The sun poured down on the crowd as a group of energetic, hyper-hair-gelled performers in matching silver lace-up boots strutted their way through a mash-up of contemporary songs. “Baby I was born this way!” cried a woman whose raven hair was lacquered into the shape of a supernova, or maybe a hedgehog.
“All the single ladies!” another woman shouted, joining in, as the music morphed from Lady Gaga to Beyonce. A moment later, the lyrical inspiration changed again, this time to Green Day.
“Don’t want to be an American idiot!” the dancers declared, doing their enthusiastic best to divert the lunchtime throngs lining up nearby for pizza and Chinese food.
Shakespeare had an explanation for scenes like this. Through the mouthpiece of Prince Hamlet, the playwright described the purpose of theater — that is, of manmade tableaux and scripted behavior — as a means of bouncing reality back at us in order to illuminate it.
In the tragedy of Hamlet, the protagonist stages a play within the play to “hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature,” exposing the usurper king’s criminal guilt by hiring actors to simulate his criminal acts. Seeing himself thus portrayed, the king leaps up in rage and fear. He does not like the ugly image reflected back at him by Hamlet’s theatrical mirror.
In our time, there’s scarcely any place as wreathed in artifice and theatricality as the modern amusement park (except maybe minigolf). In the mirror it holds up to the culture, our reflection looks pretty goofy. That people should pay handsomely to spend the day mostly standing in line for one thing or another is a marvel; yet every clement day, the cars stream in.
“Welcome to a new kind of tension, all across the alien nation!” the performers continued, scampering about and waving as they cheerily sang the anthem of anti-Americanism.
Despite the dancers’ efforts, most of the people in the crowd weren’t paying attention. Supersized parents herded venti-sized children carrying grande-sized ice cream cones. A pair of teenage girls gripped each other, half-falling with conspiratorial laughter. A woman sat eating fried rice as the man next to her changed a baby’s diaper.
Distant screams wafted in from happy victims who were whirling around on huge machines, experiencing g-forces. It was not an especially busy day; visitors needed to wait a mere 90 minutes to enter a fire-belching volcano that offered 70 seconds of thrills.
Some distance away, hundreds of people queued in an exhaust-choked shed, waiting their turn to drive an antique car along a wooded track. This adventure in sedate predetermination took 45 minutes to reach and perhaps three minutes to experience.
“So fun!” said a young woman, as she and her boyfriend finally reached the front of the line. When the couple’s car arrived, the man eagerly jumped behind the wheel while she strapped into the back seat the enormous pink stuffed made-in-China pig she’d won in a game. The car blatted as they lurched off, laughing.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
