As a kid, my favorite Boardwalk attraction was the Fun House. I loved looking endlessly at my wiggly reflection in the Fun House mirrors – first I looked tall and thin, then short and stout – like Alice through the looking glass, I could morph right before my own eyes and it didn’t even hurt!
Passing through the tumbling barrels DID hurt, however. Logically it seemed possible to walk through the moving barrels without falling, but before you knew it, you were on your knees, and side, and back, and the world was completely upside down and topsy- turvy, and you had absolutely no control of the shifting surfaces beneath you!
Towering over us all, however, was the giant slide! The idea was to grab a burlap sack and mount the huge ladder that seemed to be hundreds of feet into the rafters of the building – then to ride your burlap down the slide over the bumpy wooden structure, landing in a crashing heap on the hardwood floor! Most of us did well to sit up, but some kids tempted fate by lying down, some faced backwards, and some even tried going down on their knees or standing up to show off!! That slide seemed endlessly long, very fast, and each bump would throw me off my burlap sack so that my knees, thighs and elbows scraped against the huge wooden structure with painful friction! Never did I leave without several red welts as souvenirs, but the scrapes seemed like a mild outcome compared to the very real possibility of being thrown over the slide’s edge and plummeting to my death on the wooden floor below! It was dangerous – and oh so memorable!
