Here are the ornaments on my tree. Of course, you have to suspend your disbelief to imagine the tree. Work with me here.
I don't have an angel to set atop the tree, and Avery has no idea who James Cagney is. But to warp one of Cagney's more famous movie quotes: "Look, Ma! I'm on top of the snow!" And the tree.
As the only girl in the grandchild chain, Amelia is surrounded by boys, which makes her the center of attention. And the tree.
Some day, the Four Horsemen — clockwise from upper left, Vincent, Jack, Patrick and Luke — will get to SEE snow instead of just being flakes themselves. (And they'll find out how c-c-c-c-c-cold it is, and see lights on pine trees instead of palm trees.) For now, though, they are the snowdrift holding up the tree.
I never thought that Melissa would have another bun in the oven, but she surprised me with just that the other day.
Wait, that didn’t come out right. I meant to say one of her buns was in the oven.
WHOA! That’s really off the mark.
OK, I’ll back up and start at the beginning. She called several days ago and invited me and Kate to Jack’s holiday play.
“He’s going to be the gingerbread man,” she said. “He’s nervous, but he’s glad he won’t have to sing. He said he’ll be in the oven when they’re singing.”
(Get it, one of her buns was in the oven, again. GROAN!)
Can’t say as I blame Jack for not wanting to sing. After all, he’s no Justin Timberlake.
A lot of boys don’t like to sing except for, well, maybe Justin Bieber, and I don’t understand that phenomenon. From the first time Vincent, Jack, and Luke have stepped onto stages for pre-school and school activities, they’ve either not sung or mostly mouthed the words. Oh, besides Bieber, they do know another singer, Cousin Anthony had a star role in a musical during his senior year of high school. Who KNEW he could sing? We all thought he was just a star athlete.
As I recall, Brendan didn’t like to sing much, either, and he spent a lot of his acting career as Joseph, or one of the Wise Asses, uh, I mean, Wise MEN, looking out at the audience.
But I digress, the same way my voice splits from notes when I try to sing myself. Who could resist such an invitation? We showed up bright and early — in fact, early enough to get front-row seats if we hadn’t been so casual and that rude woman wouldn’t have selfishly called dibs on the whole dadgum front row.
As the singing started, I had to smile when I thought of Jack being snug as a bug in the rug behind the colorful façade of a gingerbread house. But then, I spied someone in a brown, hooded getup in the back row who looked strangely like Jack.
Sure ’nuf, twas he, just days before Christmas, that little creature was stirring with a song from his mouth.
As the echoes of the children’s voices faded into the corners of the school cafeteria, the action-adventure play began, with groups of children saying they were going to catch a gingerbread man and Jack periodically taunting, “Run, RUN, as fast as you can, but you can’t catch ME because I’m the Gingerbread Man!”
In groups of four, and five, and six, they chased him around the stage, and he eluded them each time. Two impressions I had:
1. He’s a REALLY cute little guy.
2. GOSH, he’s got a big class. I didn’t think the play was EVER going to end. But I guess it just seemed that way. I guess the teacher had to let everybody have a moment on stage; they can't all be stars like Jack.
But it did, and Jack posed for the paparazzi, in this case, with his little brother Patrick. Two cute little buns, out of Melissa’s oven.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave, “When first we practise to deceive!”
Sir Walter Scott couldn’t have imagined how true those words penned more than two centuries ago would ring today, when filmmakers practice to deceive our eyes with their 3-dimensional endeavors. And I’m not talking only about “Tangled,” Disney’s tangled rendition of the Rapunzel saga.
At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, I rebel against the rush to 3-D taking over movies for a couple of reasons:
No. 1: The old 2-D films weren’t broken, so why fix ’em? No. 2: I lament the fact that, when all movies are in 3-D, which I suspect they will be, kids will never know the magic of the old 2-D’s, just like they can’t appreciate the old days of black and white. No. 3: When you get right down to it, in my opinion, most of the 3-D flicks are pretty lame, with few moments of brilliance. No. 4: And this is most important of all, the theater prices for 3-D are making the films just too damn high for middle-class families to afford.
OK, so that was more than a couple of reasons. Call it a four-dimensional diss.
The 3-D devolvement knocks movies out of a tradition dating to the Great Depression, when the admission of a nickel gave folks just about the only diversion they could afford. Now, amidst the Great Recession, 3-D movies are knocking us for a loop.
Even if the 3-D technology made every flick into a WOW, the prices are inflated too exponentially to make the venture worthwhile.
For example, time was, I could take three grandsons to a matinee for an admission of $21 bucks, courtesy of the old-fart rate for me. Now, the theaters don’t give us old duffers a break so that, when Kate and I took four lads to “Tangled” a week ago, admission was 56 bucks, at 13 smackers apiece for Kate and me, and 10 apiece for the boys.
