If you wikipedia "Ball Pit" this is what they tell you...
A ball pit, also known as a ball pond or ball pool, is a pit, usually rectangular and padded, filled with small hollow plastic, multi-colored balls. It is typically employed as a recreation or exercise for small children. Some ball pits are shallow and only suitable for "wading", while others are deeper and may be used for "swimming".
Ballpits are often found in nurseries, carnivals, fun centers, amusement parks, fast food restaurants, and large video arcades. Chuck E. Cheese removed their ballpits due to safety concerns and becuase the pits were a drain on resources, since children would often steal individual balls till the pits were far below capacity, and thus, unuseable.
While ballpits are commonly thought of as a child's play-thing, there are some that can accommodate adults. Many ball pits have been removed because they are thought of as unsanitary because it is hard to clean each individual ball and because unsafe objects can collect at the bottom of the pit. Beginning in the late 1990's, many urban legends have surfaced saying that kids have died or been critically injured due to poisonous snakes and hypodermic needles at the bottom of the ballpit. China Meiville's short story, The Ball Room, is a horror story centered around a ballpit in an Ikea-like furniture store.
Wow! I love it. I think it was at the last Mascher meeting I attended, when someone mentioned having a room full of balls for a fundraiser party event and the whole thing got me remembering the loveliness of ballpits. I used to love swimming around in those sweaty awesome balls. It was extra fun in those swishy jogging suits I used to wear when I was 5. I'd have a tummy full of Chicken McNuggets, milk, and Animal Crakers. I loved those moments where your feet clearly touched the bottom and then you would try to walk and do one of those trip-steps and sink shoulder or neck deep in that crazy pit of goodness. I can remember ignoring my mom as she stood at the netting surrounding the pit telling me it was time to leave. I remember thinking that the likeliness of her coming in to get me was slim to none so...whatever. Then I thought about how awful the car ride home would be so I waded/swam on out.
The hypodermic needle thing cracks me up because just last night, PHA was rehearsing at Mascher and we heard the icecream truck outside at 9PM. We were all like, "who buys ice cream this late at night?...until we were enlightened by Laura that the truck sells both ice cream and drugs...woa! And the fact that someone wrote a horror story about a ballpit is pretty great too. It makes me think, How great would it be to do a Fringe piece in a moon bounce? and the moon bounce would maybe deflate as the piece went on. Or in inflatable swimming pools and the pools deflate as the piece goes on. The audience sits in baby swimming pools. Or inflatable rafts or innertubes that deflate as the piece goes on. You'd hear that"pssssttttttttt" of the air coming out the whole time. It'd be like one long infinitely lasting, yet controlled, fart that is made collectively by the whole audience. And I, for one, could perform much better if I knew that the whole audience was farting throughout the whole performance. (You know how they say, to cure stage fright you should picture the audience naked or taking a dump??? well this is a new and better twist on it).
So balls and farting...Happy Monday kids!
