This past Friday we planned to go again to Grand Rapids and another RLM tournament. Also coming in? Severe winds, with warnings that they were going to cause fallen branches and power outages and that travel would be very difficult. With the Active Advisory warning to not drive unless absolutely necessary I decided, you know, I don't need to drive an hour-plus to play the Pokemon pinball game again that much. We may have missed an exciting night; apparently, RLM Amusement had a partial power loss and could only operate about half the normal roster of games. As fans of things that carry on under adverse conditions we're sorry to have missed that.
But with an evening suddenly free ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger had a great idea. MSU's Wharton Center has had the touring company of Kimberly Akimbo all week, and we couldn't find a time to attend; why not this? Yes, it's still driving that's not absolutely necessary, but three miles is manageable where sixty would not be. Kimberly Akimbo had got our attention for the show's logo, derived from the logo Six Flags Great Adventure used in the 70s-80s, and I've heard a couple songs from it in the normal rotation on the Broadway channel. With the added information that part of it is a teen's wish to get to the Great Adventure drive-through safari? How could we resist?
Also it turns out you can just buy tickets to a show day-of. I mean, we wouldn't try this with The Lion King (coming in a couple months) or Wicked (which we forgot to ever get to last year) but for a show about the nostalgia of growing up in North Jersey to the point that her birthday cake is a Fudgie the Whale? That you can just roll up to.
We liked the show, in the main. The first act introducing all the characters and their particular weirdness was the strongest part. The piece not obvious from the show title or credits is that Kimberly has that rapid-aging disease so while she's turning 16 she has the body of a 72-year-old and the one strangest thing? Nobody mentions or compares it to that Robin Williams movie where he plays the 10-year-old-with-a-40-year-old's-body. You maybe forgot that, but the movie (Jack) came out in 1996 and the musical's set in 1999. I'd still think it'd be an inevitable reference.
The premise is Kimberly and her barely-functional parents are still settling in after having ditched Kimberly's aunt Debra after the trouble in Lodi (a North Jersey township). The aunt, of course, finds them, rampaging through like a felonious Auntie Mame and pressing Kimberly and her friends into an ``only slightly illegal'' scam. Two things there seemed peculiar to me; first, that the song and reprise for it haven't been on heavy rotation on the Broadway channel, and second that it's not either less or more of the story.
Like, the scam is set up in a couple scenes early in act two, and it's carried out off-stage; I'd have expected either more action in the scam or pushing it farther in the background to avoid tying Kimberly too closely to Debra. In the second act we get the revelation of just what happened that the family fled Lodi, and it's zany in a slightly edgey web comic way, and I'm not sure that Debra the character recovers from it. But, then, the whole story is kind of zany and when it does have a heavy emotional beat the contrast does help that beat land. It's gotten a lot of critical acclaim so it's at least registering well with some people.
We enjoyed it despite the ways we'd comment on it for an hour if you gave us the chance. It also reminded us how we really like going to shows and there's a really good venue for them not quite down the street but still, literally in walking distance for us. We should go to them more.
So our next day in the Most Extreme Mid-Atlantic Parks Tour? Dutch Wonderland, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Let's watch.
Big unexpected discovery? That right next door to the park was the Carton Network Hotel. Why? Who knows. My best guess was Cartoon Network trying out the branded-hotel thing at a low-profile park where if it failed nobody would notice. This would be as close as we got to the place; they ended the Cartoon Network Hotel branding of the park with the end of the 2025 season.
Here we approach Dutch Wonderland from the side; the park opened on the Lincoln Highway in 1962 and didn't really figure it would need quite so much parking on the side. The horizontal bar with the 12 FT marker is the monorail track.
And here's the entrance. I had assumed the park started out as a Pennsylvania-Dutch-heritage-themed place that grew into fairy-tale castle by degrees but turns out no, it was always a Pennsylvania-Dutch-and-fairy-tale-castle place.
Here's the front entrance, like a tiny Disneyland you can just drive to from central Jersey.
And the castle has a moat! Totally a moat!
I didn't say it was a lot of moat, but they have a moat!
Trivia: In 1257 England's King Henry III attempted minting a gold coin, which was short-lived; England would not have a viable gold coin until 1344. Source: Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages, Jean Favier. A ``gold penny'', of face value 20 pence, although it was unpopular and since its bullion value was more than 20 pence all but a few examples have been melted down.
Currently Reading: The Book on the Bookshelf, Henry Petroski.
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Date: 2026-03-17 09:34 pm (UTC)