But when the time comes I’ll support her. Decapitation, torching, cutting, amputating, bring it. I’ll encourage her creativity. The Barbies have already endured waxing, implants, and foot-binding–they can handle a little water boarding, I’m sure.

I only remember cutting hair off of dolls–I wasn’t very creative or aggressive, I guess. In my “study” I found that other people were much more inventive:

“Yes, I beat the snot out of my Barbies when I was younger. Her barn always got stormed by my brother’s G.I. Joe’s, and Barbie always ended up riding her horse off a cliff.”

“Hell, I buried mine… I tied plastic bags as parachutes.. Banged her into cactus… I chopped off her feet and hands…My barbies were always ran over… ( id leave them under the car tires on purpose)… shed be hanging on to the roof or a tree for dear life… I guess I was really abusive.”

Wow.

“My dad helped me with some very destructive barbie stunts involving fireworks. We sure had fun though.”

Aw, sweet.

“I guess I was the odd ball. I took care of my barbies for the most part… unless you count chewing off their foots. Or the one time that the little boy across the street spit red cool-aid in her hair & stole her so i broke off her arm & shoved it up his nose.”

Puts me to shame. I wonder: what is the reason for this abuse? Aggression, curiosity, science experiments? If Barbie were fat and/or ugly would we abuse her so? Discuss. I bet parents would intervene more if this were true just so we wouldn’t look bad. Like if she were fat and your kid was trampling her with a feral My Little Pony you’d be like (if people were around) “Don’t be so mean. She’s plus-sized. That means there’s more of her to love. Have her ride one of the bigger horses so Pony won’t get so tired and angry.” Or if there was Muslim Barbie you’d be like, “Don’t torture her! She did nothing wrong!”

Other theories I read about: It’s symbolic–they’re saying goodbye to things of their babyhood. That makes sense, I guess yet why such extreme animosity? I don’t remember hurling Goodnight Moon against cacti. Anyway. Your thoughts?

Preparing a victim

Are those boys in the back decapitating a GI Joe?

