Playgrounds for the Future

Photo from Tynan Studio.

Fact: All kids like playgrounds. Also a fact: Though it may seem to take forever, kids grow up. In just a few short years, innocent days of monkey bars and spiral slides turn into nights of double vodka-sodas and cocaine. Enter CiRCA―a virtual jungle gym for adults. So what happens if you put the real kids in the adult playground? Take a second to imagine―hundreds of unaffected kids partying in a playground stimulating enough to keep jaded adults entertained until the wee hours of the morning. It's like feeding a school-wide birthday party of five-year-olds two pounds of Cherry Blasters and a case of Red Bull and then turning on a strobe light. And since CiRCA's already chock-full of alien cartoon figures and futuristic dolls, it won't take much re-modeling to make it seem like something from another planet. At least, that's what we think the Bunch Family must have been thinking when they decided to organize a day of child's play at the oversized night club.

Two years ago, Bunch Family got two of the Broken Social Scene-sters to help with their Salon for the Arts. Last year, kids and their escorts partied as the Bunch bunch turned the freshly opened CiRCA into a mock Andy Warhol factory (Toronto Life covered it in their "Baby Wars" cover story). With more than a thousand parent-and-child partiers, the event was a success―what better way to give your kid a head start on the party circuit? And this time around, on Sunday, it's as if Daft Punk is behind the event―with professional lessons on "The Robot," a DJ trained to keep volumes at levels suited for tiny ears, and a robots-versus-aliens dance-off (um, why can't parties for the older set be this cool?), it's a Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger version of last year's gig. And at the bar, a selection of the finest Juicy Juice and 2 per cent milk will be ready to order for all the heavy drinkers in the crowd.

The dance party's bumpin' this Sunday from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Tickets are $12 for kids-at-heart, $10 for big kids, and free for the ones in the stroller, available at the Bunch Family website. And―if they're not sold out―$15 at the door.