Category Archives: Parental Guidance

Parental Guidance

The Hidden Shame of the Bouncy Castle

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I have this love/hate thing going when it comes to Bouncy Castles. When I say “Bouncy Castles,” I’m referring to those inflatable cages that you often see at carnivals and street fairs, where kids take off their shoes and jump around like crazy inside. When I was a kid myself, I was simultaneously terrified and enthralled by them, but never set foot inside of one. Possibly because wherever we were, a bouncy castle cost extra dough, which we did not have at our disposal.

I recall going to a street fair in my grandparents’ neighborhood when I was maybe six years old, getting on line for the Bouncy Castle, then being turned away at the gate because I didn’t have the necessary tickets for admission. All I could do was watch the other kids bounce around inside like maniacs and envy their fun. Throughout my childhood, Bouncy Castles remained this distant, unattainable mystery, like the light across the bay at Daisy’s mansion, if it were made of reinforced rubber.

Now that I’m a dad, I often find myself at places that have Bouncy Castles accompanied by a child who desperately wants to play in them. More often than not, I’ll spring for a Bouncy Castle visit, while also anticipating horror. Because kids are always completely oblivious to the pain of others, but even more so in the confines of a Bouncy Castle. When my daughter goes to one of these things, I see her leap into the air, looking like she’s having more fun than anyone’s ever had in the history of time, and seeing that kind of pure childlike joy almost distracts from the fear that she will collide with another kid mid-air and break her neck.

Case in point: We went to a fair this weekend that I think was for wool? I remember lots of sheep and llamas trudging around, and ladies in waitress-y glasses with t-shirts that said KEEP CALM AND CARRY YARN. In any case, there was a kids’ section and this kids’ section had a bouncy castle. A little girl who was at least two years younger than my daughter hopped once, landed in a trench between bouncy chambers, and lay there like a turtle on its back. Meanwhile, my daughter bounced obliviously three centimeters to her right, while I screamed WATCH OUT FOR THE LITTLE GIRL! YOU’RE GOING TO CRUSH HER SKULL! Little girl’s parents nowhere to be found. Fun!

And then something caught my eye that I kind of wish hadn’t. This Bouncy Castle was done with a full castle motif. The walls were made to look vaguely like brick, the opening to get in had a curved archway, and the “ramparts” on each side were “guarded” by a pair of goofy looking knights. One of them had a decided “Lenny from Of Mice and Men” quality to him. But whoever painted this figure decided to strip him of his dignity even further.

Yup, full suit of armor apart from one very sensitive spot, a spot they made sure to paint the exact same color as his face, so we have to assume that this soldier is defending the castle commando style. Except not really, because they made the poor bastard Ken-doll smooth. Since he will never know the pleasures of the flesh, this eunuch has decided to vent his frustrations in the service of the king, beheading invaders and infidels with his sword, when all he really wants is a codpiece, so no one will have to know his secret shame.

Even more bizarre: I have to be the first person who’s ever noticed this. Because if even one panicky parent had, you know they would’ve screamed I CAN SEE HIS AREA! and this oversight would’ve been remedied in some fashion. Either they would’ve painted his junk silver to approximate the rest of his uniform, or they would’ve just taken the thing out of commission altogether. But no, judging from the style of the artwork, this thing has been in service at least since the mid-1970s, and NOT ONE PERSON thought Good Soldier Schweik need some goddamn pants until it caught my eye.

This is my curse: To notice weird/disturbing things that no one else does, then pay that sadness forward. I’m living in my own twisted remake of The Dead Zone.

Parental Guidance, Tuneage

Jim Henson’s Street Walkin’ Cheetah Babies

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Last night, my daughter was very excited about the prospect of wolfing down some candy she’d been promised after dinner. (If you must know, it was a Kinder bar, a German confectionary whose creepy displays are ubiquitous in the Polish delis in our neighborhood.) The way she said “candy!” in an anxious cadence triggered something in my brain, and that something forced me to sing “Candy, candy, candy” a la the Iggy Pop tune of the same name that hit airwaves right around the time I started frequenting record stores as an almost-teen. I distinctly remember going to a local Strawberry’s and seeing the walls plastered with the Charles Burns artwork for Brick by Brick, and seeing that same artwork stay there for years.

Of course, I couldn’t sing “candy, candy, candy” just once. Thanks to several undiagnosed and serious mental illnesses, I felt compelled to sing it over and over, amusing no one except myself. Finally, The Kid asked me, “Is that a song?” By which she meant, Is that a real song or are you just singing it to drive us all insane?

Yes, I told her, it’s a real song by a guy named Iggy Pop. This name made her crack up, and I realized that to a 4 year old, “Iggy Pop” sounds like the dumbest, most hysterical name ever.