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Repossession Man

It’s Take Your Daughter to Work Day and Lyle has forgotten his daughter. He has left her at home. Alone. To do god knows what with god knows who. Yesterday, Lyle found out that his daughter, Izz, was starting to have sex. She was sexually active. She engaged in sexual activity. She was a bit of a slut, he had heard from a family friend.
“Slut?” he had said to the family friend. “Did you just say slut?” The friend owned a restaurant. He said that was the term the boys who worked for him had used.
Lyle sits in his colleague’s office, next to his colleague’s daughter. He’s waiting for Jeff to finish whatever he’s working on and to fill him in on what happened in the meeting. He has never really liked Jeff (he’s the kind of man who calls Thanksgiving ‘T-Day’) and he has never really liked Jeff’s daughter, Candace. She’s hyperactive. She’s always running amok around the offices after school. If Lyle were her age he’d call her a spaz. He’d say, “chill out, spaz,” or something like that.
“It’s my first time,” she says.
“What?” Lyle says.
“My first time. At Take Your Daughter.”
“Welcome,” Lyle says.
She has a yellow ledger on her lap and she’s taking notes and chewing gum with vigor. It looks like she’s munching on cartilage.
“Are you almost done?” he asks Jeff. “What happened already? I need to get back…” Lyle lets his sentence go unfinished, because they both know he has nothing to get back to.
“Where’s your daughter?” Candace asks. “Don’t you have one?”
Her round face looks up at him. She has short brown hair and a straight, faint line of freckles running down her nose. None of her features really go together. It’s as though she has been designed by committee.
“She’s sick,” he says. “She’s home sick.” She’s a slut, he thinks to himself, and I’ve left her at home…
“Too bad,” she sings. “Sick, sick, sick, sick.”
“Can,” Jeff says. “Have you found my policy number yet? I don’t think so. You want to know what the real world’s about? It’s about finding policy numbers.”
Candace lifts her hand, makes it into a claw, and hisses at her father then goes back to her yellow ledger, making her mysterious notes.
Lyle looks at Jeff then at Jeff’s daughter. They have the same mean chin and large sad eyes that give them both a look of incompetence and confidence, a dangerous combination. He thinks of his daughter, of what she has in common with him. He’s been told the smile and the mouth. Same smile, same mouth.
He should have talked to her last night. After learning what was going on with the boys at the restaurant he stood at the top of her stairwell thinking of ways to begin a conversation, but he kept seeing images of her that made his face hot.
He had memories of her as a baby—changing her diapers and cleaning in between her folds of doughy skin. He remembers her little legs spread open, the white cream he’d press against her rashes. Now she’s sixteen and there’s another man, other men, tending to her body and these images of her as a baby and a woman made Lyle leave the staircase and run straight to his room where his wife just happened to be changing into a pair of flesh toned panties, and he thought to himself, oh god, I’m one of them. I’m a boy.
He almost told his wife about their daughter’s new pastime, but thought it would sound better if he came to her after having talked to Izz and solving the slut crisis. It was the same thing he did when his children were babies. He’d take care of a situation—diapers, baths, meals, tears, not so much to help the child, but to be able to tell Sarah that he helped the child.
“How old are you now?” he asks Candace.
“Thirteen. That’s why I’m allowed at Take Your Daughter to Work for Half a Day.”
“My daughter’s sixteen,” he says.
“That’s so cool,” she says. “Does she drive?”
“Yes,” Lyle says.
“See,” she says to her dad. “Sixteen. That’s when I get your car and I’ll drive to Denver and go to clubs and I’ll be all, check this out.”
“She drives,” Lyle says, “but I get scared thinking about her on these roads. I get scared for her life.”
Jeff nods. “See.”
“You’re not scared for my life.”
“I am,” Jeff says, a statement that seems to surprise him. “Now cut the chit chat. Observe. Learn.”
Candace is quiet and he kind of wished she would bother him more, ask him questions about Izz, her life at sixteen. Lyle tries to remember sixteen, an age where life seemed to take you by the hand and show you all the new cool shit you could start doing. At sixteen he had had sex, but he won’t let Izz know that. He tries to see how her having sex is a natural thing, but thinks back to his boyhood, his first dabblings in sexuality–the numerous shower ejaculations picturing Rhonda Geldern in a cashmere bathing suit and then the other first experiences involving real girls. He remembers Tabitha Clifford touching him in her hot tub (too hot, scalding), and touching her, her vagina, in her backyard tee-pee (primitive, spiritual), and then she gave him head on a chairlift because she was saving herself (he had loved the way she saved herself). Good God. If he was sixteen, then Tabitha had been sixteen, too. But parts of it were so innocent. He remembers sneaking out of his house and walking miles to see her, sometimes just to fall asleep next to her and wake up at dawn to walk home. Perhaps it is natural and lovely: first sex, sex at sixteen. But then it stops. As a high-school senior he had the audacity to ask Katie Birch for a blowjob. In college, girls said things like “harder” or worse, “I’m coming!” as if he were a departing bus. Some asked to be slapped. One asked him to put his penis (cock, she called it) in her ass! Margaret Waters of all people! When they were children she had told him to put his ear to the ground and listen for the sounds of hell and now she was asking for a cock in her ass.
The women became like men in their desire. The penis became something to divulge, to handle, whereas when he first began his sexual explorations the penis was kept under wraps, left to throb under his clothes like a red zit–something both parties knew about yet tried their best to ignore.
Jeff closes his laptop and looks at his watch. “Done,” he says. “Okay. Meeting. Same old. We need to come up with a name for the advanced terrain. We threw out some ideas. Leaning toward, “Living Daylights.” Now we need a catch phrase.”
“Be All You Can Be,” Candace says.
“Where’s your head?” Jeff yells. “Be All You Can Be. Come on. It’s got to say something about the outdoors. The extreme outdoors. We have to sell the idea of freedom, of exclusive, outdoor, extreme freedom. Something like, Get Outside! Be Extremely Free!”
“That is so tarded,” Candace says.
Lyle nods in agreement and Candace smiles at him, spastically.
