Laser Tag Redux

[First, thanks for all the birthday greetings. My wife Wendy believes I make too much out of celebrating my birthday. I’ve even tried to push the envelope by declaring May to be my birthday month, asking for special treatment all 31 days. That idea hasn’t flown. But anyway, the blogging community made my birthday special this year.]

My ‘official’ birthday has come and gone. Since not all the family could gather yesterday, we’re going out tonight for my dinner, then cake afterwards. Since my son Greg is going away for the Memorial Day weekend, he gave me his present yesterday. Just for Men hair color. Supposed to work on just the grey, which is pretty much what I have up top now.

Sometimes I do a retro-birthday. Re-live some moment from the past. A few years ago, we enjoyed a round of laser tag at a local arena. For those unfamiliar with the game, laser tag participants suit up with a vest that’s wired to record a hit, should the wearer be hit by a strike from an opponent’s laser gun. Everyone has such a vest and their own gun.

Sometimes you’re a member of a team. Other times it’s every man for himself in the darkened maze-like arena. Once you’re hit, warning buzzers or lights go off on your vest, and you’re disabled from playing for several seconds. After you’re hit several times, you must go to a re-charging station in the arena to rejuvenate and gain another “life.” A computer keeps score. After the game, you get a print-out of who hit you, whom you hit, your score, and usually a comment on your performance.

My family’s first time on the arena came on vacation at the CN Tower in Toronto over a decade ago. It was the four of us against two experienced laser tag veterans. We were slaughtered. Our pre-teen son Scott, frustrated that we were losing badly, resorted to hand-to-hand combat, knocking an opponent’s laser gun away with his own gun. That’s a no-no, by the way.

Eventually, we got better. I learned that, though Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone get away with standing out in the open blasting away with their machine guns in the movies, that doesn’t work in real life. At least not in laser tag. My wife Wendy never caught on as well as us menfolk. Her computer print-out afterwards kept containing comments like, “You must have been an easy target” or “Try shooting back next time.”

So a few years ago, we tried laser tag again for my birthday. When we arrived, I thought the head arena employee gave us a look as if to say, “Bingo is across the parking lot.” I worried that my grey hair would light up in the blacklit arena. Well, it might scare the kids into turning tail if they spot something that looks like a ghost or zombie coming at ‘em.

There was a large church youth group there, so we joined them in their game. They paired off predictably, boys versus girls, and the girls were trounced. In a re-match, they decided to choose teams in hopes of making the game more fair. One team captain had a winning strategy. While her opposing captain picked his friends, she looked at her scorecard from last game and selected those players who had scored the most hits against her team.

“Who’s Red 16?” she’d ask. And some hotshot would amble forward and join her squad. I guess she was playing out the laser tag version of the old saying, “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” Needless to say, her team won.

Maybe next year I’ll do another retro-birthday. Is Chucky Cheese still around?