Bowling and the Brauhaus

Last night I bowled for the first time in forever. And even though I was wildly inconsistent and ended up with a whopping total score of 79 for the first game and 78 for the second, I did hit two strikes and a spare.

We played at the decidedly old-school Lincoln Square Lanes, where scoring is still done by hand and you might be missing a pin or two when the lane gets reset each time. It had the ambiance of a typical seedy bowling alley, which is exactly what you want when you go bowling. I still remember the old Rip Van Winkle Lanes in Norwalk where I used to bowl growing up. It had an awesome mural of the sleeping giant painted all along one wall and one of those old arcade games with a big glass box full of stuffed animals and a metal claw you could steer around in hopes of grabbing one.* Now it's a nightmare in teal, orange, and violet with computerized scoring and a deluxe snack bar that sells soggy pizza for $7 a slice.

OK, so I may be exaggerating. I have no idea how much the pizza is, but I'm sure it comes freeze-dried from the AMF corporate headquarters somewhere in Missouri or something. And that's just not the way bowling was meant to be. Am I right, or am I right?

Luckily, time seems to have stood still in Lincoln Square. After a few games, we hit up the Brauhaus where certain members of our party got to cut a rug with one of the older gentlemen who seem to frequent the German restaurant, prowling for pretty young things. It was all in good fun, though, and the night of retro entertainment left me so exhausted that I'm planning to be in bed by 10 tonight. What else would you want to do when it's 2 degrees outside?

*Rip Van Winkle was never quite as cool as Bowlarama in Stamford, which, according to the the Internet, may or may not have gone out of business by now.