On Story Land’s Nostalgia Nights, a gift for grownups: Permission to play

Aug 06, 2023

GLEN, N.H. — At Story Land, the height minimum for rides tends to be low. That’s because the average parkgoer has yet to celebrate their first double-digit birthday. But on a recent summer evening, the air filled with the sound of bleating goats and the scent of fried dough, there were few restrictions. It was “Nostalgia Night,” and there was only one rule: no kids. Everyone there was well into their double digits — and looking to relive their own childhoods for a few hours.

My family took me to Story Land every summer until I declared I was too old for it. The park recreates scenes from well-known fairy tales, built up like a demented candy-colored town with slanted walls that house a million ways to play. Trees talk, dinosaurs walk, and sunflowers sing. And the park, which began hosting Nostalgia Nights in 2020, contends there’s no such thing as too old.

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“It’s literally like the kid fun, but it’s adult fun,” explained Tom Dunne while taking a break from lobbing foam balls in the Loopy Lab. I found him after I tiptoed across the ball-strewn floor, dodging squishy projectiles; he and a friend had commandeered tube cannons to defend the upper levels while clad in blinking squid hats. It was his birthday.

“Everyday life is having responsibility,” he said, as his wife, Sherry, twinkled beside him in a pink cowgirl hat. “Tonight is the night to be ourselves,” he added, tentacles flopping.

The park took on a giddy, unhinged energy, as grownups began to relax into the invitation to regress. On the teacup ride, a couple careened slowly, gazing dizzily into each other’s eyes. One man twirled alone, looking deep in thought as he steered his cup.

“On some of the rides, I do feel like a 12-year-old,” said Jim Bourassa, an overall-clad alpaca farmer from Brookline, N.H., who plays Santa during the holidays. I asked what his life was like when he was 12. “Work,” he said — his father was a farmer, too.

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“They say the more intelligent a person is, the more the need for play,” he added, before departing to meet up with his “boss,” which, he explained, meant his wife.

Nostalgia Night gives visitors a long-lost gift: permission to play.

I had discovered a park full of people — some wandering through fairy tale settings with cocktails — who acted a bit as if they were getting away with something.

“No yelling, no puking, no dirty diapers,” said Darlene Wilson, of Bethel, Maine, when I asked what was different from usual Story Land hours. (This was not entirely true: I saw a woman teeter in her heels, reeking of sour fruit punch, then lean over Cinderella’s bridge. Not all fairy tales have happy endings.)

But mostly, it was all very sweet. Adults sat on the princess’s throne and rode a trolley past comically droll woodland dinosaurs. A group of drenched friends zoomed around a splash pad outside the flume rides, laughing maniacally.

“If we did this out on our lawn and in our bathing suits, people would say, what’s wrong with those women?” one of them told me. “And we don’t get timeouts,” added her friend.

Dick and Sherry, a couple from Parsonsfield, Maine, had just stepped off the Bamboo Chutes flume ride. A couple of grandparents in water-splattered shirts, the Chutes were their favorite ride, they said, and they had tried everything.

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Had I been on the rollercoaster, Dick asked me? No, I hadn’t, I said.

“Don’t be such a coward,” teased Dick, who was not, like so many in the park, playing around.

“It’s a tight fit, but it’s so fun,” said a guest named Hunter, visiting from West Greenwich, R.I. “It does make you feel like you shouldn’t be there, but it’s even funner that you are.”

It wasn’t a question of escape for some, but return. Kim and Ally Croteau had just stepped off Dr. Geyser’s Remarkable Raft Ride, and were, like many parent-and-grown-kid teams that night, there to retread their visits as mother and child.

“Reliving them kind of opens up the memory path of just connecting dots and being like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is where the submarine was,’ ” said Ally Croteau.

Forgetting — at least one’s responsibilities — might be the key to remembering what it was like to experience this park as a kid.

“It’s very freeing to kind of forget everything, to bring you back to that place,” said Kim Croteau. “It’s hard not to be in the moment when you’re here.”

Many of Story Land’s favorite features are well-preserved from my visits in the ‘80s, alongside more recent additions, such as the Loopy Lab. Humpty Dumpty gleamed atop his wall. In a nook reserved for fairy tale favorites, I found Mistress Mary’s tiny house (and her garden), and the Old Woman’s giant live-in shoe. I didn’t fit inside Mary’s the way I used to, but I sure did try.

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As for the tutu-clad elephant in the room, only a few mentioned Disney, which caters to, among its constituencies, a vigorous niche adult audience that aspires to never let its dreams expire. Story Land has a distinctively lower-key vibe.

My husband pointed toward a nook called “Little Dreamers.”

“That section’s for babies,” I said, oddly defensively. “This whole thing is for babies,” he countered, fairly. Inside, Mother Goose, wearing a purple frilly dress, held a stuffed bird. She explained that she’d presided over that wing of the park for 15 years, helping children spot the first letters of their name on the alphabet rug.

I asked her what Nostalgia Night visitors hope to find.

“You get to remember what it was like. . . . I think everybody feels that sense of belonging and peace and family and being together,” she explained. “Probably it’s a little bit sad for people, too, because they’re here remembering what it used to be.”

We stood in the waning daylight, and I blinked the dust from my eye.

“I know I’ve been longing for the simpler time,” she said. “Things seem kind of a little bit fast and crazy right now. Don’t you think?”

So it was that Ryan Griffis and Rafi Albukerk slowed it down to dance to an animatronic band backed by singing vegetables. I asked them what they had found at Nostalgia Night.

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“These memories come flooding back and it feels almost healing,” said Griffis.

The next Nostalgia Night takes place Aug. 5. 850 NH-16, Glen, N.H. 03838 www.storylandnh.com