bother you because you just can't see the perfect answer.  Remember, GOD doesn't expect us to live perfectly, just consistently. And when we confess to GOD we can't do it perfectly, that we need a SAVIOR, that we need forgiveness and guidance and wisdom for the things we're not sure about, GOD will give us all of those things.