Grade school and junior high in the '80s. Days of tube socks, Keds, T-shirt rings and passing crushes. Every Friday night you traded in your sneakers for a pair of brown quads with bright orange wheels and fat rubber toe-stops. If you were really cool, you brought your own skates. In skates, you were taller, another kind of creature who could glide into the stream of moving bodies and circle the floor beneath the disco ball. Maybe you fell sometimes, the pain in your bottom compounded by scores of legs rolling past you, those legs belonging to snickering classmates. Maybe you were one of the kids who could skate backward, who won the races. But none of that mattered as much as this: Who would skate together during the couples skate? These days, till 10:30 p.m. on Friday night, kids still pack the Dairy Ashford Roller Rink, a somewhat stale and rundown but held-together place of elementary school soap operas and birthday parties. Now they whirl on in-line skates to the Backstreet Boys and other Top 40 songs (no rap or hard rock, though). They still do the Hokey Pokey, and you can too. Thursday nights are for you now -- half-price tickets for adult skate, the best of the oldies from the '50s to the '80s -- so go ahead, double-knot those thin, long laces. Relive your childhood.
*indicates required fields.
Please enable browser cookies before filling out this form.
All reader comments are subject to our Terms of Use.
By clicking Add Comment, you acknowledge that you have reviewed and agree to these Terms.
Comments may take a few minutes to process and appear on the site.
Please do not click the "Add Comment" button again while your comment is being added.
There's only one really bad thing about the anti-clotting pill Pradaxa. You can't fall or get cut while taking it because once you start bleeding, there's almost no way to stop it. There's no reversal agent, no antidote.
There's no gloves or batting helmets when Larry Joe Miggins and the rest of the Houston Babies regularly travel back in time to play the game by its 1860 rules.