Fortunately, Patrick got in for free, as a 2-year-old. That was doubly fortunate, as he slept through the entire flick (I envied him the nap, because it just wasn’t worth the time, IMHO).
How sacked out was he? Enough so that, when I transferred him from my lap to Kate’s so I could go buy another freezie drink at an inflated price because the boys needed a refill (we bring cups and split up the drink), the tyke didn‘t even wake up.
I used to feel a tad guilty when we’d stop at the drugstore to buy contraband candy to sneak past the ticket sentinels, but no more, not now that the ticket sellers might as well be wearing masks, as bandits for the theater moguls charging outrageous prices for technology that doesn’t add a scintilla of enjoyment to the experience, in my opinion. They're just churning out 3-D flicks to jack the prices, pure and simple.
To the moviemakers and theater owners I say, to tangle a line from Rapunzel: "Highway Robbers, Highway Robbers, take down your prices!"
Oh, I know they think the math adds up, but here’s my math: I used to be able to take the lads to a flick for $30 or $35, tops. Now, with the total tally approaching 80 greenbacks, we just won’t be going to as many movies.
With apologies to Johnny Paycheck, from back in the ’80s, long before YouTube and the glut of 3-D movies, they can take 3-D and shove it, I ain’t payin’ that no more.
It was the best of the Tighes, and the worst of the Tighes, and then back to the best of the Tighes, on super smackdown Sunday, which, not to be confused with Super Bowl Sunday, otherwise is known as Vikings vs. Packers.
The trash talking began early Sunday, game day when the Minnesota Vikings, with Brett Favre at quarterback, hosted the Green Bay Packers, who consider Favre nothing short of a traitor not only for unretiring but also for playing now for the team’s arch rival. I try to be above the fray, as the father of a Vikings fan and the spouse of a Packers fanatic.
So I sat on the sidelines, knowing that the fuse was there for the lighting. And my son, Brendan, lit it early with a visual volley that my bride, Kate — a Packer fan who has braved the frigid conditions at Lambeau Field where Favre once warmed the hearts of cheeseheads — likened to child abuse.
Brendan sent a photo of my grandson Avery holding a poster proclaiming that the Packers suck, in direct defiance of Kate’s repeated warnings to Brendan and other Vikings fans that Favre would end up sucking pondwater — not to mention sucking the air out of their team’s hopes time and time again. But Brendan never received the message, unlike Favre’s opponents, who have received plenty of passes from him during this, his Season of Interceptions.
Imagine Kate’s delight later, then, when the Pack pushed back, and — as the cheerleaders used to say (maybe they still do; I haven’t been at a high school game in ages) — pushed ’em back, pushed ’em back, pushed ’em waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back, to the tune of a Packer lead of 17-3 at halftime.
That’s when Kate pushed back, happily texting Brendan that we were at Vincent’s basketball game and didn’t know the score of the Vikings-Packers joust (she was telling a half-truth, as we were at the 9-year-old grandson’s game but were able to monitor the implosion at the Metrodome). Mischievously, she asked him for a score update.
Child abuse evidence No. 2: My (formerly) mild-mannered son sent THIS photo of his progeny weighing in, as if we’d believe that the score really WAS just 1. Or, perhaps, Brendan was giving Avery a driving lesson, although such salutes violate the old saw about “Minnesota Nice.” Well, I’ve driven in Minnesota, and I can tell you — you betcha, I can — they aren’t nice, gosh darnit. Oh, they’re nicer than New Yorkers on I-95, but they’re not Nebraska Nice.
Although I’ll roll my eyes at the thought that Avery now knows how do drive during rush hour at such a young age, I’ve gotta say that his mischievous expression suits the message.
By the end of the game, though, cooler thoughts prevailed — and I don’t mean Favre, because word has it he got pretty hot headed with a coach (and I don’t mean head coach Brad Childress, whom the Vikings dumped a day later). Or perhaps it was just the minister’s daughter ruling the roost as mom Erica sent this revised photo, even before Favre helped the Pack win again, 31-3, in the Vikings’ own house.
Brendan’s lesson: If you’re gonna talk trash, it better not be about the Packers, because they’ll be taking out the trash.
OK, OK, so I’ll admit it: Sometimes, I can be a bit of a whiner. It started with a whimper, after Melissa invited Kate and me to a hayride/punkin hunt a week ago. On the way home, I said to Kate, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to go on any dadgum hayride! In this Florida heat? Getting straw in my shorts is worse than getting sand in my shoes at the beach.” Imagine my surprise when my bride, who could borrow a page out of New York gubernatorial candidate Jimmy McMillan’s political playbook and start the “Florida Is Too Damn HOT Party,” chastised me: “Oh, you big WHINER! It will be fun.”