“What about, “Don’t be a bore. Get outdoors,”” she says.
Jeff doesn’t even bother to respond and Lyle just smiles at her. She blows a bubble with her gum and the clear pink ball makes him nostalgic and incredibly sad. He’s sad when he sees this young girl. His daughter seems to be bypassing the early sweet stages entirely, and heading right for the sewage, yet how can he guide her back to the beginning of sexual experience. How can he say, “Here, try this first. Fall asleep in his arms. Every now and then you’ll wake up at the same time and you’ll kiss and fool around and then you’ll fall back to sleep again and it will feel good, but how does a father tell a daughter this? He doesn’t. He grounds her. He makes her feel ashamed.
He tries to see what Candace is writing and he sees the words, “No fear” and “I want to go higher.”
“I got it,” Candace says. “Living Daylights: Scare the Shit out of Yourself Before the Altitude Does.”
“You can’t swear in the copy. Christ.” Jeff looks at Lyle and gestures to his daughter. “You believe this?”
“Actually,” Lyle says, wanting to make Candace feel good. “You’re on the right track. It has to be bold. Clean, but bold.”
She looks at her father and smirks. She swings her legs from the chair. They don’t reach the ground. “So, this is what you guys do all day?”
“We do other things,” Jeff says.
“Like what?”
“Like nothing. Keep quiet and watch.”
“You need to explain something you do. I need to write my report. Do you chop down trees? Kill ecosystems and whatnot? Are you, like, nature’s repo men?”
“Where do you learn this stuff?” her father asks.
“Mr. Keys.”
“What a communist.”
Candace looks at Lyle for an answer. “Well, what do you do?”
He tries to think of what he does, the press he writes to keep the protestors in line, the research on the Boreal Toad, the main hindrance to the expansion. The other day Jeff concluded their toad brainstorming meeting with: “The toads been around forever. Their time is up.”
“I write development ideas,” Lyle says. “Then I sort of try to sell these ideas to the public without them thinking they’re being sold anything.”
“In Aspen they use biodiesel fuel in Snowcats,” Candace says.
“So do we,” Lyle says. “We just started that.”
“Aspen has efficient snowmaking equipment,” she says.
“Move to Aspen then,” Jeff says. “Go find Hunter Thompson and trip out.”
“He’s dead,” Candace says.
“Well, my bad,” Jeff says.
“That equipment only cuts a few million gallons,” Lyle says. “Shaves about four off of 160 million gallons of water, but you’re right. It’s a good public-pleasing policy. Easy pleasing.”
“I want to do what you guys do,” Candace says. “Sit around and think up ways to trick people and get away with stuff.”
Jeff laughs. “Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Don’t look at me like that, Can. Everyone wants to save the earth at your age. Give it four years. You’ll want an Escalade. Then diamonds. Then you’ll want a coat that’s made out of bunnies and dolphins or some crap.”
“We don’t trick people,” Lyle says. “They make their own choices.”
“But you lie in a way,” she says.
“No,” Lyle says. “I make suggestions for what one should desire.”
He wants to ask her questions, too. Are you proud of your work? Do you lie? Do you love your father? Does he influence the bad choices you make? Do you doubt yourself? Why? Why don’t you value yourself the way I do?
Candace writes in her notebook and he likes this moment, watching her write what he says. He feels as though he’s with his own daughter. He always thought he and his son would have the strongest bond, but he felt closer to Izz. With Cully they were always talking about the same things—gadgets and gear, bikes and snow conditions. They were always hitting each other in the shoulder and their phone conversations were loud and unnatural.
He looks at Candace, almost patting her on the head. “You’re right about the slogan. People want to be afraid. They want to feel alive. They want to feel they’ve really done something in their lives. How about, ‘Living Daylights: Dare to Thrive.’”
She writes this down and Lyle is invaded with warmth and pride.
Jeff types something on his computer.
“He’s a lot better at this than you, Dad,” Candace says.
Jeff looks at his daughter. “I’m taking you back to the adoption agency if you don’t shut it.”
“I wasn’t adopted.”
“You will be if I have anything to do about it. Thanks a lot, Lyle. You’re making me look real good here in front of the little one. I’m supposed to be inspiring her.”
I’m inspiring her, Lyle thinks to himself. I’m capable of inspiring a girl. “I have to talk to her,” he says to Candace. “My daughter.”
“Busted,” Candace says. “Is she in trouble or something?”
“Is she doing that sexting thing?” Jeff asks. “They’re all doing that now, luring in the pervs.”
“No,” Lyle says.
“Oxy Contin?” Jeff asks.
“No, no, nothing like that.”
“She a cutter?”
“No, Jeff. I don’t think so.” Lyle doesn’t even know what these things are. Maybe she is a cutter. Maybe she does do sexting and oxy whatever.
“But she’s in trouble right?” Candace asks.
“Yes,” he says. “She’s in trouble.” Lyle thinks of himself as a boy and as a man. “She’s in trouble for the rest of her life.”
Jeff stands and looks at his teeth in a small mirror that hangs above a bookshelf of men’s health magazines. Lyle sees his hand in his pocket, his knuckles moving, the swell of a ring. His hair is gelled making his head look like a black shell.
“We’re all in trouble,” Lyle tries to say lightly. He touches Candace’s knee, something his daughter never lets him do anymore—touch her, and he feels a strange love for this other man’s daughter, for daughters across America learning what their fathers do and who they are when they’re away from home.
Candace looks at his hand on her knee and then screams, “Stranger danger! Stranger danger!” then erupts into laughter.
Jeff walks over to her swivel chair, bends down and grabs her face and holds it so that it’s in front of his. He doesn’t say anything. He just holds her face, contorting her lips and glares into her watering eyes.
He finally lets go of her mouth and she presses her fingers to her jaw. She stands up and looks at Lyle as if he was the one who hurt her, tricked her. She runs out of the room and Lyle walks to the doorway and watches her run, run down the hall past the board rooms, past the secretaries’ cubicles, past the reception desk and headed toward the glass doors and into the world, into the trouble, the tricks and the lies and the suggested desires. He wants to shout: Goodbye! Goodbye! But instead he turns to his colleague and says, “You better go bring her back,” and then he follows her trail through the office, heading home to his daughter where he’ll act like a repo man and muster the courage to take his own advice.

