Early Onset Senility

I work for a great woman who is understanding and supportive about my never ending issues with my kids (orthodontist appointments that make me come in late, homework that requires me to leave early, kid illnesses that prevent me from coming in at all). Even better than that, she’s about my age, and grew up in the same part of the country I did (Middle Atlantic states, for those of you playing along at home), so we have a lot in common, and many of the same cultural references. Our weekly half hour one on ones are a quick recap of what’s going on in my work world, and up to twenty five minutes of chat about one thing and another.

Sometimes it’s work-related—gossip or other news, but more often than not, it’s personal. We’ll talk about what we did over the weekend, or something that happened with one of my kids, which will lead us down a path of reminiscences about when we were kids.  Sometimes it’s current events or celebrity gossip. We’re kind of all over the map. We swear a lot.

This week we had something happen that happens all the time—there was something celebrity-related we were discussing but couldn’t remember certain details, and as a result, we sort of talked around in a  circle, pulling on pop culture threads until we got it, kind of like those lame piñatas with the bazillion curling ribbon strings intended for really little kids, where they’re supposed to pull one string at a time until some kid pulls the right one and a cascade of Dubble Bubble gum  and Jolly Ranchers comes cascading down on their heads (and why do people always put such sucky candy in piñatas? Hello, chocolate? Not even little kids would pick Jolly Ranchers over chocolate).
 
It started with my recounting how one of my twins had stomach flu over the 4^th of July weekend. He’d barfed on Wednesday, but seemed fine on Thursday, until my husband took them to Dairy Queen. He ate a cone, then promptly horked it all up in the parking lot (the kid, not my husband). There’s a town near us that does their fireworks on the 3^rd, and we were going to take all four of them that evening, but after the puking I said this one needed to stay home with me. Especially after I called the doctor and they confirmed there was a stomach flu going around—I didn’t want him to give it to anyone else at the fireworks display. And as for staying home myself, I was totally OK with it. In the first place, fireworks bore the snot out of me (oo…ah…whatever; you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all) and in the second place, I find it weird that this town does them on the 3^rd. It’s my private little protest that I don’t normally get to exercise because my kids want to go see the goddamned fireworks (oo…ah).
 
So he and I stayed home and he watched The Little Rascals. It came out in 1994, and stars exactly no one you’ve ever heard of, and is one of the stupidest movies ever released (any of the fucking talking dog movies might be a contender here—you know, the ones with the golden retriever puppies who save the world with nothing but a chew toy and a shit ton of nauseating cute). The sad thing is, if the success of the movie was based on the adult cast alone, it might have stood a chance. Whoopie Goldberg, Daryl Hannah, Mel Brooks, Lea Thompson, George Wendt. The only two of the kids in it you’ve ever heard of are the Olsen twins, who were billed as “Twin 1” and “Twin 2” and showed up in possibly two scenes. But this movie is one of my kid’s guilty pleasures, and the fact that he had a couple of hours at home alone without any siblings expressing their damned opinion of what should be on the TV gave him a chance to watch it.
 

 
 
 

> = < ?

It's a toss up. They're both pretty much made of suck.

My boss wasn’t even aware that they’d made a movie of the Little Rascals, so she looked it up on IMDB, remarking as she did so that Mel Brooks had recently died. Thus it was that we had this exchange:
 
Me: “No he didn’t,"
Her: “Didn’t he?”
Me: “I don’t think so…”
Her: “Oh, no, it was his wife who died not long ago.”
Me: “Um…umm…Annette Benning!”
Her: ”…”
Me: “Right?”
Her: “No…  …  …Anne Bancroft"
Me: “Oh right! Well, I got the initials right. Annette Benning is married to…um…”
Her: “Uh…”
Me: “Carly Simon…I mean, you know, the song…”
Her: “Right, the one that dated everybody…”
Me: “Um…”
Her: “Warren Beatty!”
Me: “Yes!”

We decided that this is what happens when you get older. You can’t think of things, but you can think of all the things around the thing, or related to the thing. We do this all the time. We’ll be talking about a song, or a movie, and we can’t think of the primary piece of information, but we can remember half a dozen tangentially related facts, so we bounce them back and forth between us like so many ping pong balls until sooner or later something strikes a live synapse in one of our brains and we triumphantly spit out the answer, proud of our ability to sort through the dates in American history, punch lines to blond jokes, and old phone numbers stored in the cluttered recesses of our aging memories along with whatever pertinent information we were hunting for. It seems like this is the only way we can remember things—by playing a sort of Early Onset Senility version of Six Degrees of Separation.
 
