I'm A Pinball Wizard. (No. Not Really.)

Saturday night I was restless. I wanted something fun to do. Something different. Something with blinking lights and perhaps gentle ping-pinging sounds.

Enter a visit to the local vintage pinball arcade.

Upon opening the door, my sister inquired as to whether or not we would be the only girls in the arcade. I don't know if she meant the only girls for that night or to have ever walked through the doors.

I'm happy to report that we weren't the only girls there, but we were the only ones to get super jazzed over an Elton John pinball machine.

We're cool like that.

You had me at Captain Fantastic

After watching my sister wrestle (and lose) with the token machine, I headed for the Captain Fantastic machine. It was a real beaut and it didn't feature just any old Elton John. Oh no. This one featured the very best of Elton. It captured him at his fashion finest.

Which is to say it featured the electric blue platform boot wearing Elton of the 1970s.

Ooh-la-la.

Despite his obvious charms, Captain Fantastic wasn't kind to me. I barely hit the ball before it went through the gap between my flippers.

This phenomenon happened quite a few times with Captain Fantastic before I decided that maybe he wasn't so fantastic after all. And like anyone stuck in a relationship going nowhere, I had to cut my losses and move on.

For some reason, I picked the Cubs as my rebound pinball relationship.

True to it's baseball namesake, the Cubs pinball game brought me close to joy, but in the end it couldn't deliver.

Translated: The machine took my tokens and didn't release a silver ball for me to play.

Seriously. The little silver ball never popped up so I could play. What the crap, Cubs?

I moved on to try the Star Wars game, complete with a light saber that actually lit up when I pulled back and released the ball shooter thingie. It was fun, but didn't wow me. Probably because it featured the Phantom Menace movie instead of the original 1977 classic.

Little Kid Anakin Skywalker with his fancy green flashing light saber will only go so far with me. I much prefer Princess Leia and her honey bun hair.

I'm a purist that way.

I wandered around aimlessly feeding tokens into different games in a desperate attempt to find the pinball machine equivalent of my soul mate. The Mario Andretti inspired pinball machine didn't do it for me. Nor did the Monopoly one, the aliens drinking in a bar one, or the Bally Rocket from 1947.

My nephew totally hogged the Transformers machine, so I never got to try that one.

I was feeling pretty sorry for myself because I had yet to find my game and everyone else had. They were smacking the flipper buttons and yanking on the ball release with a fervor I've rarely seen outside of a Black Friday sale at Target. I could barely get anything going.

And on four different machines, all three of my balls went straight through the gap of no return and I never got to flip my flippers once. So far, my evening was a complete bust.

I did make one realization though: I completely suck at pinball.

True story.

How can one person buzz through six tokens in under a minute when each game only costs two tokens?

Complete suckage, my friends. Complete suckage.

Just as I was about to grab a soda and park myself on the small bench (literally, not figuratively - there was actually a bench) I saw it. My machine. The pinball game I had been searching for all night long.

The clouds parted and a heavenly light shown down … on Mick Jagger.

Rolling Stones pinball. It's got the moves like Jagger.

I felt drawn to Mick and the boys. This, I felt confident, was my game.

It had everything: flashing lights, great music, and the soft ping-pinging of a small metal ball hitting those rubber bumper things.

And a big tongue for your silver ball to shoot out of.

Yes, the tongue acts as a slide. Doesn't every one's?

Just when I thought it couldn't get any better, I discovered that you got a bonus ball if your ball smacked Mick hard enough.

Sign. Me. Up. I couldn't drop the tokens in fast enough.

The game used a start button instead of a pull back plunger. My sister and I felt that it should have been labeled a "Start Me Up" button and played a bit of the classic Stones song at the start of each game.

Wouldn't that have been amazing? We should have been pinball designers.

Obviously.

I totally found my groove playing the Rolling Stones pinball game. My pinball mojo returned and I scored the fifth highest score on that machine. The owner came out to shake my hand and personally invited me to join the Pinball League.

No. Not really.

I sucked at the Rolling Stones game as badly as all the others, but it was fun.

And there really is a Pinball League. I'm thinking about joining.

Probably not as a player, but maybe Team Mom.

Pin It Now!