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Best place to relive your childhood

ALICE WHEELER

Some of us '80s children spent much of our weekly allowances at video arcades, going for the thrill and glory of clearing the final level of Ms. Pac-Man. Hi-Score (612 E Pine, 860-8839) is the place to relive those by-gone days; all our beloved old games are here—Centipede, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Galaga, Tron—plus a roomful of pinball machines. More ambitious players might want to enter Hi-Score's Fifth Annual Atari 2600 Championships, to be held in the fall. And if that isn't enough to get you in here, the yesteryear prices (most games cost a quarter) certainly will. (We repeat: A quarter!) If you get hungry, you can snack on candy bars and Hostess cupcakes—you know, the ones with the white squiggles across the top—and other stuff you ate before you started reading nutrition labels.

Best pool hall

Go ahead and squeal into your cell and pound your Jagermeister at Belltown Billiards or that big posh place at the end of Lake Union, if that's your thing; if you want the real deal, come to the 2-11 Billiard Club (2304 Second, 443-1211) and show some respect, dammit. This is billiards as religion; the hush (enforced by signs reading NO WHISTLING AND NO EXCESSIVE NOISE!) is broken only by the clicking of the balls and the whirring of many enormous fans, which make for a nice breeze on a hot night. The lighting is exquisite, the Rainier is cold, the guy working is funny in a low-key way, and the price is way to the better side of right. Get your latte (and drink it) somewhere else; this is a metal-lockers, real-phone-booth, machine-that-squirts-bad-coffee-into-a-little-paper-cup type of joint, and it is beautiful. Welcome to the Church of Pool.

Best ashtrays

This Pioneer Square bar/hangout/dance club attracts a healthy after-work clientele that's not too heavy on either dot-com millionaires or blues-bar riffraff, and the music's fun, with DJ Riz getting especially busy on Friday nights. But the best thing about the Backdoor Lounge (503 Third, 622-7665) is its opulently trashy decor, and that's exemplified nowhere better than the place's ashtrays. Some of them look like real ashtrays, no doubt, albeit those '60s-style pseudo-space-age kinds that look like orange peels with miniature carnival slides in the middle. But our favorite is the one that appears to be a Barbie car made of ultra-thick plastic, its seats meant to catch ash. Even if you find kitsch tired, even if one more display of mod-style kookiness just adds to the dust heap of fashion, even if you abhor nicotine, you've got to give it up for this one. If you don't smoke, it'll almost make you want to.

Best after-hours club

Say what you want about Superhighway, Aristocrat's, and I-Spy's new after-hours nights, Seattle has NO after-hours scene. Much of this, of course, has to do with our ridiculously early 2am drinking curfew and tight-ass noise ordinance. Which brings us to a club, that only of its kind we know about—2514 Dexter (2514 Dexter, 352-5984). Perched high above Lake Union and sharing the no-frills quality of San Francisco's top-shelf 1015 Folsom, 2514 Dexter's retro-'60s d飯r (complete with framed photographs of dead presidents and their wives), permissive attitude, and crafty beats from resident DJ Chauncey Fenwick have put this tiny pad on the underground map.

Best hassle-free weekend dance night

Sure, you could go to the Showbox on Saturday nights: Dedicated, the club's weekly dance night, ropes in plenty of stellar guests, including house giants Angel Moraes and Terry Mullan and local hero Donald Glaude. But even walking down First as the crowd lines up to get in gives us a creeping sensation of having walked in on a frat party that we didn't want to know about to begin with. That's why we're more inclined to hoof it over to I-Spy (1921 Fifth, 374-9492) for their stellar LickIt! Maybe it's just because we miss the old Showbox's two-room setup, back when they were hosting Electrolush, and find that I-Spy's three-level structure suits our multifarious dancing needs much better. The main floor usually features house or whichever major headliner—Alex Gopher, Dimitri from Paris, Aphrodite—the club's intrepid promoters have managed to snag, while the top level, a.k.a. the restaurant Nation, and the smaller entrance area feature local and up-and-coming names spinning anything from classic funk to up-to-the-minute drum-and-bass. But what we love the most about LickIt! is that our female friends can actually dance without getting hit on by some mook with a blank stare and a cell phone.

Best tea dance

Tired of Friday- and Saturday-night dance scenes? We mean really tired, as in can't even think about moving your fanny at 1am? Well, before you give away your dancing shoes and resign yourself to feeling O-L-D, check out Sunday afternoons at Timberline (2015 Boren, 622-6220), where the music starts pumping at 4pm and the last dance ends at a very respectable 9:30. Oddly, the building looks like a Bavarian lodge, but their retro Sundays turn the place into a disco-funk Xanadu. James Brown, Chaka Khan, Earth, Wind & Fire, and Michael Jackson's Off the Wall are often on the turntables, accompanied by vintage concert videos projected onto an overhanging screen. Seventy-five-cent beers keep the crowds lively, and best of all, after all that drinkin' and sweatin' on the dance floor, you'll be home in time to catch Crocodile Hunter.

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