Rollerskating and Aerosmith

Growing up, if you wanted an AWESOME birthday party, you had it at Funway. Or maybe Pizza Hut, but Funway was a better choice.

This is from my friend Sarah's birthday. It hung on the bulletin board at Funway for probably 10 years.

Funway provided pre-teens of the far-west Chicago suburbs with all recreation they could possibly want: video games, bumper boats, batting cages, and the most popular of all activities: rollerskating.

I did my share of skating in my formative years and I loved it. I wasn’t particularly good, I couldn’t do turns or skate backwards (I always HATED when the DJ decide it was backward skate time. Backward skate meant nacho time for me), but I could stay on my feet and generally avoided embarrassing myself.

I hadn’t been on skates since the last day of 8^th grade, when kids with good grades got to go to Funway, while everyone else finished up their missing work. That all changed when, while doing my student teaching, we decided to take the kids on a trip to Skateland. (Anchorage’s answer to suburban Chicago’s Funway). I didn’t plan on skating, since it had been 10+ years since I’d been on skates, I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of my students, and I didn’t have health insurance, but after some begging and pleading from my students, I begrudgingly laced up some roller skates. Turns out, I can still do it. (Thank goodness, because a broken bone would have been really expensive…)

I was pleased to see all my students on roller SKATES not roller BLADES. In fact, I don’t even think Skateland offers roller blades. I was even more pleased to see that my kids were REALLY good at it. They could do tricks and spins and skate backwards (which is still impossible for me). I always kind of feared that rollerskating would become a dying art, left to roller derby girls and former roller disco fans. But there’s a whole new generation of roller skaters hanging out at the roller rink on Friday nights trying to get the object of their desire to couple skate with them, so all must be right with the world.

Keeping with the era, this week's hot jam is Don't Want to Miss a Thing by Aerosmith. Picture it, it’s 1999, you’re skating around in overalls and an Adidas/Old Navy t-shirt, and you hear the DJ say in his smooth DJ voice, “Alright folks, this skate is for couples and trios only.” Cue those fateful first chords of Don’t Want to Miss a Thing. You think, “Is he going to ask me to skate with him? Oh my gosh, I would totally die if he did.” No, he’s probably not. (Middle school boys are generally not known for brazenness with the opposite sex) So you grab two girl friends and skate around pretending you don’t care that you don’t have a boy to skate with. Or, if you're a more sensitive young lady, you go cry in the bathroom. Regardless of your sensitivity levels, Don't Want to Miss a Thing is a hot jam. Because couple skating to Mambo No. 5 just isn't as romantic.