“Iggy Pop did songs?” she asked between the chuckles.

Yes, I told her. In fact, did she remember the commercial with the pirates in the boats? She did. I told her the song in that commercial was an Iggy Pop song, too. (Yes, I’m fully aware this is a Captain Morgan ad. It’s on TV all the time on every channel, guys. I’m pretty sure it’s in heavy rotation during A.N.T. Farm.)

“I like that song!” she said. “I like Iggy Pop. When I grow up, I want him to be my boyfriend.”

This last line has gone into heavy rotation lately. It’s been applied to virtually everyone she sees on TV and likes. Previous recipients of this honor include Daniel Radcliffe and Jose Reyes. She has eclectic tastes.

Normally, I would just laugh this off. But the idea of my daughter wanting to date Iggy Pop, no matter how hypothetical and far into the future, set off some primal Dad Warning in my brain. So I told her, You probably don’t want Iggy Pop to be your boyfriend. He’s old and kind of weird.

“Does he have good manners?” she asked. No, I said, he does not have good manners. He did lots of silly stuff on stage. I realize “silly” is not quite the adjective to describe someone who used to snap mic stands in half and carve up his chest with the broken ends. But silly is as close as we’re gonna get here.

Then I remembered that the quickest way to discourage someone from thinking they like Iggy Pop is to show them a picture of Iggy Pop. I have a book of glam/punk photos by Mick Rock, a large coffee table slab I snatched up for free when some philistine abandoned it at an old job. I pulled it down off a very high shelf and flipped to a pic of Iggy on stage, grasping the mic, shirtless and adorned with makeup. (Think the cover of Raw Power.)

That’s Iggy Pop, I said, and she immediately recoiled.

“Ew!” she said. “I don’t like Iggy Pop. Boys shouldn’t take off their shirts. Girls don’t wanna see that!”

Oh no, they definitely don’t, I said. I showed her a few more pics of Mr. Jim Osterberg, and she remained convinced that she didn’t like Iggy Pop. Crisis averted. Except, now she wanted to see the rest of this book, which contained many photos of things it’d probably be best a four-year-old not see. Like Lou Reed.

So I swapped the photo collection for another large, artsy book, this one on Tex Avery, and we spent the next several minutes looking at classic cells and sketches of cats getting their heads blown off.

A few minutes later, she said to me, unprompted, “You’re a good dad.”

Thank you, I said. Why am I a good dad?

“Because you’re not in jail.”

Can’t argue with that.

Parental Guidance, Politics Schmolitics

Kids Witness The Darnedest Political Actions

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On Saturday, The Wife took The Kid into The City out for a good chunk of the day, which enabled me to get an enormous amount of work done on my various quixotic projects. I was very grateful for the chance to write uninterrupted, and I hope I can get these things that I’m working on into people’s hands before long. (/tease)

When they returned in the evening, The Kid wanted to tell me all about her adventures that day. First I was told that she had ridden on “seven boats!” over the course of her afternoon. In truth, it was the ferry to Governor’s Island and back. When it comes to a kid’s eyewitness account of something, you usually have to take whatever they say they saw and divide the stated quantity in half.

Then she told me she a “big parade for a contest!” What kind of contest? “I don’t know, but everybody was yelling and singing and waving signs and puppets!” Oh, that sounds like fun. “They were singing, ‘This is denockasee looks like!'”

I asked her to repeat this last part, and she did, but it was no clearer than the first time. She was repeating what she thought she heard–This is denockasee looks like–even if she didn’t understand it.

And then it hit me: She must have seen one of the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, since the Governor’s Island ferry terminal isn’t too far from the center of the whole thing. I assume The Wife told her it was a protest, but since she had no idea what a protest is, her brain interpreted the word as contest. And what she heard people “singing” was the old standby chant This is what democracy looks like.

Sometimes I correct The Kid when she mispronounces words because I want her to the right way of doing things, and sometimes I don’t because her misinterpretation is so adorable and she’ll only be this little for so long. This clearly should have been one of the latter instances, and yet I corrected her anyway. That led to her asking me, “What’s democracy?”, a moment that would have been too precious and on the nose for a Family Circus cartoon. All I needed was little squiggles charting her course back from Manhattan with a ghost-grampa watching on.

Democracy, I said, was the kind of government we have, where we elect people to represent us, like senators, or the president.

If this were a TV show or a movie, she would have had some follow-up question that would expose the hypocrisy and helplessness that all of us feel when we resign ourselves to the harsh realities of adult life. Instead, she said, “Oh,” and asked to watch a Harry Potter movie.