I'll Mature When I'm Dead (5 page)

And someday, decades from now, when your kids have all grown up and moved out, you and your wife (if you’re lucky enough to still be together) will turn to each other and think back to how the two of you set out, totally clueless, on this amazing adventure. You’ll shake your heads, and you’ll smile. You might even kiss.

And then, if you’re
really
lucky, she’ll put down her Taser.

H
ere’s a simple and fun experiment:

Select, at random, a man who has one or more daughters. Place a gun to this man’s head and tell him he must do one of two things:

He’s going scorpion. Yes, he knows it will be unpleasant. But he also knows that eventually it will end. This is not necessarily true of the dance recital.

I speak as a father who has attended three major recitals, each of which, for all I know, is still going on. Don’t get me wrong: I love to watch my daughter dance. I’m just not crazy about watching the entire daughter population of North America dance. But you have no choice, under the recital system as practiced in my neck of the woods. Here’s how it works:

Every week, for many weeks, you take your daughter to the dance studio, which is a building in a strip mall almost entirely obscured by a giant cloud of estrogen. There your daughter learns, step by step, two dance routines, selected from the major dance genres: Ballet, Tap, Jazz, Hip-Hop, Modernistic, and Weird.

Your daughter will perform her two routines at the recital, so she has to practice them at home. This means that she—and therefore you—must listen to the same two songs over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, to the point where, even if you liked the songs originally, you start fantasizing about getting a time machine and going back into the past and whacking the composers. You might also take Hitler out while you were back there in the past, but your highest priority would definitely be the composers.

Finally the day of the recital arrives. The morning is entirely taken up with preparation, which is very stressful for everybody involved, by which I mean your wife. There’s a lot to do. For one thing, there are the costumes. Your daughter must wear a different costume for each routine, because God forbid she should appear onstage twice with the same costume. So for each routine, you are required to buy a costume, which your daughter will never ever wear again, because that is the system used by the dance-recital-costume industry, following a business model originally developed by crack dealers.

Your daughter will also need makeup, as specified by strict written dance-studio guidelines, which require that, because these are young girls with flawless skin, they must wear a sufficient quantity of cosmetic products to cover a regulation volleyball court, or, to put it another way, Cher. Also your daughter’s hair must be compacted into a bun, and it must be a very tight, dense, ballerina-style bun, held in place by weapons-grade hair gel to keep it from exploding due to the severe pressure exerted on it by your wife, who by this point, trust me, is not in a great mood.

Once your wife is convinced that your daughter is ready (allow nine hours) it’s time to go to the recital, which will be in an auditorium containing hundreds and hundreds of people who are no more interested in watching your daughter dance than you are in watching their daughters dance. As you enter, you will be handed a program, and when you examine it, you will find that your daughter’s first dance routine is near the beginning of the program, and her second routine is near the very end. In between will be roughly two thousand routines featuring other people’s daughters.

You would think that, by sheer chance, there would come a time when your daughter’s two dances would be close together, ideally near the beginning. But the dance studio makes sure this never happens, using the same computer scheduling program that the cable-TV company uses to make sure that the technician, for whom you have been waiting eleven hours, rings your doorbell only when you have just commenced pooping.

Clutching the program, you take your seat, which is near the back of the auditorium, because all the seats near the front have been claimed by Serious Dance Moms who got in line early, in some cases before their daughters were actually born. Finally the lights dim, the curtain goes up, and you begin to watch other people’s daughters perform their routines. Each routine takes about three minutes, or, in Dance Recital Time, six years.

The most entertaining routines are the ones performed by three-year-old girls, usually dressed as something cute, such as bumblebees, so that everybody, even men who are not fathers of the dancers, goes “awwww.” The bumblebees come out in a line, some looking excited to be out there, some terrified, some lost, some picking their cute little bumblebee noses. But when the music starts, an amazing thing happens: what had been a random-acting group of little girls suddenly transforms itself into a group of little girls who are continuing to act pretty much randomly. Some face the audience; some turn around, presenting the audience with their little bumblebee butts.

Meanwhile, offstage, their dance teacher is frantically gesturing, trying to remind them how their routine goes. If, for example, they’re supposed to twirl, the teacher will twirl. One or two of the more alert bumblebees will notice, and they will twirl, usually in different directions. Other bumblebees, noticing this, will then twirl, so you have a chain reaction of twirling, along with a certain amount of falling down, standing still, and running offstage in tears. Then the music stops and everybody applauds heartily, and the bumblebees run off the stage, except for the ones who remain on the stage.