When I got back to my desk, I got curious. I didn’t remember hearing that Anne Bancroft had died. I loved “The Graduate” and I remember seeing “The Turning Point” when I was about nine. I had always thought she was so lovely, and such a really excellent actress. Plus I love Mel Brooks (“Blazing Saddles” is just awesome—“Are we awake?” “We’re not sure…are we black?” “Yes, we are” “Then we’re awake…but we’re very puzzled” I mean, that shit is genius). I looked her up on Wikipedia (the source of all wisdom). Wikipedia is the best friend of those of us who suffer from Early Onset Senility. For the curious, she died of uterine cancer in 2004, two months after her son and daughter in law had a son (I thought it was nice that she got a chance to at least see her grandchild).
 
I went back to my boss’s office a little while later.
 
Me: “So I started wondering when you said Anne Bancroft had died recently, and looked it up on Wikipedia.”
Her: “Yeah?”
Me: “For the record, she died in 2004. Ten years ago.”
Her: “…”
Me: “Right?”

The fun never ends with Early Onset Senility.

Confessions About Kid Movies

It’s fairly common as a parent to not be wild about one’s children’s televisual selections. Children seldom express an interest in the most recent Academy Award nominees, nor light but charming rom-coms staring the Hunk of the Moment. However, I must confess that in ten or so years, there have been a few movies that I’ve bought for my kids that I’ve secretly enjoyed. Sometimes not so secretly (“C’mon guys—let’s watch ‘Franklin Goes to School’ again, you wanna?”). It's sort of like admitting that you really liked your toddler's Gerber Fruit Puff things, or that, as much as you  may roll your eyes when the song comes on the radio (every seven and a half minutes), you really do clap along with Pharrell and know what happiness is to you. This may not be an exhaustive list, but it has the potential to be vastly humiliating, and that’s what counts, right?

Pooh’s Heffalump Movie
This was the first one I found myself urging my oldest (who was the only one old enough to watch DVDs when it came out) to watch again. “How about Pooh’s Heffalump Movie?” I’d say hopefully. Since he was young and easily led, and not yet aware of the concept of an “ulterior motive,” he’d often agree. I’m not really sure what about this movie I found so delightful. Maybe the voice of Lumpy, which was voiced by some child with a little piping British accent. As a rule I scorn the idea of gratuitously giving characters British accents because the producers theorize that it makes them charming and endearing (lookin’ at you, Peppa Pig), but in the case of Lumpy, it worked for me. Also, as I once said to a babysitter when expressing my fondness for this particular movie, the fact that Carly Simon did all the songs made it a bit easier to take. (I was not charmed by her response: “Who?” Fuck it.) “Pooh’s Heffalump Movie” eventually found its way into the garage sale box, but I still have a soft spot in my heart for it.

Scooby Doo and the Curse of the Tiki
You know, or something like that. The plot involved The Gang going to Hawaii (for…some reason. But as always with The Gang, it was a good reason—they were visiting someone’s uncle. Or cousin. Or godparent. Those kids had more family scattered across the globe, all of whom owned condos and vacation homes and shit that they were just itching to have people come stay in, than any five people you will ever meet). And there was a beach, and people were being scared away from it by the “wikitiki” and there was something about some damned resort being built nearby. It was in all ways your typical Scooby Doo story line, with an explanation of what “poi” was thrown in for good measure. For the life of me I couldn’t tell you what about this was appealing.

It was actually bad Scooby Doo, because it was when The Gang had become so two dimensional and nineties-afied.  But you have to give them credit for being willing to stick to the formula. I mean, seriously? How many people have pointed out that Scooby and his friends should just have stood their ground when the weird scary bad guy showed up the first time, and refused to run screaming. Then when the weird scary bad guy got tired of jumping around yelling, they could rip off the asshole’s mask and discover it was Old Man Jenkins. It would have made every show and movie about 80% shorter, but they would have been about four thousand percent more believable.  Finally the disc became so scratched that I threw it away. This was before I realized the video store near our house could clean them so they’d play again. I sort of regret having done that.

