This is a true story and it happened very recently, in fact a week before Good Friday, during Lutheran's Night Out. We had an hour and a half wait for a table at the fish fry, so we wandered toward the sound of big band music to discover a fundraiser in process, complete with a live band. However, there is only so long you can stand there listening to music for free at the entrance to a $60/couple fundraiser before you start to feel guilty and the people taking the money start giving you dirty looks, so we hung out in the hallway by the coat rack. There were nine of us, two-thirds with a Y chromosome but oddly it was the three of us females who ended up wandering into the arcade to look at the pinball machines and video games. Then we spotted the thing I always call the Claw Machine, but Richard Bonomo tells me it is actually called the Crane Game. Being girls, we were immediately attracted to the thing full of plushy toys.
"I never win at those," said A-Fooze, so I told them a story from when the world was young, and I was in high school. One day I was at a bowling alley with a guy we all called Caveman Daveman for reasons I have long since forgotten, and I spotted a plushy pink cockatoo in the Crane Game. I said something along the lines of, "Oh Dave, look look look! It's SO cute!!" and he was immediately in Caveman Mode: "I will catch prey for pretty girl! Ugh!" After wasting more than a dozen quarters on it, he gave up in disgust, handed me a quarter, and said, "YOU try it!" Whereupon I immediately grabbed the cockatoo with the claw. (To this day, I still have the cockatoo, but I couldn't tell you what happened to Caveman Daveman.)
"So," I concluded, "it can be done." My speech encouraged A-Fooze to waste two whole quarters (that's inflation for you) on one attempt, which was entirely fruitless. Then Anna Banana II, who had never tried a Crane Game before, decided to try her hand at it. To our delight, she grabbed a green-and-yellow dinosaur and picked it right up!... but then it fell out of the claw. A-Fooze was so infuriated that she immediately put another 50 cents in the machine, moved the claw over the dinosaur, and picked it up. Not only did she get it, but a plushy fish stuck to it so she actually got two stuffed animals!!!! She said, "I feel like I've taken vengeance on every crane game that I ever lost money to!" She gave Anna Banana II the dinosaur she had been so unfairly robbed of and kept the fish for herself. We were cheering so loudly that the menfolk raced into the arcade to find out what had happened, and we told them how A-Fooze had defeated the evil Crane Game and gotten Anna Banana II back the plushy toy she had so unjustly lost.
Famous Hat
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
So much plush. We have never had any luck with the claw.
Post a Comment