The luau grounds are fertile but shabby, with light touches of outsized, tiki-tack theme park tourism: a giant Easter Island head. A Chinese gazebo. Throngs of tame peacocks drift, endlessly still-lifed on mid-priced digital cameras. The signs identifying various types of foliage are decayed around the edges, eerily untended, like a haunted amusement park in an episode of Scooby Doo: Where Are You?

I smell tomorrow's hog dinner long before I see him. He is interred at the far end of the gardens, tucked back under a banana leaf tree. His eyes are small and dwindling, and he has long, straggly white hairs on his haunches. He stamps about in a small metal cage lined with a thin layer of straw. He seems possibly, in his unrest, to suspect that this is his last day on earth, before he is lifted out of a smoking hole in the ground as tomorrow's star attraction. He'll be pulled into pieces and dumped into heated catering dishes, to be parceled out to the intestines of 200 plus camera-strapped tourists from the mainland, who will give their thanks, mahalo and goodnight.

Later that evening, teenaged dancers lead us mai tai lubricated luau-goers through an interpretive dance of Hawaiian ethnic history. The girls have hard, determined smiles, smiling-for-a-living smiles, women often learn them young. The boys have a harder time of it; their smiles start out half-hearted, and fade into clouded stares fixed on some point in the future, possibly tonight after work, hanging out with their friends, drinking, trying to make something happen with someone.

Ah, yes. I've seen this somewhere before.

It was the summer of 1994, the early years of my post-collegiate malaise, where my contemporaries still lived four or five to a house, clinging to the feckless student lifestyle even though the university had shoved them out of the nest. For fun, they smoked clove cigarettes in groups on the porch, grumbling over their low paying day jobs and who didn't do the dishes. At night, they pursued half-hearted affairs that ran aground after a few depressing weeks of flirting and dart games in townie bars.

One of my own half-dozen roommates was a seductively egomaniacal college radio disc jockey in horn-rimmed glasses, who liked to brag about his early-life stint as an LA child star almost-ran. It was his birthday, so young--21? A very irony-appropriate idea was hatched, to take him to that iconic den of animatronic mirth, Chuck E. Cheese, to celebrate. We would wink knowingly at the heavy-lidded banjo-playing puppets that would appear, without warning, at random intervals from behind maroon curtains. We would eat cardboard-crust pizza at long kid friendly tables in the deserted dining room and smirk at life-sized puppets shifting heavily in preprogrammed patterns, motors grinding beneath their synthetic fur upholstery as they frugged to classic rock songs doctored up with kid-friendly line changes.

Tragically unbeknownst to us, however, was this: live dancing by the staff was part of the performance, where birthdays were concerned. Not a detail remembered from our collective suburban childhoods, this must have been some recent and insidious marketing brainchild from the evil upper echelons of Chuck E. corporate HQ.

And thus, some sort of birthday klaxon sounded, and a weary supervisor appeared in a too-short tie, leading a reluctant, rag tag band of lackeys to the front of the stage. A familiarly lame melody began, something Rolling Stones, as the puppets shuddered and lolled their heads, and begin to trade puns.

Harlem Shuffle. No-- it's the Chuck E. Shuffle.

To our horror, the employees began to sway, like a band of Thriller zombie rejects. They stared down at their pizza-stained white LA Gear sneakers and polyester cook's pants, following their manager's grim, side-sliding dance, anger radiating off of their wilted work shirts and plastic name tags as they mumbled along with the barking puppets:

You scratch just like a monkey
Yeah you do real cool
You slide it to the limbo
Yeah how low can you go?

Now come on baby
Don't fall down on me now
Just move it right here
To the Chuck E. shuffle
Yeah yeah yeah, to the Chuck E. shuffle.

This moment, that dog and pony show, by those hapless workers, for us shameless, college-town ghosts, was the very death of irony, that stylish affectation of emotionless scorn coveted by clueless, insecure collegiate hipsters from Berkley to NYU. All of the culturally clued-in haughtiness you might expect from this sardonic birthday celebration drained out of the room in a sudden burst, like a stepped-on balloon, the kind that makes toddlers cry.

We remained frozen to our bench seats while the pizza cooks and cashiers danced on, the excruciating minutes of the Chuck E Shuffle ticking by like a migrane. When the music mercifully stopped, the workers dashed off, like a pit crew after a smoke break, leaving us only with the twitching, oscillating puppets, who themselves retreated behind the maroon curtains after a moment, as embarrassed as we were.

Ever since that day, I've been preoccupied with the secret life of performers; what sort of curses they are secretly casting on those they're paid to entertain.

See here for bonus Chuck E. Cheese art.

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