McKenna had a birthday party today for a classmate at her nursery school, and the party was at a roller rink. After overcoming our surprise that a roller rink still existed in suburban America in 2014, we discovered that it was only about a mile from our house. I think I would have been less surprised to find Harry Potter’s secret train platform 9 3/4 than I was to find that roller rink stashed behind the Waffle House on Hull Street.

Entering the rink – named Skate Away – was like being transported back in time to 1989. It was an old-school skating rink, complete with disco balls and stuff.

Somewhere up there is the sign to notify skaters when couples skate has begun.

At least as surprising as finding a skating rink were the following discoveries, made at the skating rink:

• Someone remade and remixed “Who Let the Dogs Out,” filling a void in the lives of all of us.
• There are people in Virginia who still own roller blades and use them. And I’m not counting the people who haven’t bothered to purge twenty-year-old roller blades that have served as a hangout for spiders in a garage since before the turn of the century. The roller blades users I’m referring to were people who had clearly been using roller blades in the last year – it was like seeing someone who knew how to load a Revolutionary War-era musket.

• Young children skate at about the same rate as a fast-moving glacier, meaning that the party was nearly over in the time it took kids to circumnavigate the rink once. I have sped up the video below 7,000,000,000 times to enable you to see movement from the skaters.