STRANGER THAN FICTION: WITH A LITLE IMAGINATION AND AN ALBUM COVER...

There's nothing like a young mind to create its own fun.

Get out your notebooks, kids. You're about to learn the vocabulary word of the day.

It's "foodertainment."

I'm not sure if my boss should be credited with this new word or if she picked it up on the street. Either way, she's the first -- and only -- person I've heard use it in a sentence.

We were talking about the new Lambert's Cafe in Foley, Ala. Yes, it's another location of THAT Lambert's Cafe.

"You know why everyone loves eating there, don't you?" she said. "It's not just a meal. It's actually foodertainment."

My boss explained that, in today's society, people don't cook as much as they used to. Going out to eat isn't the fun experience that it once was -- especially for children. Now they can't just eat hamburgers; they have to play in a ball pit after the meal. They can't just eat a pizza; it has to be served by a big rat and followed by games.

And if they're going to eat rolls, gosh darn it, those rolls are going to be thrown from across the room, just like at Lambert's!

This isn't going to be another what's-amatta-wit'-kids-today column. But it occurs to me that today's youth don't seem to entertain themselves like my friends and I used to.

They have Game Boys for long trips. Nintendo at home. There aren't pick-up games in the park -- teams and games are organized through churches, schools and cities. And I can't remember the last time I saw a hopscotch thingy (board? outline? diagram?) drawn on a neighborhood sidewalk.

I never really see the kids in my apartment complex playing any games. They're usually on their way to the pool to terrorize the old people who wear their glasses in the water. In all fairness, that always cracks me up, too. What do those people want to see out there? Anyway, I took an informal survey of my peers to determine how they entertained themselves as children, back when the only home video games were by Atari. I had one of those things -- the two sticks and the square block that bounced back and forth between them. It had four versions of that game, complete with the stunning black-and-white graphics!

I also had a Barbie whose head popped off five times a day, a Ken whose hair was rubbed off and a "Baby That-A-Way" with no batteries to make her crawl.

Of course, none of the people interviewed for my survey wanted to admit what they did as kids, so I went first. Yes, I used to unscrew a leg off my mother's jogging trampoline, stand on the steps and pretend I was on stage, singing into a microphone. My rendition of ABBA's "Dancing Queen" was nearly flawless.

My other favorite activity was convincing my little sister that I was adopted. My real parents were a royal couple on another planet, I told her, and they sent me to grow up on Earth and spy on a human family. My act was pretty good -- Mom and Dad believe I'm from another planet to this day.

But other people had some good anecdotes, too.

Lynn: "My mom had a Rod Stewart album with his picture on the front. It looked like his eyes followed you wherever you went, so I'd prop the album up, walk around the room and say, `Oh, Rod! Why do you keep looking at me? Do you think I'm pretty?'"

Elizabeth: "My favorite game was `grocery store owner.' I'd drag everything down from the shelves, make price tags out of cut-up notebook paper and tape them to the items. Then I'd make my little brothers go shopping with Monopoly money. Mom kind of came out the loser, because my brothers and I would get into a big fight over who should clean the stuff up and she'd send us to our rooms."

Missy: "My best friend and I played house a lot, only we pretended to live in big apartments in New York and have famous husbands. We always fought over who got to be married to Shawn Cassidy, and she usually won. `You can be married to Peter Frampton,' she'd say. That was fine with me . . . until I finally saw a picture of Peter Frampton!"

So, kids, you can see that you don't need expensive electronic gadgets to have a good time. An album cover, Monopoly money and a fertile imagination is all you need.

It also helps to have parents who listened to a lot of Jimi Hendrix and did their own laboratory experiments, if you get my drift.

~Heidi Nieland is a former staff writer for the Southeast Missourian who currently resides in Pensacola, Fla.