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On the show Heather Armstrong (writer of the mother of all mother blogs, Dooce) admits she can do away with plastic toys and isn’t good at arts and crafts. Oh snap! SHHHHHH!!! I waited to hear “the parts of motherhood no one knows about.” Just what parts are those? We’ve been literally poked and prodded and sucked dry. Most of our husbands have seen a head come out of our vaginas. Some of them were lucky enough to see us poo on a table while the head came out of the vagina–there’s really not all that much we have left to expose. If anything we’re way too out there. Nothing has been left unseen or unsaid. Our stories are scattered all over the place, giving sitcoms ample opportunity to mess things up. Case in point: the new show, “In the Motherhood.”  It’s truly lame. Lame plots and language, and no mothers dress like that just to hang out with each other. The dialogue is awful. We’re way more unpolished immature, awkward, obnoxious, and mundane. We can hang out for hours and just talk about food and our children’s sleeping schedules. We’re also way more crude. Here are some snippets of conversations I’ve had (or overheard) with other moms recently that pretty much represent the gamut. 

1.
“I hate it when my boobs sweat. You know, the underneath part?”
“I hate that!”

2.
“Were you horny when you were pregnant? I masturbated constantly.”
“I felt like an ape if I did that.”
“I almost humped my bedpost once. It was looking real good!”

3.
“So I guess “Hayden” is starting Elimination Communication. Why can’t they just say, “Potty Training?” No one better teach my kid to use the word “Elimination.” My son will say, “Poop.” He will say, “Mommy, I crapped my pants.””

4.
“I haven’t had a pot brownie in so long.”
“We should totally make them.”
“That would be so funny!”
“Can you imagine?”
“Oh, did you want to dye eggs Saturday? I got this kit. It has stickers and shit.”
“Sure.”

5.
“Every afternoon I think I’m good then bam. They start whining and I crack open a beer. I have to.”
“I know! I’ve actually been trying to hold out until the weekend. Can’t do it.”
“So it’s okay to drink every night?”
“I think so. It makes me a better parent, personally.”

6.
“I got that Carmen Electra aerobics strip tease video and I’m going to learn something for his birthday. I’ve been practicing.”
“Oh my god are you serious? You’re such a good wife!”

“The other night I took off my underwear and was like, “Ok. go. Before American Idol starts.” It was like the best thing that ever happened to him.  I didn’t even shower.”
“I don’t know what song to strip to. I was thinking that Fergie one, but he has this serious thing for Fergie and I don’t want him to be thinking of her.”
“Why not! Then it will be over quicker.”
“That’s true. Kids! Five more minutes!”
“You’ve said that, like, twenty times.”

