I would never say that pulling a scam on an amusement park is a good or honorable pursuit, but if any place is ripe for scamming, it’s Six Flags. It is a place awash in Coed Naked, Big Johnson and Insane Clown Posse T-shirts and every few feet there is an advertisement, or something for sale at 300 percent market value. Mind you, it’s not just the corporation trying to sell you things, it’s all of your favorite Time-Warner-licensed characters, from Batman and Tweety Bird to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, should they ever find a use for him.

My favorite was always The Wheelchair Scam. It’s not really so much a scam as paying fifteen bucks extra for what I call a “super ticket” for yourself and three friends. What you do is you pay for a normal ticket and then go to the Guest Services building (limp there, if you think you can fake it) and tell them you need to rent a wheelchair. Explain why, fill out the forms and give them the money.

It’s a personal preference, but I always made it a point not to portray myself in a positive light, or as seriously infirmed. Example: “I got really drunk last night and jumped off my friend’s roof. I think I sprained my ankle or something.”
They don’t like you, but they give you the wheelchair. Voila! Now, instead of waiting in line, you and your friends can climb up the back way. You’ll be amazed to see how quickly you can exhaust the park.

There are two downsides. One is that someone will get stuck sitting down through an entire hot day of fun. If this sounds relaxing, it isn’t. After a couple hours you will be desperate to get up and move. The second is that, at some point in the day, you will feel like a horrible person. Truth is, you are a horrible person, and you won’t realize it until someone who is bound to the wheelchair year round says, “Don’t worry, you can go ahead of me. I’ll catch the next one.”
Asshole. (Eric Strom)

By Elaine Richardson

Never, ever, send anyone to an amusement park and expect them to come back in a prompt manner.

Amusement parks are in the blood. They’re that little bit of childhood fancy that we remember with joy—and pain. They captivate the mind and hearken back to that sunny day when mom and dad stuck us on the Zipper, alone, just minutes after finishing that hot dog, cotton-candy spool and the entire box of Cracker Jacks. Somehow, even past the stomachache, what we’ve remembered is the inexplicable fun of being jerked around the local field, or fairgrounds, or parking lot on a contraption that looks like an insurance nightmare. Read the rest of this entry »

Before you can say “cold front” it’ll be September and you’ll be wishing you hadn’t spent all summer watching reruns on TV. There’s a whole world around Chicago, and for three months, it’s not as icy, bitter and unforgiving as a jilted lover. The sun glistens of the concrete, steel and glass menagerie we call home. But since it’s such a pain to find out what’s going on, and to plan things, NewCity did the work. From hot air balloons to Binti the ape who save lives, we tell you where to go to make you want to sing like Brian Adams about the Summer of ‘97. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rennie Sparks

The courtyard—that’s what sold me on the first apartment I rented in Chicago. It was May, and my future landlord led me across the beginnings of green grass to show me the place. I imagined barbecues and building parties, idle Sundays spent playing checkers out in sun-splashed greenery. Heck, maybe I’d even grow tomatoes.

Of course, I didn’t know that only a month earlier there’d been a body bag left leaking blood on the grass of this same courtyard, while the firemen who’d been called to the scene of the suicide were puking in the bushes. I didn’t know that in this same courtyard skinheads had once emptied an entire apartment through a front window, and that every summer at least one person went insane in that courtyard. Read the rest of this entry »