Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

I like old pinball machines. It’s the artwork rather than the games themselves — they bring back memories of hanging out in the arcade at Swift’s Beach when I was young. I was never any good at the games, I don’t even remember trying to play them. It was the atmosphere that both attracted and repelled me — the noise, the smoke, the garish pictures and (of course) the boys. Never talked to anyone there, just stopped in many evenings to observe.
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This is the backglass for a 1972 pinball game that I found on the porch of the The White Elephant Shop in Essex, Massachusetts.

When I was growing up, we spent two weeks at Swift Beach every summer, and I spent a certain amount of time at the penny arcade there. Everyone called it the “penny arcade” but of course you couldn’t do a thing with a penny. Like so much about Swift Beach in those days, the name was an anachronism, a reference to the good old days the older people were always talking about.
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