7.
“I got the crab call in college.”
“The what?”
“The crab call. You know—‘I have crabs and I’m calling you and the other people I’ve slept with to tell you about it so you can shave your pussy hair off and take crab-be-gone pills.”
“I can’t believe he called to tell you. I wouldn’t call. Would you?”
“I don’t think so. It’s pretty responsible. He was all business about it. Offered to make me an appointment.”
“Whoa. That’s the kind of guy who will take care of a baby. He’ll do night feedings.”
“I know.”
“So did you have crabs? Are they actual crabs? Like with pinchers?” 
“I don’t know. I didn’t have them. That’s why I wouldn’t call. I mean he endured unnecessary embarrassment. He will forever by the guy with crabs.”
“Forever Crabby.”
“I was such a slut back then.”
“I’ve only slept with three people other than ____.”
“Really? You seem slutty. Like you’d be recognized by the back of your head.”
“Fuck you.”

There.  Now you’re in the motherhood, bitches. Now give me a sitcom.

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2. One of the items up for bid was to be the headmaster for a day. In the program this was most unfortunately titled, “Head For a Day.” When this is presented to a table full of drunk people in a context where you’re supposed to be semi-refined and respectful, lewdness ensues. “Maybe I should go in on it with someone,” Andy said. I told him I’d write the check, but then asked, “Wait— who’s the head coming from?” because that really changes things.

3. We bid on a condo in Sun Valley for a week. I think we won, damn that wine. Rumor is they were looking for us but we had bid, dined and dashed. We left our credit card number so we thought that took care of things. We’re hoping they’ll track us down and that we didn’t cause any unnecessary frustration because we really want our daughter to go to the school— I mean— we really want to do what we can to raise money for the school. So call me and we’ll pay up! And about the party— the jokes on the word “head” (so rich in possibilities— We’re usually not that immature, drunk or irresponsible, and any day now I know my mom’s going to tell me about our old family money she’s been hiding all this time so I could have a normal upbringing.

4. Sunday, Hawaii Opera Luncheon at the Halekulani. Two woman sang a duet from Madame Butterfly. The hostess, seated next to me, looked down and wiped her eyes. I thought she was moved and touched her back and smiled.
“Why is she wearing those awful shoes?” she said. I quickly removed my elated expression and said, “It’s ghastly. I mean, really.”

5. At the luncheon we had a fritatta, pork loin, savory bread pudding, and when it came time for desert I couldn’t stomach it, especially since there was a fashion show and skinny models were trotting down the runway making me feel like a Jaba the Hut who lunches. I didn’t eat my panna cotta. My Rubenesque hostess looked at my full dish and her empty dish. “That’s why I look the way I do, and you look the way you do,” she said.
“But who’s having more fun!”
“Well,” she said and downed her champagne.

6. Dinner at friends house. People talking about those Harry Potter jelly beans with gross names like, Vomit and Guts and whatnot. “They should make those for adults,” I said. “They could name one, ‘Pussy’.”   Silence.
And that was my weekend.

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I have a few more things to say about the princess posse.  I didn’t say it all in one post because I have a short attention span and figure you do, too.  The princesses aren’t that big a deal.  Far worse things await: the Jonas Brothers, for instance, or teen idols with babies and/or meth addictions.  Disney Princesses are relatively minor.  My daughter developed this passion for commercial characters in general at around two. She actually has clothes and underwear with cartoon characters on them, something I always thought was so white trashy, but whatevs–it gets her to put on her pants just as “Seven” or “Paige” gets me to put on my jeans.

One thing I don’t allow in the house  are foods with cartoons on them. The little bitches are always on food items whose first ingredient is corn syrup (found to contain mercury, which the FDA has known for years.) Why can’t they put Belle on tofu, Aurora on almonds, Cinderella on garbanzo beans?  Call them Hot Chick Peas for all I care. Otherwise I don’t protest too much. The vacant skanks make her so happy, and I’m not the kind of mom who only allows wooden toys and books about bi-racial eagles with two proud fathers. I’m not OBSESSED. In fact, I let it go, for the most part, not because I’m just chill like that, but I don’t know how the hell I’m supposed to explain gender and shit.  It’s not time yet, and I don’t want to kill the magic, but…

Here’s what happened the other day at the playground:

Eleanor and I were in the hut pretend-cooking when all of the sudden her eyes widened and she screamed, “Dora!” She began stomping her feet and pointing and I looked for someone who had on a Dora backpack or t-shirt, but there was nothing.

