Circus Pizza

By Bob
May 19, 1998

For more than six years, Bonnie and I helped a single mother raise her two daughters - Sabrina from age seven on, and Ana from birth on. In addition to hundreds of other visits and overnight outings, every Tuesday night, I'd take our goddaughters out for dinner, and every Friday night, they'd stay overnight at our house until Saturday at noon.

One of their favorite things to do was to go to Circus Pizza. Circus Pizza was one of those places that had lots of manual and electronic games, a "band" of robotic animals that played rock music, and a dining area where you could buy pizza, pop, and ice cream.

The fact of the matter is that their pizza was very expensive and was really pretty horrible. It had a crust like a saltine cracker, a lot of tomato sauce, a few pepperonis and hardly any cheese. Nevertheless, Ana and Sabrina loved going to Circus Pizza, so that's where we went at least two or three times a month, often bringing a few of their cousins and/or friends with us.

We'd order our pizza, then the two of them would play some of the games, then we'd sit down and eat the pizza while watching the robot band play a few songs. Sometimes, Ana would toddle up to the edge of the stage and dance along with the music, grinning back at me as I watched her from our table. Sometimes, I'd join her and we'd do a little dance together, oblivious to the other people in the dining area.

After eating, I'd let them each play a few more games before we'd head off for the Salvation Army store or K-Mart to do some "smart shopping".

It was during one of our Circus Pizza outings that Sabrina was drawn to the claw machine for the first time. The claw machine was a little glass booth, filled with brightly colored stuffed animals, with a mechanical claw that dangled from a couple of thin wires in a corner of the booth. After you put in your tokens, you got one chance to maneuver that claw to try to pick up one of the stuffed animals and drop it into the bin area where you could reach in and get it. In all of our visits to Circus Pizza, I had seen a lot of kids lose a lot of money on that game. It was just too difficult to get a prize, since for one thing, the stuffed animals were packed into the booth pretty tightly. For another thing, you had to push buttons to move the claw first from front to back, then from left to right, then you had to push another button to make it go down and try to grab a toy. In addition, the claw itself hung about two feet above the toys, making it really hard to see exactly where it was going to end up when it dropped. As if all that wasn't enough to discourage anyone from trying it, the claw itself was made up of only three little "fingers", and they seemed to have a habit of not closing all the way onto whatever they grabbed.

It took two tokens (fifty cents) to play the claw machine. Sabrina decided that she wanted to try it. I tried to explain to her that it was designed to cheat her, but she insisted, so I gave her the tokens. Of course, she failed miserably, not even getting the fingers of the claw around a stuffed animal. Undeterred, she asked me if she could try again. Another fifty cents. Another twenty seconds. Another disappointment.

This went on for several visits to Circus Pizza. Sabrina would try the claw machine a couple times each visit, each time with the same result. Sabrina didn't care. She just loved playing the claw machine. She didn't have to win anything to have fun playing it.

One day, however, she managed to win a stuffed animal. She was really excited and happy. And hooked. From that point on, Sabrina didn't want to play anything at Circus Pizza except the claw machine. I'd give her a bunch of tokens and let her play, while I'd take little Ana around to the other games. The funny thing is, Sabrina got good at the claw machine. I mean really, really good at it. If I gave her enough tokens to play it 7 times, she'd win 6 stuffed animals. She became a claw machine consultant, teaching other kids how to tell which stuffed animal was ripe for being grabbed; teaching them how to maneuver the claw itself. Teaching them how to beat the machine. Other kids started giving her their tokens, so that she could win prizes for them, which she was more than happy to do. Sabrina quickly became the claw machine's worst nightmare.

Ana, on the other hand, really liked a game called "Skee-Ball." Skee-Ball consisted of a slanted wooden ramp, about 25 feet long, like a small bowling lane, leading up to a raised series of circular walls in the shape of a large target. The point of the game was to roll a solid wooden ball, about the size of a small softball, up the ramp, hard enough and accurately enough to make it jump up into one of the circular rings. The center ring was worth the most points. Depending on how many points you earned by rolling 10 wooden balls, between 1 and 5 little tickets would pop out of the game. After you had collected three or more tickets, you could take them to the main desk and exchange them for prizes, like a rubber eraser for 3 tickets, a magnifying glass for 5 tickets, some crayons for 15 tickets, or even a radio for 1000 tickets.

Skee-Ball became Ana's favorite game at Circus Pizza when she was barely old enough to hold one of the wooden balls. She would grip the ball with both tiny hands and fling it toward the ramp, often throwing it into an adjacent lane, where I would quickly retrieve it and apologize to the people who were playing next to us. Even when she got it into her own lane, many times, the ball would go about half-way up and come rolling back to her. Other times, she'd roll it just hard enough to make it to the end of the ramp, where it would drop into the no-points moat that separated the ramp from the circular walls. Ana didn't care. She just loved playing Skee-Ball. She didn't have to win anything to have fun playing it.

As she got older and stronger, Ana honed her Skee-Ball skills. She learned that, instead of trying to roll the ball precisely down the center of the lane toward the center hole, she could throw it hard enough at an angle to bounce it off the side wall of the lane up into the safety net over the circular walls, and right into the center hole. She started winning the maximum number of tickets almost every time she played. Each time a little kid near us would throw a wooden ball into our lane, she'd turn and look at me, grinning knowingly, as if to say, "that was me a couple years ago." Each time we'd go to Circus Pizza, she'd leave with three or four prizes that she had won by playing Skee-Ball.

As for me, I don't remember ever playing any of the games at Circus Pizza. For me, the fun was in watching Ana ride the tiny one-person electric train engine around and around the same little 12-foot circular track, blowing its horn and grinning from ear to ear. And watching Sabrina triumphantly holding the armloads of stuffed animals that she had won in the claw machine. And watching Ana grow up at the Skee-Ball game. And spending time with my two goddaughters as we shared what was probably the worst pizza I've ever eaten.