The Rotary Merchandiser

Current mood:  giggly

This may turn out to be one of those "you had to be there" moments, I'm not sure yet, but I'm going to give it a shot.
I went to Asheville, NC, this weekend with my niece to see my sister. Sunday we went to a pizza place with her husband and son. Alex (my nephew) is 12, Rebecky (my niece, Alex's cousin) is 5. So we give them, like, 10 dollars to play video games while we sit around waiting for the pizza to arrive. At some point my sister says, "Look how sweet Alex is. He's spending all his money trying to win that crystal heart for Rebekah."
So, I look over, and Alex is playing on this game that's kind of like the old bowling alley / roller rink game they used to have everywhere where you use a claw on a string and try to grab a prize out of the bin. Except, in this game, there is a bunch of stuff spinning slowly on a lazy susan type apparatus and you try and grab the stuff off the disc. So then the kids run out of money, and everyone scrambles to find more because Rebecky is standing there pouting and getting a little crazy and saying, "BUT I NEED IT. IT'S SO SHINY." So I go out to the car and find about 12 more quarters and my sister makes some deal with a waiter to give him a super sized tip in exchange for his quarters. The gaming commences.
Finally, we're all totally out of quarters, and even dollars for that matter. Rebecky is totally bummed. Alex promises to go to Dollar General and buy her a crystal heart after lunch. I'm a little stunned that this weird game totally subsumed our lives for a few moments there.
Me: God, it would have been cheaper to just buy the damn machine and take a sledgehammer to it.
Alex: Yeah, it's pretty addictive. They have one at the skate park and every time we go we spend like $40 on it.
So then we're all laughing about the ridiculousness of what's just happened to us. What a bunch of suckers! And then I notice the name of the game, and that's when I just totally lost it. You might think it would be called Grab-a-Prize or Whacky Wheel or something like that, but no, it's called THE ROTARY MERCHANDISER.
Me: The rotary fucking Merchandiser? What kind of name for a game is that? I can't believe you kids go to an arcade and go, "I wanna play Ms. Pac-Man! I wanna play Turbo Charged! No, wait, I wanna play THE ROTARY MERCHANDISER."
Alex: (dying laughing) I wanna play the Rotary Merchandiser!
Me: No Alex, the whole joke is that whenever you say Rotary Merchandiser, your eyes have to glaze over and you have to say it in the most boring tone possible.
Alex: (eyes a-glazin') I wanna play THE ROTARY MERCHANDISER.
So then Alex comes up with about 17 different sentences all containing the ROTARY MERCHANDISER and we all sit around cracking up, eating pizza.
Then we get out to the car and the song "Fancy Pants" by Ween comes on. If you've never heard this song, you need to go listen to it right now, preferably before you finish reading this.
Alex: This should be the theme song for THE ROTARY MERCHANDISER.