The other day I was at Pewabic Pottery and while checking out, Juniper started singing this song out of the blue. I'll admit it is one of the songs I have sung while trying to put her to sleep, but I had no idea she knew all the words. Now if only I can get some of her teeth to rot, she might sing it almost as well as Shane MacGowan.
Happy Christmas everyone.
We're all sitting at the dining room table while Juniper eats her dinner, and my wife is reading to me from a story in the paper about a 72-year-old man who learned that he was adopted after being abandoned at 2-days old in a snowy vacant lot during the Hoover administration:
"'Back then, it was either Jane or John Doe,' one nurse said. 'But they chose to name him Jimmy Snowbank.'"
"What are you talking about Jimmy Snowbank?" Juniper asks. These days she's like a cub reporter for the Poughkeepsie Journal with all the who what when where whys.
"Jimmy Snowbank was a baby they found in a snowbank. . .because his mama put him there. . . because she didn't want him I guess. . .maybe she was scared. . .maybe she was too young to take care of a baby. . .it's hard work. . .because they ask a lot of questions."
The next day there's like a thousand feet of snow outside so I dress her up in so many layers if you took a cross section it would look like they signed the magna carta back when we put her underwear on. With an impenetrable polyester exoskeleton in place, the final touch is a pair of pink Dora the Explorer sunglasses that cover half her face. Every time I put them on her she points at Dora and asks "who's that girl?" and I pretend not to hear her. Outside, she has no interest in making snow angels, but delights in making what she calls "butt prints." She orders me to sit down next to her, but I'm only wearing jeans and soon they're so clammy and cold my balls are snuggling up against my appendix for warmth. "Let's play Jimmy Snowbank," she says, and then she goes through some melodramatic pantomime about leaving me in a snowdrift and she's covering me up with snow and telling me to cry. She forgets nothing you tell her, I think, and then I can no longer feel anything below my belly button. Just when I'm sure they're going to find me frozen like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining with a two-year old wearing sixteen pairs of pants banging a stick against my head and barking at me to cry like Jimmy Snowbank, she tells me she wants to go back inside.
Once there, the feeling returns to my legs, and I sit down at the computer and show her this flickr set. She is so freaked out by seeing Elmo in all those real world situations. "What is Elmo drinking?" she asks. "Beer, probably," I say. "What is Elmo doing there?" "That's what happens when you drink too much. One time I had to sit with your mom in someone's front yard for a couple hours after a party. She looked just like that." I know that one's going to come back at some inappropriate time and get me in trouble. When we get to the shot of Elmo on the toilet Juniper starts hyperventilating. I have to answer at least a hundred questions like why is Elmo pooping and whose bathroom is that and finally what color is Elmo's poop?
To spend all day with a not-quite-three-year old is to regularly find yourself interrogated and trapped in all kinds of existential dead ends. Why does a mother leave a 2-day-old baby in a snowbank? Who is that girl on her sunglasses, really? What color is Elmo's poop? I used to lie like my mom did, but keeping track of all the lies is so exhausting. So now I just hum, and nod my head from side to side. And that worked until yesterday, when she learned to grab my cheeks and say, "Dada you have to talk to me!"
So the kid is really into fairies, and I am largely at fault. Every night I tell her a bedtime story that involves owls and fairies flying around her room and sometimes I get all Pink Floyd with a laser pointer and a blue LED flashlight, and I'd best stop writing about this before I reveal something about "the land of fairy dreams" that could earn me an unfortunate nickname. Let's just say she's really into fairies and leave it at that. I was at the store the other day and I thought I'd pick her up a Christmas present that involved some sort of plastic, figurative fairy, and walking up and down the toy aisles the closest thing I could find is all this "fairy princess" crap. Now I've pretty much had her sequestered away from the whole Princess Industrial Complex. As far as she's concerned, "princess" is just what the creepy old ladies who get in her face at the grocery store call her. I just don't understand why the only fairies they sell also have to be princesses. Is not enough just to be a fucking fairy? You've already got effervescent butterfly wings and a magic wand and pointy shoes and a toadstool couch and two little tiny ponies to pull you around the forest in a wee cart. On top of all that, you need to be a member of some faerie aristocracy? With a fairy castle with little pixie maidservants and a whole fiefdom of lesser fairies to tax in order to sustain your royal extravagances? Why is it perfectly acceptable to celebrate this lifestyle of excess permitted only to those lucky enough to be yanked out of most royal of fairy vaginas? I want the kid to understand that just because someone's parents are wealthy, that doesn't make them smarter, nicer, prettier, more interesting, or in any way better than anyone else. If I teach her that now, she won't have to waste four years at Yale to learn the same thing. Think of the tuition we'll save in 2023!
