Okay, a couple of things, here. First, when you grow up in New England, you are essentially bombarded by guys in tricorne hats and frilly shirts and buckle shoes and white leotards. It's just a fact of life. Most of our towns and cities predate the Revolutionary War (my own hometown was founded in the 1680s) and when you're a kid growing up, you're forced to make all the field trips to Interpretive Centers and historical sites. Not that I really MIND history, mind you, it's just that ... it might be something other people are not necessarily attuned to.

Like, maybe if you're out west, you have rodeos and cowboys shoved down your throats. Well, here in New England it's women in bonnets working beehive ovens and men with wire-rimmed glasses carrying flintlocks around, and sometimes everyone pretending they don't know what a camera is. It's What We Do, apparently. Or, at least, some people do. And since New England is pretty small you're in driving range for just about everything between Boston and NYC for a daytrip.

So there you have it: another fascinating glimpse into Mojo's sordid past. Field trips aplenty: Shakers one day, Benedict Arnold the next. Yes, we all toured the Connecticut state capitol and we all got to sit in the torturously-carved chair made from the legendary Charter Oak. And we all banged our heads after the tour guide very specifically told us to be careful sitting back in the chair so we wouldn't bang our heads.

(Whoever designed and carved the Charter Oak chair very deliberately carved this giant protuberance just where the back of your skull would touch the back of the chair, resulting in heaven knows how many concussed school children and Girl Scout troops. It was very painful. It's about the only thing I remember about the state capitol and the Charter Oak, except for the guys hiding the Connecticut charter therein. That and I gotta say, the Connecticut quarter with the Charter Oak on the back is THE NICEST of the state quarters. There, I said it. It's so much nicer to be known for a beautifully-rendered tree than SOME states, trying to depict crap like "Home of RUBBER PRODUCTION and SHOE MANUFACTURING!")

Anyway, this is not about history, but about amusement parks. Because Mojo also had the great fortune of living just across the river from a really good amusement park, called Riverside Park. Don't get me wrong; I like amusement parks just fine. I love roller coasters, and just about anything else that doesn't spin too violently for too long. If it looks like it was put together in a shoddy fashion and my life might be endangered, so much the better!

The original Riverside was a place you could run through and your parents would buy handfuls of tickets at these little gingerbready doghouse-like ticket booths, and each ride "cost" so many tickets. They used to have these big plastic slides they'd send you down on a burlap sack, and many kids, like my Favorite Older Sister, got so airborne they came down and broke their wrists on the slide. Eventually they started a pay-one-price dealie and they'd stamp your hand, and then we kids (it was a simpler time) were just pretty much let loose in the park to ride what we wanted as many times as we wanted.

As the park grew they did away with many such lawsuits-in-the-making as the giant slides, but kept the most important one: the Thunderbolt, a wooden roller coaster, joined in the later, waning years of Mojo's amusement-park-going by the Cyclone. The Cyclone was built while my Favorite Brother worked at the park, so I got to ride it many times for free, although some drunken idiot early in its existence disengaged his lap bar and fell off the car and closed it for a while. (They have since put big shoulder bars on it, too, to stop drunken idiots from doing that. He didn't die, but he got wedged in the wooden structure for some time. Ouch.)

While Riverside was always THE birthday destination, as we got older and more financially responsible for ourselves we stopped going as often, because it was so darned expensive--except for the brief glory days when my Favorite Brother worked there. (He played Toni Canneloni, and sometimes Captain Rivi.) And then the final death knell: Six Flags took over. Immediately Captain Rivi was replaced by Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck skipping around the place, and the race car track was torn up (never went, so I didn't care, but other people were crying) and the park was expanded and they started charging a week's pay to attend for a single day. And as we got older and more fuddy-duddy we ultimately decided it just wasn't worth fifty or sixty bucks a visit.

Worst of all, Six Flags CHANGED THE NAME. It was ALWAYS Riverside Park, for a gazillion years, and I still refer to it as Riverside. Not that I've ever been since the Takeover. Which might be why they're going bust right now. Or it just might be the über-obnoxious advertising campaign they've been pushing for the past few years. I don't know if this is a national thing or just some odd regional variation, but it has Got To Stop.

It all began with a creepy bald guy with giant glasses who'd pull up a bus at, say, a school, get out, and start dancing to some obnoxious techno-beat music. And all the children would pour out of the school onto the bus and he would take them to ride roller coasters. Yeah, that would go over well with parents. After a few years of Mister Creepy stealing children, they inexplicably went in an entirely opposite direction, in which they would depict some boring event and some Asian guy would pop onto the screen and scream "ONE flag!" Followed by an excitement-filled clip shot at the amusement park and the rating "SIX Flags!" Which MIGHT have worked if they thought about it better, but here in Wonder Bread New England it was just a little too culturally exotic, I suspect. So back came Mister Creepy, only they upped the creepy factor by having HIM talk and having HIS face pop up with the flag rating.

Which I hate even more than everything else leading up to this point. Combined.

Except. Who knows, maybe they are tailoring their advertising to the region? Wouldn't that be a smart thing to do? Because lately they've been depicting some lame family at a New England History type place. They've got this totally sullen blonde teenaged girl working a butter churn and showing all the excitement of said activity in her gum-chewing face while her parents ooh and aww and take pictures. And--now, this is the sheer brilliance of the spot--this Very Scary Old Dude in a ruffly shirt and a tricorne hat dodders onto the scene and just screams, "CHURN! CHURN the BUTTER!" right in the sullen teen's face.

He just really cracks me up. He has it down just PERFECTLY. I don't know if it's a childhood throwback, but I just laugh and laugh every time he comes on. I still have no great desire to go to Six Flags. Nor do I like the intrusion of Mister Creepy in the scene. But they have partially redeemed themselves with this one commercial.

For now.

Mojo