Fantastical Andrew Fox

I'll bet James Caan never chaperoned a bowling party for 23 little kids...

Now that I’m a middle-aged guy with a professional job and family responsibilities, I very rarely willing enter a situation involving physical peril (my rollerblading days, for example, are far, far behind me). But this past Saturday, I found my pulse racing, my adrenaline pumping, my internal alarm Klaxon screaming like a banshee with a burning tail, and my trusty robot companion blaring “DAN-GER! DAN-GER! DAN-GER!”

What’s more terrifying than a Friday the Thirteenth marathon, more hair-raising than participating in a Mexican cliff-diving competition? How about… hosting a bowling party for twenty-three kids under the age of nine?

Since we’ve been up in Northern Virginia, Dara and I have been throwing the boys their birthday parties at one of a couple of local Burger Kings with indoor playlands. The parties have been reasonably pleasant affairs for involved; the kids get to get their ya-yas out by crawling through the tunnels and pitching themselves down the slides, and the parents can hang out with their BK ice coffees and chat, keeping only half an eye on the kids. I like those parties. I look forward to them.

The car-nage of Death Race 2000 can't compare with the catastrophic mayhem in my mind's eye at Bowl America

But this year, Asher, my middle son, decided a Burger King party was no longer satisfactory. He wanted Something Different. Now, mind you, Something Different doesn’t come cheap. Back in New Orleans, Februarys are fairly mild, so parents can make do with renting a bounce house for the backyard and inviting over twenty kids. In Virginia, however, the February climate isn’t so accommodating. Renting an indoor House-of-Bounce bounce house palace for a party runs over five hundred bucks when you include the food and drinks. Doing a party at Chuck-E-Cheese isn’t much less expensive.

So I came up with the idea of doing a bowling party. The boys have been nagging me to take them bowling for months. A big change in bowling for kids since I was a youngster is that nowadays, managers of bowling alleys are willing to block gutters for young bowlers. This lets the kids have way more fun. When I was a kid, being taken to the bowling alley by my summer camp counselors was an occasion for withering humiliation, as I launched ball after ball into the gutters. In today’s culture of Self-Esteem, however, such an outcome is simply not allowable. But the allowances made nowadays bode well for bowling’s future as a recreational pastime. Kids that can do it and feel good about themselves will probably grow up to become adult bowlers (unlike me, for instance).

Bowl America advertised bowling parties that included ninety minutes of bowling, followed by pizza, soda, ice cream, and tokens for video games. Their prices were reasonable, so I had Dara sign us up. Bowl America even provided invitations for Asher to pass out to his friends. We brought our own birthday cake.

I don’t know what I pictured; I guess I figured that the bowling alley staff would set all the kids up and supervise their games. We were assigned just one staff member to work with us, however. A very nice, accommodating young lady who was quickly Overtaken By Events.

Things didn’t start out too badly, when it was just a few guests and my three kids. We got bowling shoes for everyone, and Judah, my youngest, thought the red and blue shoes were the cat’s meow. My liaison set the five or six boys up on a pair of adjacent alleys and blocked the gutters on both. We had a total of four lanes set aside for our party. I was able to get the kids to take turns, with some difficulty, I’ll admit, but they listened. At first. Of course, some of the bowling was painful to watch. I’m talking balls that Dara and I made bets on as to whether or not they would finally reach the pins. I suspect that the lanes were very slightly angled downward, because only gravity could have caused those balls to keep meandering toward the pins after their momentum was entirely spent. But hey! Every ball a kid tossed knocked down at least one pin. So what if a kid sometimes tossed himself down the lane along with the ball?

The birthday boy, looking suspiciously innocent... is that pizza sauce or BLOOD around his mouth?

Then things began getting Out Of Control. One of the lanes consistently refused to reset on its own, so I was constantly having to run to the front desk to grab some help, leaving the kids temporarily on their own. More kids started arriving in a big rush. I had to direct parents where to go to get their kids into bowling shoes. Plus, I had to corral staff to sign the new kids onto the scoring machines and divide them between our four lanes.

In the meantime, the kids were Devising Their Own Games. That sort of thing is just fine at a Burger King playland, where the opportunities for mayhem are minimal. It’s another matter entirely when each child is wielding a spherical hunk of plastic weighing between eight and twelve pounds. I have to give kudos to the parents. They spontaneously organized themselves into supervisory squads that kept the most dangerous behaviors at bay. If just a few more parents had decided to drop their kids off at the party and head for a local bar for a couple of hours, I would have been S-C-R-E-W-E-D.

Even with the help of numerous parents, however, the bowling party rapidly devolved into Barely Safe Chaos. Balls were dropped. Many balls, which miraculously missed landing on many, many little toes. Kids launched themselves head-first down the lanes. Taking turns was quickly abandoned. When kids saw a freestanding set of pins, they ran to chuck their ball, even if the pins stood at the end of another set of kids’ lane. A neat thing the bowling alley had for the littlest kids to use was a wire ramp which allowed a small child to set his or her ball into its top, then push the ball down the ramp so it got up a good head of steam. My youngest, Judah, all of five years old, actually bowled a strike using one of those ramps. Unfortunately, we only had one ramp to service all four lanes. Most of the kids adored the ramp, so of course the ramp became the object of much competitive attention. My heart almost flew out my mouth several times as I saw various small children toting a bowling ball in one hand and dragging that ramp across the alleys with the other.

The little brother, about to bash someone's brains in...

Balls clanged into the reset sweepers as kids flung their balls before pins could be reset. This necessitated staff braving the hazardous spaces between the children and the pins to retrieve the balls. The birthday boy, either out of an overabundance of zeal or mischievousness, tossed his ball onto a lane as an unwary staff person trooped up the lane to grab a stranded ball, narrowly missing the man’s feet.

Amazingly, incredibly, almost unbelievably, no bones were broken, and no blood was shed (although I may have surrendered several birthdays of my own in years lost to fright). The children all had a marvelous time and said it was one of the best parties ever. However, rarely in my life have I been so relieved as when the pizza and ice cream arrived, and the kids put their bowling balls down.