Date Night, Roller Style

Last night was Nina and I's turn for a date night. She has been interested in roller skating lately. She came across this picture of me learning how to roller skate and started asking if she could learn to roller skate. Part of me wondered if anyone out there even roller skates anymore. When we were kids, roller skating was the thing to do. Shen and I would roller skate in our unfinished basement and put on "routines" for our parents. I fully remember going to the roller skating rink, doing the limbo, the shoot-the-duck, watching the couples skate dreamily... Now that I'm writing this, I'm wondering if we were just really un-cool kids. Anyway, back to last night.

So, since Nina had her cool roller skating t-shirt, and we'd been talking about it, I thought I'd take her roller skating for our date night. Suprisingly (but probably for good reason), it's hard to find somewhere to roller skate in the DC metro area. The only place I could find was Skate 'N Fun in Manassas. So that's where we decided to go. I figured that we'd probably be the only people there on a Tuesday evening. I couldn't have been more wrong.

After a quality dining experience at the Manassas McDonalds, Nina and I made our way to the skating rink. We got there and rented our skates and got ready for fun. Within five minutes of our being there, the lights went off, the strobe light came on, the black lights were fired up, and the jamms started pumping. I took this little video right before we started skating. As soon as I put the camera in the locker, the skating floor was practically filled with people. I wish I could have just sat there all night with a video camera. It was hysterical. I had NO IDEA that people still take skating so seriously. Let me set the scene - you've got the idea with the lights and the music, guys in tank tops and jean shorts, girls wearing flashing necklaces and air brush painted t-shirts, and it's dark in there and some guys are still skating with their sunglasses on. People were seriously getting their skate on to the tune of all the latest jamms. There was an occasional "Gettin' Jiggy Wit It" but, other than that, I felt my age (which I didn't think was that old). We managed to survive our skating experience by staying to the very outermost part of the rink, taking it very slow and trying not to get clobbered by the die-hard quad-skaters (I also had to learn the new lingo for roller skates). I think it was all a little overwhelming for Nina, so after a valient effort to learn to skate, we took a seat on a bench, took off our quads, and took in some seriously good people watching. We exited our Manassas date night with a drive-thru visit to Checkers for a milk shake. It was quite a night!