Author: Jenny

Well, today is Emily’s birthday.  Her 31st to be exact.  And since last year was the time for me to jubilantly celebrate us once again having the same beginning number to our ages, this year I thought I’d just share a fun birthday memory.  Because after all, dammit, she’ll always be younger than me.  And now, she is also irritatingly skinnier.

But anyhoo.

Emily’s birthday would often coincide with the opening weekend of our favorite amusement park, Kings Island, which was about an hour away.  (Since Emily is a “fun mom” she still often goes there with her kids in the summer.  Since I am NOT, my kids have never been there, and they can go when they are old enough to walk around the place by themselves.  Or, when Emily feels sorry enough for them to take them. )  We loooved Kings Island, and on Emily’s birthday I was often the lucky Chosen Friend who got to accompany her.  So I have some really good memories of that place that involve her, and specifically two rides, a roller coaster called “the Racer”  and  a ride which defies description called “Skylab”.

The Racer was a super-rad WOODEN roller coaster that had two tracks with two trains “racing” against each other.  One went backwards and one forwards.  (If you ever saw the “Brady Bunch” episode where they went to Kings Island [and SHAME SHAME SHAME on you if you haven’t!!!] this is the roller coaster they rode and looked terrified on.) As I recall, they were both really fun, if you like being shaken to death at 60 mph.  We LOVED them.  The backwards one literally made me feel like I wanted to die, but in a good way.  If that’s possible.  Because the Racer was kind of an old stand-by, and had two trains running at once, sometimes the lines wouldn’t be too long and we’d ride it over and over again as many times as our sturdy little pubescent bodies could take it!

As awesome as the Racer was, our true amusement park ride love was the Skylab.  May it rest in peace.  I searched ye olde internetz high and low for a good pic of the Skylab, but all I could come up with was this lovely photo of that hallowed ride at night time, which I ripped off some guy’s You Tube (WHICH, I might add, was made up of STILL PICTURES and BROCHURE pages set to music of his “solo trip” to Kings Island in 1987.  I am happy Emmy and I never ran into him when we were there.  EEP!!)

So this is the hallowed SkyLab.  Basically a giant circle full of interconnected (rainbow-colored) cars that starts out flat and raises up completely perpendicular to the ground while spinning at warp speed.  You rode two to a car, so the person in front was literally smashed against the person in back like twins in the womb.  You couldn’t tell where one person started and the other ended.  Since it was always about 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit on any given day at Kings Island, when the Skylab finally spun to a stop, you were still adhered together by sweat once the G-forces let up.  And it. was. AWESOME!  This was the other ride Em and I rode as many times as possible, and my heart goes “pitter patter” when I think of it.  (Although looking at that photo, my stomach lurches. How on earth did we DO that stuff over and over??  And how did we manage to get our cheekbones to slide back into place after the Skylab spun them out to the tops of our ears?)

I loved going to Kings Island with Emily on her birthday, but since I am now Old and No Fun At All, I think we need to come up with a new tradition to celebrate!  What’s the 30’s-mom equivalent of roller coasters and deathly-fast spinning wheels?  A double espresso and one of those massage chairs at the mall?  Help me out with ideas for a new tradition!

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Cousin!  Here’s to many more decades of cousin fun.  I love you!