Echo Effect

Outta Leftfield: Teens tackle terror while terror turn tables on timid taxi driver
Published: Tuesday, November 09, 2010
By Mike Morsch
Executive Editor

Hmm. I'm really wondering whether a "taxi driver" will factor into this story at all.

Actually not too much to report on this one. The basics: Morsch takes his daughter and her friends to a haunted prison attraction that, on a previous trip, had frightened him. I'm going to skip around, because vast portions of this entry are just plain boring.

The teenagers apparently have a surplus of bejeebers and they were perfectly happy to part with a boatload of them in the name of having a good time. I do not understand that approach but was willing to be the taxi service that delivered them to their fate as long as I got to stay in the car.

What approach? Running the gauntlet of Morsch's tortured prose gets more exhausting by the day.

The Philadelphia prison’s attraction — “Terror Behind The Walls” — is recognized by those who recognize such things as one of the scariest Halloween-themed attractions in the country. Frankly, the only aspect of this attraction that I was even remotely interested in was the “Comfort and Safety of the Parking Lot” portion of it.

Hey, will Morsch be going in? Or will he be, like staying in the car? He should really clarify this a little. Is "recognized by those who recognize" supposed to be funny? If not it's a complete waste of language.

It was not my first visit to the prison. I took the kids to see it about six years ago, when Younger Daughter was 10 years old and Older Daughter was 16. It was their idea, not mine, but I had to dad up on that one and actually go inside the prison.

I get that self-deprecation is sort of his schtick, but come on. Stupid, smelly, rude, loud, lazy, physically gross, and now cowardly. Are his readers supposed to find this endearing? There's an entire paragraph about how he swears at the costumed monsters and hides behind his kids.

The end result of that trip was that the monsters did their job and Younger Daughter was so scared that we only made it through half the attraction before skeedaddling the premises, and in a hurry. That’s probably the quickest I’ve gotten out of Dodge for anything in the past two decades.

You can't "skeedaddle the premises." You can skeedaddle from.

That experience, though, did nothing to dissuade the now 16-year-old Younger Daughter from returning to the scene of the puddle.

Add "peeing his pants" to the list of self-ascribed Morsch defects.

This time, however, she surrounded herself with other teenagers and I was relegated to chauffeur and cash machine, which was fine with me. I had no intention of contributing another puddle to the prison’s efforts.

That's two pee jokes in one paragraph, and yet another mention of the fact that he is staying in the car and not going in. Can we move on?

The place was packed, so I dropped the teens off at the front gate and began what looked like it could be a futile search for a parking space. After several passes around the prison and surrounding neighborhood (the parking lot was full),

Good LORD, he just said "the place was packed" one sentence ago! It occurs to me that Morsch is like an unfunny version of Seinfeld. While that show could take the trivial parts of life and make them hilarious, Morsch takes the trivial parts of life and makes them downright unbearable.

I got lucky and scored a space right in front of the prison, about 30 yards from the front gate.

From that vantage point, I got an up-close look at the people standing in the long lines waiting to get inside. I also found that with the crack of the passenger-side windows, I could hear the reactions of the people who had just experienced the terror and were headed back to their cars in the parking lot.

“Better bring an extra diaper, you’re going to need it!” shouted one jamoke to the people waiting in line.

"Jamoke": classic Morsch over-used word. I bet Morsch uses the diaper reference to work in a poop joke.

It turned out to be a perfect spot for people watching.

Why? Is it because you can get "an up-close look at the people standing in the long lines," as you said a few sentences ago? Try submitting an effort like this in any college composition class. A teacher would rip it to shreds.

One monster — who I can only describe as Beetlejuice on stilts (and probably several cups of coffee) — noticed me and stuck his face into the passenger-side window.

I can't fault the author too much for this, but the character's name is "Betelgeuse." For once in his life, he didn't have time to Google this? I'm sure this is the lead-up to an epic Morsch Fictional Conversation.

“Hey, buddy,” he said.

“Hey,” I said.

Funny?

That’s all you got pal? Why that didn’t scare me at all.

No. Not funny.

I had stayed outside the attraction this time specifically because I did not want to have to find a 10-year-old to hide behind. Now I had the monsters coming out to my car for criminny sakes.

Is there an echo in this column? Because it seems like the entire thing as been Morsch making a statement in one paragraph and then repeating it in the next one.

I must admit at one point, when [another monster] was crouched in front of my car, I considered blasting the horn in his ear. I had a fleeting thought that it would be funny if I could actually turn the tables and startle the monster. I would have considered it a little bit of payback from six years ago.

No, see, there's a difference. That was guys being paid to dress up and frighten people. This would be Morsch being a total douche.

But I resisted that urge, mostly because I didn’t want to catch seven kinds of heck from the Federated Brotherhood of Monsters and Ghouls Union. I don’t need a whole group of monsters latching onto my pant leg.

First rule of fictional organizations: as the name becomes longer, the laughs generated by it increase exponentially! Note the use of "seven kinds of heck," because he's used it before, and gosh darn it, he'll use it in next week's column too.

It sure sounded like they had a good time. Me, I can think of better ways to have fun, ones that don’t require I bring along an extra diaper.

And we get the pee joke hat trick to end the story. By the way, how exactly did the monsters "turn the tables" on Morsch?