While The Wife was getting her booze on with her girlfriends in Austin the weekend, I endeavored to find ways to keep She Who Shall Not Be Named from destroying the house and/or herself out of boredom. To that end, we found ourselves at the Day of the Dead Festival yesterday.
Much as I'd like to tell you this was an even commemorating George A. Romero's 1985 movie, with fun family activities like Bake and Eat Your Own Brain and the interactive Tear Out Capt. Rhodes' Entrails exhibit, that wasn't the case. The festival in question commemorated Dia de los Muertos, which takes place November 1st and 2nd. It was pretty small, but there was a playground where my daughter could annoy the older kids with her trademarked slow-motion creep down the various slides. She also liked the music, which forced me to ask some hard questions. Specifically, would I prefer my daughter playing mariachi music in my home over whatever bland, formulaic pop will be in fashion when she's a teenager? Or should I just puncture my eardrums with sewing needles now and get it over with?
Before the festival, he stopped at Pig Stand #7 for breakfast. Less important than our choice of fare (pancakes) however, was the conversation taking place between a young boy and his parents at the booth next to ours. If you recall the lies Calvin's dad used to tell him from the comic strip, you'll have a pretty good idea how this mother and father operated. This was my favorite excerpt, concerning what Halloween-themed movie they should watch that afternoon:
Boy: Can we get House of Wax?
Mom: Ooh, I like Vincent Price.
Boy: No, not Vincent Price, Paris Hilton.
Dad: Can't say I've ever heard of her. How about you, honey?
Mom: Doesn't ring a bell.
Dad: Say, you know what would be a good movie? The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.
Boy: The what?
Mom: Good choice, I love Don Knotts.
Boy: Who's Don Knotts?
Dad: Heresy.
Mom: He's Mick Jagger's brother. They had a falling out years ago, I hear.
Dad: You can see the resemblence.
Mom: Don Knotts was also the face of the demon in The Exorcist.
Dad: We could always watch that.
Boy: Really?
Dad. Ha ha. No.
I felt sorry for that kid, but it was quite entertaining.
Poor kid! I predict he'll be in a tower on some college campus in a few years, armed to the teeth.
Naw, he'll be fine. My father did the same thing and I turned out okay.
No really.
Oh dear, Rob. Methinks thou doth protest too much! :)
Rob's all right. He needs to settle on one hair color, though.
I love parents like that.
What is arguably the main reason my husband wanted to be a father was his encounter with a VERY Calvin type child while he was managing a college restaurant. The kid came up to him and asked for a refill on his pop and started with the "So, what are you doing?" "Working." "You call that working?" thing and my husband just LOVED it.
Hey, it's better than a lot of other people's reasons.
Haha, loved those strips where Calvin's dad would feed him a line of bogus info and Calvin would buy it completely.
Some Halloween trivia I wasn't aware of: Apparently, for Michael Myers' mask in "Halloween", John Carpenter sent his staff out to find a cheap mask to use instead of coming up with one on their own due to a tight budget. They bought a William Shatner mask and converted that! Couldn't believe it when I read it in today's paper. I wonder if he got a screen credit for that.