on the second floor of the Arrowhead Mall, off to the right. . . fake people enjoying a fake sun.
Tag: phoenix
At the BUILD-A-BEAR WORKSHOP, here are the steps for building a bear:
- choose me
- hear me
- stuff me
- hug me
- dress me
- name me
- take me home
Coincidentally those are the same steps for turning me into a bear.
The person hired to stuff the bear, insert the plastic heart, and sew it up is called a BEAR BUILDER ASSOCIATE.
earthbound. . .
At the Wild Horse Pass Sheraton, outside of Phoenix, they installed a bar inside of a fake cliff dwelling and decorated it with appropriately reverent artifacts. Perfect place to booze and shmooze.
Love the desert-themed murals in this Tempe mall. . . showing on the inside, what was once outside.
I had never been to a Rainforest Cafe, but while walking through the Arizona Mills mall, I realized that the restaurant filled an entire bingo card of topics for my website. Fake nature, wildvertising, greenwashing, crapitalism, vaguely apocalyptic. . . all in the same place? Wuh? So my wife and I braved the lush plastic jungle and now I’m convinced. . . Rainforest Cafe is a portal to hell.
Rainforest Cafe is kid friendly, sort of? They have talking trees. Glitchy animatronics. Cartoon predators. And orange fake footprints that tell you where to go. And what happens if you stray off the footprints? You end up at a dark and creepy bar, sitting on stools with sheered-off animal-legs, beneath a giant magic mushroom. So there’s that.
At one time there were almost sixty Rainforest Cafes. Now there are sixteen? The one in Tempe is vaguely apocalyptic. The fish tanks are cloudy and contain no fish. The plastic vines are faded and dusty. Many of the animatronics only half work. One of the gorillas kept twitching and giving Nazi salutes. And the menu is full of food that you’d only order when drunk at 2AM at Denny’s.
It felt weird having animatronic elephants and gorillas watching me eat. I kept waiting for them to say things like, “are you gonna eat that?” and “please pass the ketchup.”
Somewhere in the depths of the Rainforest Cafe is this buff dude, painted in gold, rising out of a hot tub, and holding a neon globe that says, RESCUE THE RAINFOREST. Sure, why not.