Chris Grabenstein
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Chris Grabenstein
Fun House
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He wasn’t happy about it, but last night my partner John Ceepak became a TV star.
Maybe you caught his act on YouTube this morning. The video snip of his guest appearance on the reality TV show
And it’s sort of my fault.
Back in June, at the all-new, all-wood Rolling Thunder roller coaster, I met a girl named Layla Shapiro. She’s my age, just turned twenty-six. Very sexy, very sassy. Turns out Layla (yes, her parents really dug that old Eric Clapton song) was visiting Sea Haven-our sunny resort town down the Jersey Shore-over Memorial Day weekend because she was scouting locations for Prickly Pear Productions, this Hollywood outfit that shoots crap for television like
“Think
Ceepak’s star turn came during last night’s Skee-Ball competition or, since this is
I wasn’t there when the cameras were rolling, but Ceepak filled me in over breakfast at the Pancake Palace. Plus I have his YouTube moment on my iPod.
Here’s what went down:
Tuesday night is family game night at the Ceepak household. But the first week of August is way too hot to stay inside playing Parcheesi without air-conditioning. So Ceepak and his wife, Rita, head over to the Coin Castle on Pier One to amuse themselves.
Unfortunately, they decide to roll a few frames of Skee-Ball, which is sort of like bowling on a ten-foot-long inclined lane but, instead of knocking down pins, you try to whirl your polished wooden ball up a ramp into a series of scoring holes. You get ten points for the easy hole, twenty for the next easiest, and so on up to the fifty-pointer, which is maybe a millimeter wider than your baseball-sized Skee-Ball. When your turn’s up, the machine spits out raffle tickets matching your score, which you can trade in for prizes-once you have like a billion of them.
I say Skee-Ball was an unfortunate choice for the Ceepaks because that same night, the rowdy boozers from