Diversityay!

I doubt I'm going to shock anyone by saying this, but say it I will: Boston is one of the most segregated cities I've ever encountered. For a state so blue, this has always bothered me. If the states were individual socks, you wouldn't ever be able to figure who to roll Massachusetts up with. Eventually you'd just have to take our navy asses and ball us up with a really faded black dress sock, wear us with long pants when all your other socks were dirty, and hope no one noticed. And yet, here Boston is, all racially compartmentalized by neighborhood, often right down to the block. It's incredibly disheartening. (I'm not a sociologist, or an urban historian, so I don't feel comfortable tackling the socio-economic racial politics. Suffice to say - it's something that bothers me, and it bothers me daily.)

So imagine my delight when I discovered Boston Bowl over the weekend. Apparently everyone already knew about Boston Bowl, but for those of you who, like me, thought they were stranded in a metro-area choking with preppy-polo Ralph Laurenoclads for all your bowling and bar sports related needs, fear not. Boston Bowl has bowling, obviously - candlepin and regular - and an arcade, and pool tables, tons of weird food options, and plenty plenty plenty of beer. $6 for an aluminum bottle of Bud Light isn't going to win the award for best deal in town, but they let you run around with them unrestricted, and the draught beers are cheaper - even the Harpoon - if you and the people you're with aren't insanely impatient about waiting in line.

Anyway, I was many different kinds of pleased by this place, mostly because there's just this incredible dearth of comparable places in the city where you can go and see a representative from nearly every race, age and income tax bracket hanging out and having a good time. (Sidebar: I almost included Somerville's Good Time Emporium, in this category, but the bloom has kind of gone off that rose. Personally, I love me some Good Time, and I've never been anywhere else where I can play old-school arcade games - Original Ninja Turtles! The four-player one! - carnival shooting games, skee-ball, go-karts, laser tag, batting cages and never be more than twenty feet from one of about five full service bars...but if I had kids, I would not take them there after nightfall. And I'm fairly certain that if you lingered for long enough, you could catch some form of hepatitis in the bathroom.) Walking around the city in the days following my Boston Bowl initiation, I tried to figure out how they had achieved this feat. The answer is really quite simple: they succeed by shamelessly appealing to the gigantic dork inside everyone.

Not to sound like like that Amanda Bynes movie that came out last summer, but there is plenty of dorkiness inherent in every human. And no activity puts this on display better than bowling. Think about it - before you even set up your screen and pick teams, you have to surrender your kicks and don rental footwear. Now everyone is wearing the same shoes. Equal - fantastically evenly nerdy - footing. The only way to differentiate yourself here is to bring your own bowling shoes...dropping yourself immediately into the basement of bleatingly uncool footwear. Before you know it, everyone has their pants rolled up all weird, and is making up stupid nicknames for people on their team, and eating weird food that one normally doesn't encounter outside of a 4th graders birthday party...bottom line - you just can't be cool when you're bowling. It's one of those very rare great human equalizers. And maybe we don't have them in Boston (notice how I'm carefully side-stepping those loaded socio-economic issues again...not saying they don't exist - but this is just a blog entry about the socially soothing effects of the American bowling alley, after all) because we're all just too busy on our Massachusetts trip to let our guards down for more than five seconds at a time. This whole bloated superiority complex we all tend to take on from time to time (oh, honestly, stop with the denial, if you live here, you suffer from it too) is just really...tiring. When we let it go, we stop being so mean to each other and can actually hang out. Or maybe I'm totally off base. Maybe everyone in the city just digs bowling so much that they're all willing to put up with each others shit if they're at least separated by lanes and tables. Who knows. I told you - I'm not a sociologist. All I know is Boston Bowl is doing something everyone is appreciating the shit out of.

Plus, they give you free socks with every shoe rental. Free socks! Another great human equalizer. The powers that be at Boston Bowl should be nominated to some kind of state executive committee. Everyone could hang out, eat french fries, and wear free clean socks. Then it wouldn't matter that you can't roll up Massachusetts and bundle it with another state. We'd all have our own fresh pair, with the word 'bowl' right above the little flag logo. Great success.