i followed a bunch of like "family fun suggestions in portland" accounts on instagram and i don't like how they keep suggesting privately owned, for-profit indoor play spaces that charge money and aren't municipal :/
i'm not paying $12 to take the lads to MonkeyTown Fun Factory TM where they have a coworking space and a cafe that serves egg bites. i don't want to normalize that sort of thing. they'll get weird ideas
i just don't like things being private when they should be municipal! i'm sorry! i want the employees to be in a union and i want robust protections against discrimination in a purpose-built space i partially own via taxation! i want it to be venture capital proof!
i just know MonkeyTime Fun Factory is owned by a literal fascist too, some hideously rich woman who lives on a ranch in Utah and is exploiting tax loopholes and has her business registered as a hospital somehow, most litigious woman alive, drives a tank
renting space in a strip mall also owned by a fascist but this one is somehow like a bulgarian shell corporation under investigation for arms smuggling
I am with you on the pay to play crap, but your description of the fun play place and those involved made me go WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH OUR COUNTRY so I had to say it
ok my kid has aged out of this but I am familiar, and yes, indoor park at the community center is far less dystopian. BUT playdate pdx in the Pearl is where the real fascists are, pretty sure Monkey King is family owned and it’s pretty down to earth, despite being a screaming germ factory
yeah, the creeping privatization of Kids Fun as i grew up meant it was way too easy to get paywalled out of “having friends” or “doing anything.” is this why i smoothly transitioned from a child running around outside to an adult recluse who clomps around in the woods trapping mosquitoes? probably!
i do also feel like our classic go-to workaround for the other kids without $12 did involve riding bikes/scooters/roller skating/etc through the neighborhood, which is less safe in the “every car is a goddamn tank now” era
I am presently in my hometown, where going to the public pool was $5 for residents and $7 for non-residents — AND IT STILL IS but it’s a splash pad now, but both of us need a ticket and it’s online only and they don’t accept cash. SIGH.
The key point of places like monkey Time (tm) is that they're indoors and serve alcohol. I got through many rainy Saturdays that way, and by taking someone else's child I also earned important child care credit, exchangeable for date nights and other precious things
i just think they should be public! if we're not satisfied with our parks museums libraries etc we just need more and better ones, not to have a whole industry of private versions of them to pick up the slack for people with $12
also adult drinking spaces become “one teenager making minimum wage bearing individual responsibility for ensuring two to three dozen children don’t break anything” pretty fast, based off my summer lifeguarding
I have spent enough time in parks in Germany and Luxembourg where you can buy a sausage, fries, and beer to confidently say this is a workable hypothesis. The key is everyone understanding it's not an adult drinking space it's a space where adults can drink
