My husband and daughter are amusement-park freaks. The faster, higher, and scarier the ride, the more quickly they line up to experience it. Me, I hate the damn things. I like to keep my feet on the ground. I don’t feel the need to be catapulted into the air or to experience the G-force the astronauts do upon takeoff. If I wanted to live that excitement, I would have signed up for NASA.
Despite my fear of these rides, I still go on them … well, I used to go on them. A few years back, we were at this amusement park, and my daughter and husband convinced me to go on a ride that looked fun to them but oh-so-terrifying to me. Still, I sucked it up and agreed to join them. But after I’d stood in line for an hour, my mind had managed to work itself into a frenzy of panic, so I was not my usual calm self when I sat in my seat and pulled down my harness. And then I noticed something: my harness was different from my husband’s harness and it was different from my daughter’s harness. I started to look around, and I saw that my harness was different from everyone else’s freaking harness.
When the ride supervisor, who was at most sixteen years of age, made her way down the line to inspect everyone’s restraints, I asked her, “Hey, how come my straps are different?”
To which she replied—and I swear this is true—“Oh, that harness had to be repaired. But it’s fine now.”
What the hell? This ride is going to flip me upside down and hurl me to the ground at a ninety-degree angle, and I have a broken harness? I grabbed her by her little teenage collar and pulled her down to my face and said, “Are you screwing with me?”
Well, before I could get out of my seat or spew any expletives her way, I heard a loud buzz and the ride took off into the air at about sixty miles per hour. To be honest, I don’t really remember the ride—it’s all one big, frightening blur. Did I survive? Obviously. However, I declared to my family when we got back on terra firma that my days of roller coasters were done.
That was, until a new type of ride started to hit amusement parks—the virtual rides. These, I thought, would be great. What a wonderful invention! You sit in a seat that rocks a little bit, and the screen moves in front of you, and you feel as if you are flying, flipping, jumping—whatever. I was psyched to give it a try, and then my husband uttered these words: “The rides are 3-D.”
“What?”
“3-D—three-dimensional. You don’t have 3-D vision.”
Eww, a snag. I should explain. I have only one eye. It’s not like a Peter Falk or Sandy Duncan glass-eye thing. My right eye is there; it just doesn’t work. I never really had 3-D vision, and it hasn’t affected my life in any great way—until the arrival of 3-D rides.
“Well, will they not let me on the ride? Do you have to prove you see 3-D?”
“No,” he answered. “You just might not enjoy it as much.”
But I decided to give it a whirl. At Universal Studios, we went on the Spider-Man ride. Everyone was ducking and jumping and flinching during the ride. Me, I just sat there wondering what the hell was going on. I was in the middle seat and kept hitting my husband or daughter and saying, “What do you see? What did you see now?” By the end of the ride, they wouldn’t talk to me.
Apparently, I was annoying. I tried a few more 3-D rides over the years, and I even paid for a 3-D horror movie where they give you those ridiculous glasses, but nothing miraculous happened. I tried to fake seeing the 3-D action, but truthfully, it’s easier for me to fake orgasms than it is to fake seeing the action of a 3-D flick. The people around me just stared as if something were wrong with me, because my reactions were so out of sync with theirs. Of course they were out of sync—I was copying their moves, so I had to be a second or two behind them. I don’t even know what the movie was about, because I was obsessed with keeping up with all the two-eyed people.
