Steppin' Out in Public

Today I went to Elitch Gardens, the major amusement park in Denver. It's their closing weekend, and my friend had some "half-off" passes. We figured that between it being a Sunday, there being a Broncos game just a few blocks away, and today's high temperature being about 55 degrees, it wouldn't be very crowded -- even with the two haunted houses on site.

We were right. We went from ride to ride, doing basically everything in the park we wanted to without waiting more than 10 minutes for anything. In fact, we were able to pack in the rides so close together that we basically had to stop for a break mid-afternoon. A little too much lurching around without the needed rest periods of waiting in line had made us all just a little queasy.

As I said, we got to do basically every ride in the park, even though we were only there about four hours. We thought about staying for the haunted houses that opened up in the evening, but they were the one thing that actually did have a long line. And by that point, the temperature had dropped at least 10 degrees and it was just starting to rain. (By the time I'm writing this, it's become snow.) Enough was enough -- we figured we'd more than gotten our money's worth already. It was actually quite a great day at the amusement park.

There was one other highlight of the afternoon. We were walking by one of the video arcades at one point, and there was an "In the Groove 2" dance machine right up front. One of the three friends I was with had seen me "stepping" before, while the other two had not. She insisted on a performance, and put up the 75 cents to make it happen.

It was actually a little more than a year ago that I played any of the DDR games for the first time. But until today, I'd never done it in public at one of the actual arcade machines. But hey -- it wasn't my dollar, so I figured "what the hell." And so my first public DDR-ing came to pass.

It turns out that you have to have your timing really damn precise on the actual arcade models to score well. I made it through my first couple songs with nearly full combos, only missing a step or two, but I was getting a whole lot of "greats" and "perfects" and not enough of the arcade-exclusive "marvelouses." (Or whatever the In the Groove equivalent was. I can't remember at the moment.) Consequently, my 200+ combo performance in one song only rated a "B." And the other two songs weren't even that high. Still, I gather no "baggy-panted super-dance freaks" had been to the machine lately, because I got to put my name in afterward. The whole thing managed to draw about a dozen random strangers for an audience, too.

A relatively useless skill, put to the tiniest of uses. Good times.