“Oh my God, Dora!” she said again, and I looked at the slides, a girl sliding into her nanny’s arms.  A short, Mexican nanny with bobbed hair and bangs: Dora. 
“No sweetie,” I whispered. “That’s not Dora. We don’t know her name. It could be Louise or Mary.”

“Louise?” she said.  ”I don’t know about that.”

She really did look like Dora, if Dora was fifty-five and taking care of twin blonde girls who kept shouting, “Look what I can do! Look what I can do!” A Dora who had stopped her adventures and explorations and spent her time parked at a playground bench, grinding up flax to sprinkle on the in-vitro twins’ tofu dogs.

“That’s not Dora,” I said again, cringing at the way her face fell at this news. She wasn’t convinced. 
Was I supposed to explain to her that not all Mexicans are Dora, just as not all Asians are her friend, Austin’s, dad?  I’m fairly good at blending in lessons, hiding them like spinach in meatloaf, but this is hard turf.

I remember a while back in San Francisco we went to a funeral for a baby whose name was Thomas. Every time his name was spoken during the service Eleanor yelled, “Thomas? Thomas! Thomas the Train!”
 We said, “Shhh.” We said, “No not the train. He’s a boy. A boy.”

Later that night we did our reading routine in the living room. I read a book to her and when I finished she fetched me another. She sat on dad’s lap.  ”Where is green sheep?” 
I read.

“Where is Thomas?” she asked.
 She was two-and-a-half at the time.  The question brought tears to my eyes. Andy and I exchanged glances. What do we say? When do you start telling the truth and killing the magic? 
“Oh, sweetie,” I said. “Thomas had to go.”
She looked at me with her little mouth open. “Oh, he had to go?”
“He had to go,” I said.
“He’s okay,” Andy said.
“Yeah,” she said. “He’s okay.”

There are a lot of women at playgrounds who look like Dora because…
Cinderella can suck it because…
Thomas is dead because…

Do I have to fill in the blanks?

***

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I confess. When I read to my child at night I sometimes try to skip ahead. She always catches me, but I persist, omitting adverbs (much too prevalent in children’s fiction) and dialogue tags.  Tip to writers: Don’t try to be creative—he exclaimed, she retorted, he cried, she responded.  Just say, “he said,” or “she said,” unless it’s obvious that he or she said it, then just don’t say anything.  Moving on.

I’m such an asshole for cutting her reading time short some nights.  I don’t cut her watching-the-Bachelor-with-mommy-time short, after all.  And, I just finished Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (brilliant book), which stresses the importance of practice, putting in the hours, and extra work. I know the magnitude of legacy so what gives?

Here’s what gives: children’s books.  Not all, of course, but many, especially the ones about Disney princesses.  One of last night’s stories was about Aurora and Prince Philip, a kind of part II to Sleeping beauty.  I hate fairy tale sequels. They give me violent thoughts. They’re vapid, lazy and should be banned by Obama. 


“Why do you like Aurora?” I asked.
”Um, um.” She covered her face, feeling the pressure. “I like her necklace and I want to be like her.”


“What?” I said. “Crazy. You know what’s weird–people want to be like you, too.”


My daughter beamed. In a writing class, Tobias Wolff told me to never use the expression, “she beamed,” but that’s what she did. “Isn’t that neat?” I said.

“But they can’t be like me ’cause only I’m me.”


“And you don’t want to be like Aurora because then you wouldn’t be you.” Ho snap–mommy just dropped some knowledge right there. 


“Fo shizzle,” she said.


“Sweetie, you need to stop saying that,” even though I love when she says it, but I have to draw the line somewhere since I get points docked for skipping ahead.


At the same time, I can also make the case for skipping.  For example, after a few readings I began to skip the part in Snow White that says, “When the dwarfs learned that Snow White could cook and clean, they invited her to stay.”

The first time I read that to my daughter I paused to say, “Are you fucking kidding me?  Fuck the dwarfs.  They’re dwarfs!”  No, I didn’t really say that, but I did say later, when Snow White got whisked off on the prince’s steed: “How does she know she’ll even like him? They never even spoke to each other.”