“Well, I’m going to suggest something else, maybe a movie,” I countered. “You need to PLAY more with those kids,” she parried. “Besides, I already told Melissa we’d go.” That’s when it started. The whining. Heck, I hadn’t been on a hayride since I was in high school, and back then, the hormones were looking for different things in a haystack than pumpkins, if you catch my drift. I didn’t stop at whining, though, because we all know all that does is give a guy a headache. So I schemed. I tried to figure out a way to have to work yesterday. Didn’t work. I tried to ramp up my heartbeat so I could fake a heart attack. I lay down on the railroad tracks, trying to end it all. Dadgum train stopped inches from my head. Saturday arrived. My eyes popped open, and I checked my limbs, just in case, to see whether I had been paralyzed in the night and I could have used that as a dodge. Everything worked, as well as it does, at my age, so, since I’d been foiled, and foiled again, we set out for the punkin farm; fortunately, it wasn’t too damn hot, and the sun playfully, mercifully ducked behind the clouds. Then another reason to whine transpired: The wind blew my new hairdo askew. After all the planning, and my hairdresser, Sharon’s, careful planning and execution of my coif to look like Mark Harmon, the wind botched the part down the middle. When I had left her shoppe, I was the spitting image of the NCIS star.
Granted, when I got home, Kate agreed that I looked like Harmon’s character. Well, she coughed that out between guffaws, as she rolled on the floor and kept repeating his character’s name: “You look just like a JETHRO — like one of the characters in ‘Brother, Where Art Thou?’ goin’ down to the river to pray.” (And she didn't mean the George Clooney character, either.)
Soooooooooo, anyhooooooo, I’d like to unveil my new ’do, but the wind aft gang it aglee. And so did the hayride/punkin hunt. The adventure turned out to be quite a bit of fun. Of course, the added thrill was seeing a baby alligator in the canal next to the punkin patch. And wonderin’ where the mama grizzly, uh, mama gator, was. With no further whining, or ado, here’s a mini album of the outing:
Luke, Patrick and Skip on the hayride; upper left: Kate's photo-challenged finger.
Skip, Melissa and the boys (from left) Luke, Vincent, Patrick and Jack, guard their gourds.
Luke and Vincent pick pumpkins under the watchful eye of Mark Harmon, aka Jethro Gibbs. He just HAPPENED by, working an NCIS case, no doubt. He's doesn't seem to have the tight, well-formed 12-pack I have.
Kate poses with a character from 'Brother, Where Art Thou,' and (from left) Luke, Vincent and Jack. And, of course, their punkins.
After a hayride and a punkin hunt, nothin says lovin in a Florida oven than ICE CREAM. Some of it even made it into Patrick's mouth.
Vincent puts a finishing touch on his caramel apple, and the day, by showing his prowess at caramel through his teeth. I suppose it fits the Halloween season.
OK, OK, I'll have to say that, overall, it was a fun day. I guess my aversion to hayrides turned out to be just a straw man, or maybe I've sublimated a memory of being slapped on a hayride in my youth. All I can remember is that the girls were on one end of the wagon, surrounding Ray Burns, like they ALWAYS did, and most of us guys were on the other.
Turns out, I spent part of my overnighter with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse with my eyes wide shut, but at least I didn’t let ’em pull the wool over my eyes all of the time. In one instance, I found that a 2-year-old can be brutally honest. And in another, I discovered that, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Some people have expressed wonderment that I’d tackle an overnighter with the Gang of Four, ranging in age from 2 to 9. I pooh-pooh such incredulosity. Pooh-POOH, I say. So THERE, the four poohs in those two sentences match the number of poopy diapers I changed for Patrick in a 24-hour period. All a guy has to do to survive such an adventure, from noon on a Saturday to noon the following day, is stay one step ahead of the lads (and allow TV and Wii to help with the sitting chores). First step out was a trip to the Halloween store. DAMN, how times have changed since granddad was a lad. Back then, we either made our own costumes or chose from a few options in a tiny Halloween section of an aisle at Ben Franklin (the STORE, folks; I don’t date all the way back to the father of the “penny-saved-is-a-penny-earned“ slogan). This was a whole dadgum store with aisle after aisle after aisle of costumes and masks and scary paraphernalia. Ghosts and ghouls and goblins, oh MY. The life-sized, automated, machete-wielding Jason Voorhees scared Jack a bit, although he refused to admit it. If he wasn’t scared, I asked, why did he make a huge detour around the manikin in motion, all the while trying to figure out whether it was real, as the ch-ch-ch-ch-ch emanated from a speaker. His lips said he wasn’t skeert; his eyes told a different story. (Can't say as I blame him; Jason used to scare the bejabbers out of my kids, and they were older than Jack when Jason started slicing the air with the oversized knife, not to mention throats, and heads, and sundry body parts.)
