Well, my little jaunt down memory lane continues this week with a trip to Skate Way roller skating rink (forever in my heart known as the Skate Lodge) tonight. I'll be taking the girls to attend Kelly's very first school skating party -- the first of many, I'm sure.
As a pre-teen, I spent more than a few evenings rolling around that rink on my white skates with the sparkly blue wheels. As I teenager, I spent more than a few nights with my skates tied together and slung over my shoulder as I roamed the streets with my friends or snuck off with a boyfriend while my mom thought I was skating. It was the perfect cover -- parents would drop you off, you'd go in the crowded lobby...wait for the parents to leave and voila -- you had three or four hours to yourself and $5 in skating money. That money usually went up in smoke, literally, as I'd use it to buy a couple of packs of Newports (yes, you could get a couple of packs, a few even, with $5 back then).
It was all good until the night my friend's mom who went shopping in the area after dropping us off at the Skate Lodge spotted us at Putt-Putt which was several blocks from the Skate Lodge. After that, our parents waited outside to make sure we actually paid our money and went in.
I'm not sure it was any better that we stayed inside -- certainly, we inhaled more smoke, met more boys, and we still didn't do any skating.
A few years ago, the Skate Lodge was bought by a new owner who renamed it. He also made the rink smaller and used the extra space to add a steakhouse restaurant in the front and a sports bar in the back.
It's not the same, and, yet, pieces of the old Skate Lodge exist. I have no doubt the rental skates are the same skates they were renting in 1975 and the yellow and orange booths are the same ones I and all my friends squeezed into in 1987. And the snack bar menu still offers pepperoni balls and soft pretzels and nachos and cheese.
Certainly, Skate Way doesn't figure into teen's lives the way it did when I was young. Today's kids "meet" and chat online and they e-mail and text-message and IM each other endlessly.
I'll bet they don't even know how to shoot-the-duck or skate backwards with their hands in their boyfriend's back pockets.
But, then, as the mother of two daughters, I should be thankful for that.