The death of a Dream, Wizards
So yesterday the wife and I were out in Rockville for some family errands and early Valentines dinner. One of the stops we needed to make was to exchange some of Rory's dance shoes and I realized 'hey, Dream Wizards is literally right across the street; I haven't been there in ages - I should stop in and look around'.
We walk through the door and the stench of the unwashed geek horde assaults us like a hammerblow to the sinuses. We look at each other with this expression of immediate horror, but hang around long enough to do a quick circuit of the place. The shelves are filthy, there's dust on most of the product, a discarded used paper towel we first mistook for a used diaper and dozens of older geeks clustered around folding tables in the back playing CCGs. As we're getting out of there, the pair of guys at the counter ahead of us had epic fails in the areas of crazy greasy hair and 'can't stop scratching my crotch' - we're walking out the door as a woman leads her 4 children in (her older boy was looking for a game, apparently) and we see her face twist as she gets a wiff of the place. Jody and she exchanged sympathetic looks as we got the hell out of there.
When I was a kid, I used to love that store - back in it's old location. It was always a small little place that had character and pretty much dominated the local gaming scene for where you would go to get hobby stuff. The same woman owns and runs the place, but it's incredibly obvious that she stopped caring about the store years ago - the place has become a major dump. It was kind of depressing to see something that had been such an icon of the hobby years ago turn into a bad caricature of the awful smelly unwashed gamer den.
It makes one wonder at the viability of a new reality series where some professional hobbyist goes around resurrecting hobby and comic shops that have fallen into pitiful, nasty states.
We walk through the door and the stench of the unwashed geek horde assaults us like a hammerblow to the sinuses. We look at each other with this expression of immediate horror, but hang around long enough to do a quick circuit of the place. The shelves are filthy, there's dust on most of the product, a discarded used paper towel we first mistook for a used diaper and dozens of older geeks clustered around folding tables in the back playing CCGs. As we're getting out of there, the pair of guys at the counter ahead of us had epic fails in the areas of crazy greasy hair and 'can't stop scratching my crotch' - we're walking out the door as a woman leads her 4 children in (her older boy was looking for a game, apparently) and we see her face twist as she gets a wiff of the place. Jody and she exchanged sympathetic looks as we got the hell out of there.
When I was a kid, I used to love that store - back in it's old location. It was always a small little place that had character and pretty much dominated the local gaming scene for where you would go to get hobby stuff. The same woman owns and runs the place, but it's incredibly obvious that she stopped caring about the store years ago - the place has become a major dump. It was kind of depressing to see something that had been such an icon of the hobby years ago turn into a bad caricature of the awful smelly unwashed gamer den.
It makes one wonder at the viability of a new reality series where some professional hobbyist goes around resurrecting hobby and comic shops that have fallen into pitiful, nasty states.