“Yeah!” Eleanor said.


“He could be a total loser. He could be like, ‘Hi Snow White, wanna’ ride my horse.’ I realized I was speaking in a retarded-sounding voice and stopped.  “Why would she go off with a stranger who did nothing more than kiss her? I mean, is he stable? Does he work or just live off his parents? What are his table manners like? His taste in music? Why must there be so many adverbs in these books?!”

“I just don’t know,” my daughter sighed.  Then she asked me to read Cinderella, then the Little Mermaid and finally, the token minority, Jasmine, from Aladdin.  I read.  I skipped, I omitted, I added on.  I’m just so sick of these bitches with their freakishly wide eyes, their shy laughter and porn bodies.  You can’t blame me when I do a little improv and after the line “When the dwarfs learned that Snow White could cook and clean, they invited her to stay,” I have Snow White say: “You’re closer to the floor, bitches.  Clean it your own damn self.”

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There is so much brilliant analysis of the inauguration, I figure why add to the mix? Why dissect an already dissected frog? I’ll just write down what I did on this historic occasion.

We got up at 6 a.m to watch the swearing in with Eleanor. “What’s African-American?” she asked.

It was like playing charades. I just made gestures at the television. (I later asked my friends how to explain. They said: “You say he’s black.”
Oh.)
Then we watched the speech (which proved again that prose is better than poetry). Then I took her to school, went to Morning Brew to work, inspired to dust myself off.  Then I came home to watch more t.v.

That night we went to an inauguration “ball” where we greeted hope and new beginnings with a keg and fish tacos. I do not like being asked to wear a gown, write a check and then be given a plate of cod rolled into enriched flour dough, but enough. Change, renewal, sacrifice, and nothing could be as unfortunate as Aretha Franklin’s bow and awkward phrasing of “Country.” Tip. When you sing, ‘country’ do not pause between the ‘count’ and the ‘try.’ It’s an old Chinese proverb.

God I’m hung over. There was wine, too–a good mother’s drug of choice. At one point while pouring myself a hearty glass of Twin Fin merlot some dude said, “What’s the vintage?”

“What? I don’t know.” He loomed over me like a cloud. “Oh,” I said. “You’re joking. You made a joke.”

“Are you relieved? Nice dress.”

“Thanks.”

I looked around for my daughter–she’s like a badge that says, “Move along, tool,” but she was across the yard with her buddy, playing with his dad’s iphone. This is her friend who taught her that Martin Luther King got shot by a bad guy.  Yes, we brought her to the party. I thought it would be cool if the family was all together on a night like this, and we bring her with us everywhere anyway, even to fancy restaurants because that’s how we roll. I like how Cheney rolls, too.

“It’s such a nice night,” the tool said.

I looked for my other badge, my husband, but he was pumping the keg, his back turned to me. He later said that he didn’t interrupt because he wanted to see his game. Then I sat down and ate a few tomatoes. I participated in a brief discussion about scurvy. Supposedly it’s back, like flannel (which isn’t actually back, neighbor up the street). What if consumption comes back, too? Or the plague? An older gentleman in a tux explained scurvy, the plague and consumption.

“Are you a physician?” P asked.

“No, he’s just old,” I whispered.

“I learned it from watching NCIS,” the man said, which is pretty much the same thing I said. I observed that all the Punahou people were at my table. Practically everyone at our table had received a diploma from Dr. McPhee, the same man who handed Barack his diploma. The woman next to me was Obama’s classmate, but I tuned out when she talked because she didn’t smile and I could tell she was preparing what to say next whenever I spoke. I don’t like that. I like improv. Anyway, about Punahou, about Hawaii. Our table discussed that we’re all very aware that we’re trying to claim Barack in some way, as if by going to the same high school means something. But it does, right? It’s a neat fact, right? And our town, Kailua, could very well be the next Ranch. The ‘shaka’ could be the next fist bump. Let us have our claim.

And that’s that. We drove home on a cold Kailua night. We put our daughter to bed–she insisted on sleeping in her party dress. Then Andy and I retired to the bedroom and dissected the frog a little more (no, that’s not a sexual position–I’m referring to inauguration analysis). We talked, we laughed, we reflected. Then I watched TMZ.

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