Anyhow, we burned about 45 minutes at the store, and could have spent more because there were about a bazillion scary and/or fun things. But we had to head to the big-box drugstore where we stop to load up on movie candy and reasonable prices instead of being held up at the theater. Actually, having Patrick along helped my stealth maneuver of sneaking the candy past the gendarmes and the sign that proclaims, “NO food or drink from outside.” All I had to do was stuff part of the loot in the bottom of the diaper bag, and the rest in my cargo shorts. Sorry, theater folks, I don’t like your 70 percent markup. Bad example for the boys? Well, at the prices for 3-D movies these days, nobody should begrudge my saving a few bucks.
We saw the owls movie, which I thought had some of the best 3-D I’ve seen so far, although I didn’t give a hoot about the length. It was just too dadburned long. (Time was, I thought the longer, the better, to get my money’s worth, but this challenged sitting times for Patrick and 4-year-old Luke, who kept asking when it was going to be over.)
However, just to help other grandparents, I’ll disclose my secret to taking the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to the flick and surviving: You’ve gotta get the kids organized before the lights dim. That means making sure each has the candy he picked out at the drugstore, as well as dividing the two supersized icies I’d bought, at the theater’s exorbitant prices, into the four cups I’d brought, as well as divvying up the huge bag of popcorn I’d bought a the theater’s highway-robbery prices, and making sure Luke is propped in front of the diaper bag so the seat doesn’t swallow him, which is his one fear of theaters.
Of course, it helped that Patrick, who was a little whiny at first, was that way because he was tired, and he soon nodded off to sleep. In my lap, which meant I had to be careful when I reached for the HUGE drink I’d gotten for myself, albeit supposedly cut-rate from the theater thievery, because it was in the trifecta of the popcorn and a supposedly “free” candy.
After the flick, I considered a stop at the ice-cream store, but they all seemed sugared up enough, so we headed home for their various choices of dinners: Vincent and Jack opted for cereal, I forget what Luke ate, and Patrick ate a couple of fistfuls of miniature corn dogs.
The evening was fairly uneventful, breaking up a few scuffles, watching a kids movie and playing Wii.
Here’s a HUGE secret, or so I thot: I let ’em stay up late so they’d sleep late, and so could I. After all, it worked onetime at our house, when Vincent stayed up til midnight and slept like a teenager the next day.
Despite my loose bedtime rules, Jack tried to trick me. As I nestled in to sleep twixt Patrick, who had gone to sleep at 9, and Luke, Jack came in and said: “Papa Mike, what channel was that Nickelodeon we were watching — for no particular reason?”
For no particular reason? Does the lad think I was born yesterday? He serves up an alibi with the premeditated crime? Well, I didn't just fall off the turnip truck, son. Just so happens I used to sneak behind my step-grandfather’s back when I was a lad, too. I figured he was asleep when I got back up and turned the TV back on to watch “Gunsmoke.” Next day, he said, “How’d you like ‘Gunsmoke?’”
That legendary series started out simple enough, in black and white (after all, those were the simple days, when everything was black and white):
Of course, eventually, it came out in color:
I saw most of the series’ 635 episodes (BTW, that‘s the record for the longest-running, prime-time drama leaving even the more recent “Law and Order“ in its smoke, but I might have missed this one, if it really WAS missing and that isn’t just a myth:
My suspicions were confirmed a bit later when I checked on him and found him sprawled across his bed, dead asleep, with Nickelodeon on the TV.
I should mention that Patrick foiled my bedtime secret: I guess he wasn’t very tired, between the nap at the movie and having gone to sleep at 9. The little pants loader was up bright and early: at 7 a.m., and I was dead tired.
To make matters worse, he bruised my ego a bit as he watched me change out of my SpongeBob SquarePants jammies Sunday morning.
He looked at me reflectively and said, “PaMike, you’ve got a big bewwy.” Well, I NEVER. Here, just a few months ago, I wondered what it would be like when he started talking. Now I know: He’s a little wise-a**. Oh, wait, that’s a bit harsh to say about a grandson. Perhaps I should say only that he's a wiseacre.
Then I looked in the mirror and realized why he said that. I mean, it’s not big as in HUGE, but it’s bigger than when I was a senior in high school and drank a malt a day trying to gain weight. He could have thought I had a fat bewwy without SAYING it. After all, I've been on South Beach for two months! And I mean the diet, not the beach.
Maybe he IS a wise-a**. Time will tell, I suppose.
All in all, though, a great, and memorable, 24 hours. Chances are, someday, Jack will have a grandson who tries to foil him into letting him watch TV all hours of the night. Or whatever they’ll be watching then.
