Ben: "Arrrrgh!"
Me: "What's wrong?"
Ben: "I was trying to build this stack up and it fell over."
Me: "Well, just try again. I'm sure you can do it."
Ben: "Daaaaaaad! Don't you know how much I hate encouragement?"

African American voters turned out in California in record numbers to support President-Elect Obama.

African American voters were, according to exit polls, the only ethnic demographic to have supported Prop 8. It lost among whites and was 50/50 among asians and latinos, but blacks lopsidedly favored it. Full citizenship for me but not for thee.

Oh well. We'll put a repeal initiative on the ballot and we'll keep hammering away until we win. Four years ago same-sex marriage was unthinkable radical crazy-talk, and now it's one voter in fifty away from winning. Bigotry is doomed.

And my kid, who was appalled when I told him what prop 8 would do, is eleven years from voting age. Never give up.

I am now holding my breath until America turns blue. Who's with me?
Update: GASP pant pant pant pant pant

He's wearing a bright-red sheet, with big goggly white eyes, and carrying a piece of posterboard that looks like this:


(this bit was my suggestion; the rest was all him)

1. Take the nearest book and open it to page 56.

2. Read the fifth sentence on the page.

3. Put the book back exactly where it was before you touched it.

4. Tell no one what you have done.

5. Go about your life as if nothing has happened.

6. Carry the secret of this meme to your grave.

"Dad? DAD!"

"What is it?"

"I keep hearing this clicking sound. And I know it's probably just someone walking on stilts outside my window, but I called you because there's always a chance that it could be monsters snapping their fingers."

Ben: "Dad, did you know I can change my age to anything I want?"

Me: "Really? That must be nice. I wish I could do that. Sometimes I get tired of being 40."

Ben: "Okay... you can be the age you really are, or you can be any multiple of 40."

Me: "... yay."

This week I got to do a happy thing I've waited a long time for: I watched one of my lifelong favorite films, The Muppet Movie, with my kid. (To accommodate his attention span and the fact that he's just not used to watching TV, we ended up watching it in half-hour segments over three nights.)

All three of us enjoyed it, but after Ben went to bed on the last night, Willa said: "I have to confess, I've never really understood why you love that film as much as you do."

I answered, "Well, these days... mostly nostalgia. It doesn't really hit me in the same place it used to." Then I spent a while trying to remember what it was that I loved so much when I was eleven. I mean, it's not... exactly... a good film. The jokes are corny, the story is clichéd and often forced, the songs hold up pretty well but only one or two of them are truly great...

After a while I started to think about themes and metaphors and what the film says just by the way it's made. And one aspect of The Muppet Movie that occurred to me is that a lot of the time it has this sophisticated, ironic detachment--it's jam-packed with self-referential jokes playing off the fact that it's a movie. ("How did you guys find us?" "Easy. We read the screenplay: 'EXTERIOR DESERT, NIGHT'. We knew exactly where you were."). But at the same time, and to exactly the same degree, it has this happy, childlike, wide-eyed naïveté--total enchantment with the magic and wonder of it all--it's a MOVIE!

It's based on puppetry, which is the most self-evidently artificial of the performing arts (we'd never seen any of the characters from the waist down before), but the sense of artifice is blown away. Kermit's riding a bicycle, sitting on top of a tall stool with no place for a puppeteer to hide, lounging on a log in a swamp. But it's blown away selectively--he's still obviously made of felt.

In the big finale, after studio mogul Orson Welles offers the Muppets "the standard 'rich and famous' contract," they recreate their adventure with painted backdrops and special effects... only to have it all come crashing down, every artifice revealed as a cheap trick... only to have the wreckage illuminated by a glorious rainbow.

In short, one way or another, every moment of the movie depicts a tension between "believing in the magic" and "knowing it's a trick".

Which means it's about being eleven. Being right on that cusp between childish naïveté and mature (or at least teenage) sophistication, being pulled in both directions, trying to resolve the two.

The ultimate message is: The fact that it's a trick doesn't make it less magical. And that really spoke to me then. Willa was older and in a different phase of life when she saw it the first time. Perhaps I should have waited a few years longer to show it to Ben. But when I was eleven, it was made for me.

So today was spent at the home of our friends Bela and Sandy, whose daughter Nadya is a month younger than Ben and they've been friends since birth.

Nadya decided to change into her "princess dress," a floor-length white gown covered with lace looking for all the world like a wedding dress. I teased her about it, asking who she was marrying, and with enormous six-year-old dignity she explained to me that this was a Snow White dress, not a wedding dress, though on second thought we could certainly have a pretend wedding. And she was off.

Ben was busy with something else at the time, but he was the nearest unattached male, so he never stood a chance. She dragged him, looking somewhat confused, out of the room with her, then explained step by step how a wedding works:

NADYA: Okay Ben, now you walk in the room with me like this. [slow, dignified march] No, slower. That's good. And then... we dance together.

BEN: Dancing? YAY! [they both begin hopping and spinning]

Next time I officiate a wedding, I really must remember to suggest this ceremony. I think it has a lot to recommend it.

Later, the two of them started a small but apparently lucrative business, blowing bubbles and popping them for money--which, as Sandy observed, is nice work if you can get it. Getting married and starting a career! Big day.

Kid at the drop-in center, with a slight speech impediment, greeting my arriving son while stirring a bowl of noodles: "Guess what, Ben? I'm making Machiavellian Cheese."

Excellent concept.