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The volunteer acted like it was no big deal and happened all the time, but it was a first for me… until moments later when I made the same mistake on Radical! right in the main hall in front of all the baddies. I nearly died of embarrassment when I got the ball stuck on a ramp in Al’s Garage Band Goes on a World Tour and had to retrieve a staff member to remove the glass for me.

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I didn’t know TV screens had been used on play fields before Stranger Things. I vowed not to waste my time on Attack from Mars, but had to play Revenge from Mars with its 3D playfield. I also drained when the creature appeared below the playfield in Creature from the Black Lagoon. Nothing prepared me for playing Whirlwind – the first time the fan hit me at the same time as the strobe lights, I dropped my ball. I wanted to rock and roll all night, but I’ve already paid that machine enough attention.įrom there, I bounced around like a silver ball on a playfield, playing most of the games on my list 3 times each before moving on. After all the balls I drained over the last year while trying to get the hang of the smooth modern pinball machines, those old pop-bumpers and drop targets were much easier to hit than I remembered. The game I’d lost countless quarters to as a teenager. When I turned around, there it was – my first Kiss. I needed to wander just to acclimate to the clacks and dings, knockers and voice callouts, and the muggy spring air, thick with the smells of wood and wax, old wiring and ozone. What playing pinball on my phone and even playing in my local dive bar with its 40 pins did not prepare me for was the cacophony of hundreds of pinball machines in four long isles of the main hall nearly all being played at once. I’m reporting that yes, VFW Pinball is the Brighton where Pete Townshend’s pinball wizard must have played 'em all. Is this the same Brighton where the wizard from The Who song played?” I got the impression that I may not have been the first casual player to say that either, but she didn’t give me a firm answer. That’s why they only open twice a year and we all need permits. VFW Pinball now exists in pinball’s fashionable quasi-legal state and its challenges with local law mean VFW Pinball wasn’t really a commercial business and I wasn’t really a customer. She told me the pinball collection’s history, how the zoning changed after they bought the VFW hall so that commercial businesses could no longer operate in this residential area. Follow these halls and go through all of these doors into each of the outbuildings to find more machines. He just grinned, but a kind woman at the desk took me aside to explain the show to me: Here’s a map in the foyer. I clearly wasn’t the first imposter he’d ever met. I made it all the way down the dirt road, through parking in the field, past the picnic shelter with the smoldering grill, and just inside the doors of the main hall where the cash and ticket-taker asked if this was my first time attending before I blurted out my confession: “I’m just a casual player!”

My name was on the list at VFW Pinball, I had $80 cash in my pocket, and I was ready to pass myself off as a competent pinball player.

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I’d even won a few matches on Black Rose, Champion Pub, and Safe Cracker – all of this from the Williams app on my phone, of course.

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I played Monster Bash until I had pretty good aim, learned to nudge from draining down the center on Attack from Mars, and figured out how to hit the looping ramps on Creature from the Black Lagoon. Over the last year, I’ve been catching up on pinball. I walked into a bar one day and saw all the new Sterns, Chicago Gaming, and Jersey Jacks and wondered, “Who the hell is Jersey Jack?” Then I didn’t play again for twenty years until I moved to a town with a vibrant pinball community and realized that pinball had grown up without me. I’d learned to play at the bowling alley as a kid when the proprietor taught me to catch, cradle, and aim so that I would stop accosting his machines by pounding away on both flippers at once. That’s how a casual player like me slipped in unnoticed. Twice a year, the venue opens to the public and anyone who reserved a ticket is allowed to enter the old Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) hall in an idyllic field in rural Michigan where a gaggle of pinheads play more than 500 unique pinball machines all year, restoring them and fine tuning them just so that they will be ready for a small-but-lucky bunch of ticket holders to play. Luckily, to “make it” to VFW Pinball, one need not be a competitive player.

This spring, I finally made it to the Ann Arbor VFW Pinball Museum – one of the world’s largest collections of playable pinball machines located in one of pinball’s most fitting locations.

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