Franklin Goes to School
The last time I watched this (although to be fair I didn’t really watch it as much as listen to it, and it was probably the last time I will ever get to experience this without the shame of actually picking it for myself and secretly watching it, terrified of being discovered, not that I would do that) we were in the car returning from a short vacation, and I insisted it be on the video player, because I couldn’t stand the idea of listening to whatever the hell the other choice was. About ten minutes in, one of my kids announced that he was “making some notes” on this movie in a small notebook he’d found in the seat pocket. “So far,” he informed us, “I have ‘stupid’ and ‘babyish.’”

Well, OK, but as kids cartoons go, Franklin is pretty tolerable. I’ll admit that I find it odd that only Franklin has a name, and the rest of the creatures are referred to by their species (“Bear,” “Goose,” “Beaver”) and the fact that, with the exception of Snail, they all have opposable thumbs, or something that passes for an opposable thumb, even when the creatures they are do not in real life (and sure, I get it, it’s easier to have them be able to do “human” things, but then why didn’t Snail get an opposable thumb? Even Goose got super flexible wings that are almost as good. I mean, if you’re going to go unrealistic, just go for it, man), but those are small things. The characters are polite to each other, the story is one that kids can identify with: a familiar teacher is replaced by a substitute for an extended period of time, and that substitute is different—the kids would say weird—but they find a common interest over which to bond (in this case, soccer), get used to one another’s ways, and forge a nice relationship. This is another one that I think has made its way out of my house via yard sale.

Cars
My oldest was the right age for Cars, and I think he liked it pretty well, but nowhere near as much as I liked it. As a result he had every one of the cars (Lightning, Mater, Chick Hicks, etc, along with every possible permutation of them sold—Radiator Springs Lighting when he had the white wall tires on, Dynaco Lightning, old Mater, new Mater, you name it), as well as play sets of the various buildings in Radiator Springs. Every Christmas and Birthday for about two years he was showered with Cars toys. We had Cars slippers, Cars sunglasses, Cars sippy cups.

Then one afternoon when my oldest was about 7, I was walking through the kitchen, and I noticed a strange smell. I had preheated the oven for something, and the strange smell was coming from there. Since it was a brand new oven, I couldn’t imagine what it was. I opened the oven door to find a Lightning McQueen slipper that had been put in to roast by one of my younger boys. I tossed both slippers, and realized it was kind of the beginning of the end for our family and Cars. The attempted cremation of Lightning was a sign I couldn’t ignore. Also a sign that we needed to have a little chat about appliance safety and not playing with stove.

Toy Story
Both my husband and I justify letting the kids watch Toy Story by saying, “But Andy is playing with his toys at the beginning of the movie! It’s almost like a…a documentary with a subliminal message! ‘Play with your toys—be imaginative!’” Yeah, sure. At the end of the day it’s still a fucking movie and they’re still just watching TV. But they do have the Andy’s Room/Pizza Planet play set. Although they’ve pretty much outgrown it. Oh well, since they’ve pretty much outgrown the movie, too, I guess that doesn’t matter. This is one I watch on weekend nights when my husband is out of town, they’ve gone to bed, and I’m exercising my adult privilege of staying up late.

Naturally the list of children’s movies I couldn’t bear is much longer than this one (see: Time, Land Before and Squarepants, Spongebob), but these few I really did like. Now they’ve moved on to The Disney Channel, and all they want to watch is “Jessie” and “Austin & Ally” (would those two please get on with it and just admit they like each other, for fuck’s sake?). And, seriously, are there 327 Shark Boy and Lava Girl movies? Or is there just one that’s 46 hours long? I really can’t tell, but Shark Boy and Lava Girl is sort of like Disney’s version of 1990s cable and their obsession with “The Man From Snowy River.” Any time you turned on Cinemax, they were showing it. Of course, they do like “Frozen” (which is not necessarily a good thing, although I can take it in small doses), and they’ll watch the Brady Bunch on DVD with me (maybe don’t ask about that one), but I expect the next time I happen to catch one of their movies and realize it’s something I’d actually willingly watch again, and even kind of like, is a ways off.