Well, I suppose I'll have to go looking in one of those hippie toy catalogs that sell faceless dolls made out of organic wheatberry chaff. I'm sure they sell fairy toys that won't offend my Jacobin sensibilities, you know: hardworking proletarian fairy serfs who harvest thistledown and collect dew drops for the royal baths. I wonder if they'll be able to ship in time for the holiday. As my wife always says, you can't rush a hippie.
Okay, that's not really my mother in law, not even after she raids the minibar. That's Carol Channing's big scene from the 1985 made-for-television musical version of Alice in Wonderland. I love the deer-in-the-headlights look the little girl keeps giving Channing. If you can't be bothered to watch the full five minutes, just watch this 1 minute song and dance. It's pretty clear that Lewis Carroll and Carol Channing are kindred spirits.
I am currently using the serialized YouTube clips of the whole movie to scare Juniper away from televised entertainment forever. The credits read like the autograph wall at the Brown Derby in 1980: Red Buttons! Sherman Helmsley! Ernest Borgnine! Scott Baio! Martha Raye! Roddy McDowell! The film features Sammy Davis Jr. as a rapping caterpillar. Ringo Starr in tights and a turtle shell. Telly Fucking Savales as the Chesire Cat. As you're watching it, you might find yourself thinking things like, "Hey, that's Junior's Grandpa from Problem Child and Problem Child 2! Then, "Why is Mr. Miyagi wearing a plush horse costume?" Or, "The post-All in the Family years were not kind to Sally Struthers." The whole movie is kind of like the Love Boat crashed on Fantasy Island and now everyone's on acid.
Alice in Wonderland (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
There is a certain type of person who goes on vacation and says he wants to experience wherever he is going "like a local," despite the fact that locals almost everywhere mostly sit around at work daydreaming about their next chance to go on a vacation. There's one particular self-hating version of this type of person who might, say, go to Chicago for the weekend and (even with a Nikon around his neck) look down his nose at his fellow provincials wandering starry-eyed between the Art Institute, Navy Pier, and the Rainforest Cafe without acknowledging that he, too, is a tourist. He says the word "tourist" the way someone else might say "rodent" or "Carrottop." He has never been to a Rainforest Cafe. It could be a place that serves pan-seared marmoset and sloth tartare. He wouldn't know.
It's with food that he's most annoying. He feels very strongly that meals in a place as big and fantastic as Chicago should not be wasted on something familiar or uninteresting. "You only get a few chances to eat when you're traveling," he says. "I'm not going to waste one of them in the Bennigan's on Michigan Avenue." He might drag his 8-month-pregnant wife, his 2-year-old daughter, and his farsighted mother-in-law around the Loop for an hour looking for some place halfway-interesting that's close to their hotel for lunch. He might end up sulking through a meal in some deep-dish pizza place surrounded by suburbanites and their bags from Macy's, Forever 21, and H&M. Later that evening, on a date alone with his 8-month-pregnant wife in the city of big shoulders, he might hold her arm and drag her down icy sidewalks through three northern neighborhoods looking for a place to eat that wasn't lit by blue neon or filled with the type of guys who wear those newfangled tech-earmuffs. "Are you really surprised by any of this?" He asks her. "Don't you remember Venice?"
"That was eleven years ago. But yes, we smelled every damn canal before you found a restaurant that fit within your annoying matrix of authenticity and affordability."
The next day, he forces her to walk past twenty greasy hot dog stands looking for a place to get an Italian Beef. Some look too nice, others too popular. He refuses to visit any place with a reputation as "the best," resenting such subjectivities because they don't allow him to discover anything for himself. They decide to get tostadas and menudo in Pilsen. He walks back to the hotel; her woman parts hurt so she takes the CTA. He thinks Little Italy looks like it's populated mostly by Indian medical students. As he walks through all these neighborhoods, he thinks a lot about gentrification, how hipsters like him seek and fetishize and ultimately destroy the authentic, because they are so ashamed of what they are. It takes him three hours to get back to the hotel with all his detours, though it would have taken far less if he'd had ice skates.
Finally, as they are about to leave town, they pass a hot dog place on the outskirts of Ukrainian Village that looks just dirty and empty enough to try. He waits for the middle-aged woman to grill a cheeseburger for a black man in coveralls. When it's his turn at the counter, he orders an Italian beef. Dipped in gravy? Yes. With peppers? Yes. It is everything he has dreamed it would be. He even takes pictures.
A few minutes later, on I-94: "I'm sorry you married such an annoying tourist."
"It's okay," she says. "I had notice."
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