The Great Circus Mystery

Teenager finally beats Sega game after 12 years

Nicole O'Hara will be the first to tell you: it's been a long and treacherous road.

It all started at the tender age of 6, when the now 18-year-old Nicole received a Sega Genesis for Christmas.

"It was our favorite Christmas present for many, many years afterward," Nicole says.  "We all had our favorite games: Dad had Mickey Mania, Mom had Wheel of Fortune, my sister had Toy Story . . . but for me, it was The Great Circus Mystery."

Nicole watched her older sister Janelle beat The Great Circus Mystery alone many times, and when the two small girls played it 2-player, Nicole got to experience the thrill of beating the game.  However, Nicole could never beat it alone.

"I can't even describe how hard I tried," Nicole sighs, choking up a little.  "Even when I broke my arm when I was 9, I asked the doctor: 'can I still play Sega?'  I tell you, I was obsessed.  Watching Janelle beat the game twice a day like it was a piece of cake really drove me nuts."

The Great Circus Mystery is a Mickey and Minnie Mouse game in which the protagonists travel through many worlds (jungle, caves, haunted house, ice world, the castle, etc.) in order to solve the mystery of the disappearing circus and defeat the villain, Baron Pete.

Periodically, throughout the tumultuous years of middle school and high school, Nicole would hole up in her room and try to focus her negative energy on destroying evil Baron Pete, to no avail.

"I think that if I would have beaten Baron Pete in middle school, I wouldn't have felt so much teen angst," she claims, though she's half-joking.  "We never had another gaming system, either.  We really aren't video game people, but Sega was a special part of our childhood."

And adulthood, apparently.  Over this past Christmas break, Janelle, now 21, brought Sega home from college.  After Nicole and Janelle successfully beat the game, Janelle challenged her sister to beat it by herself.

Nicole was up to the challenge.  "It was a big deal.  My parents sat down and watched it.  My sister popped popcorn.  I had a feeling that this was the day."

Ignoring the jeers of her father and sister, and feeling heartened by the continued support of her mother, Nicole triumphed over all the bosses and declared victory over evil Baron Pete.

"It was a great feeling!" Nicole exclaims, flashing a huge grin.  "I imagine that it feels something like when you get out of prison after 12 years.  Well, maybe not.  But I feel like I have finally busted out of my Sega-induced prison."

For the record, at the time of victory, Minnie Mouse had 2 out of 7 lives and 3 out of 7 hitpoints left.

Janelle is proud of her little sister.  "It got a little draining, watching her suck so bad for all those years," she says.  "It was as much a victory for us as it was for her."

Laundry Diving and various other childhood pasttimes

I noticed that one of my interests is Laundry Diving, and I realize that not everyone might know what that is.

It's the rather disgusting habit of letting the laundry pile up so long that it resembles a mountain, and then jumping in it while playing some music, like Lawrence Welk or Jackson Browne or some cheery Bob Dylan song (I realize there aren't many).  Now, the disgusting factor is lessened when it's only your own clothes and there's no underwear.  I have a separate hamper for "delicates" so that's not the issue.  But I own so many sweatshirts and sweatpants and fleece articles of clothing that it's actually very warm and comforting to just jump into a pile of dirty clothes.

I guess you could do it with clean clothes, but your body would probably just make them dirty.  So in a way, it's less gross if you just jump into your dirty clothes with your dirty body, because it's less work (you don't have to re-wash clean clothes).

It was also a lot easier when I was younger, like 6 or 7, because you needed less clothes for it to be a huge mound.  And the music was usually my mom's Dirty Dancing soundtrack cassette tape, or The Best of the 50s with Chubby Checker and The Dixie Cups. 

Speaking of things I used to do when I was younger, the best thing was when my mom would let us take all of the bedding besides the fitted sheet off of her bed, and my sister and I would just do somersaults and play charades and play this weird game called "Bunny/Wild" that I can't even begin to explain, it's so weird and pointless.  Or, my sister and my cousin Karli and I would pretend we were figure skaters in our basement, only we had rollerblades and let's face it, we could barely even stand on them.

We used to play Little Women, and I would make Nikki be Amy and fall through the ice, or I would make her be Beth and die.  Laurie was always invisible, sadly, but in my mind he was Christian Bale.  And we never mentioned Professor Bhaer because as my sister says, "he's an ugly hog".  We used to play Little House on the Prairie, too, complete with flannel pajamas, a well, and an iron to wrap in a towel and put at the foot of the bed to keep our feet warm.  I was always Laura, of course, and Nikki was Carrie.  Although sometimes, she would get ambitious, and be Mary and keep her eyes closed for the whole time, because Mary was blind.

We used to play Homeless.  No joke.  We had a big cardboard box my dad brought home from work, and that was our house, complete with newspaper blankets, and we would dress in all this random winter clothing, and we would walk around with signs and cups for donations, and sometimes we would use an old hatbox for donations and pretend we were playing guitar and singing.  We also would pretend to warm our hands in the trash can.  Only in Detroit would little girls play that game.

There were also the various movies and books, like Pippi Longstocking, Pocahontas, Peter Pan (reallllly hard because we can't fly), Babysitters' Club, The Boxcar Children, Oliver Twist (okay, so we didn't really 'play' that.  We would just take our cereal bowls to Dad and say, "Please, sir, may I have some more?").  We acted out Home Alone by sledding down our outside steps like Kevin did in the movie, only we only had 3 steps so it was kind of anti-climactic.  And there's a wall about five feet in front of the foot of our basement stairs, so that was ruled "too dangerous".

One of the best was Guts, that old game show on Nickelodeon.  We had these cardboard bricks and a bigwheel, and we would make an obstacle course in the basement and the final stretch was running the bigwheel through the bricks, just like they did on the show.  We would yell "Do-do-do Do you have it, GUTS?!"

We tried to act out the board game Clue, but my mom got mad when I used a piece of PVC as a lead pipe and clocked Nikki over the head with it.  My argument ("But she's Colonel Mustard and I'm Mrs. White and I HAVE TO kill her in the library!") was rendered invalid.

In our pool, we would play "Beanie Babies", which means that you just picked a Beanie Baby that was a marine animal and as we did a whirlpool, if someone started to get sucked into the vortex the others would yell, "Flash the dolphin!  I won't quit you!" and you dragged them out.  We played mermaids, and the foam noodles were our sea horses.  We even invented a game similar to Quidditch (this was before I became a Potterhead) in which the mermaids rode the sea horses and had to score points by shooting a volleyball into an inner tube.  We called it something like Herkimon or some gibberish word.

There was the Little Mermaid phase, where we would slosh all the water out of the bath tub and stick "dinglehoppers" (forks) into the couch cushions, much to the dismay of my parents, who sat on them on more than one occasion.  We did frequently get yelled at for brushing our hair with forks.

All in all, my childhood was fun and happy, if slightly bizarre due to my HYPERactive imagination.