As I say, these are the more entertaining routines. Most of them, however, consist of other people’s daughters prancing around more or less in unison to various styles of music that you would not listen to voluntarily, using the medium of dance to express universal human emotions such as love, fear, joy, despair, and prancing.

Then, finally, comes the moment you have been waiting for: You fall asleep. At some point after that you feel your wife’s elbow, which is the signal that your daughter’s first routine is about to begin. The lights come up, the music starts, and . . . There she is! You watch in amazement as she performs the routine she has practiced for so long. You are stunned. She’s so beautiful! So poised! So confident! Your heart swells with pride. You can’t believe that’s really your daughter up there.

Then you realize that it’s not, in fact, your daughter. At this distance they’re hard to tell apart under all that makeup. You look around frantically, and just as the routine ends, you locate your daughter. Your heart re-swells with pride. Then you settle in for the long wait until her second routine. To pass the time, you think of ways in which the dance-recital experience could be improved. It goes without saying that beer vendors would be a huge help. But there is another element that I believe would make the dance-recital experience far more enjoyable for male audience members: competition.

Imagine this scene: Onstage is a group of daughters in tutus, prancing around to classical music, expressing the Hopefulness of Spring. Suddenly a second song, some kind of hideous inscrutable modern music, starts playing on top of the first one, and a new set of daughters appears onstage in leotards and starts slinking around to express Existential Angst. There are collisions. A member of the Hopefulness team goes down hard. A member of the Angst team takes a tutu to the eye. Then things get really exciting as a
third
song breaks out, this one hip-hop, and a third dance team charges onstage, dressed as tough streetwise urban gang members wearing enormous quantities of makeup. Now the stage is total chaos. The audience is also getting into it; parents are punching each other. Somebody knocks over a beer vendor. Wouldn’t that be great? It would also help if there was a score-board, and some kind of ball.

Of course none of these things will happen. These are just daydreams you’re having while you’re waiting to see your daughter again, assuming you recognize her. By the time her second routine starts, she may have gone through puberty.

Finally, the recital ends, and you stagger outside. You reunite with your daughter and present her with the bouquet of flowers that your wife bought at the supermarket. You tell her she was wonderful, and you mean it sincerely. She was the best dancer you have ever seen. Assuming that was her.

T
here was a time when the human race did not have technology. This time was called “the 1950s.” I was a child then, and it was horrible. There were only three TV channels, and at any given moment at least two of them were showing men playing the accordion in black and white. There was no remote control, so if you wanted to change the channel, you had to yell at your little brother, “Phil! Change the channel!” (In those days people named their children “Phil.”)

Your household had one telephone, which weighed eleven pounds and could be used as a murder weapon. It was permanently tethered to the living-room wall, and you had to dial it by manually turning a little wheel, and if you got a long-distance call, you’d yell, “It’s long distance!” in the same urgent tone you would use to yell “Fire!” Everybody would come sprinting into the living room, because in the 1950s long distance was more exciting than sex. In fact there
was
no sex in the 1950s, that I know of.

There were automobiles, but they lacked many of the features that automobiles have today, such as a working motor. In the Barry household, we had a series of cars named (these were all real Barry cars) the “Rambler,” the “Minx,” the “Metropolitan,” and the “Valiant.” You could rely on these cars—rain or shine, hot or cold—to not start. The “Metropolitan,” in particular, was no more capable of internal combustion than of producing a litter of puppies.

There also were computers in those days, but they filled entire rooms and weighed many tons. An ill-advised effort by IBM to market one of these in the “laptop” configuration was abandoned when the first test user was converted into what the medical examiner’s report described as “basically a human pizza twelve feet in diameter.”

This pre-technology era was especially brutal for young people. We had no Wii. Mainly what we had to play with was rocks, which we had to throw at each other by hand. What few toys we had were lame, like the Slinky, which did basically one thing: go down stairs. And it did
that
only in the TV commercials, which apparently were filmed on a planet with much more gravity. Here on the Earth, the Slinky went down maybe two steps, then fell over on its side, twitched, and died, like a snake having a heart attack.

We also had the Wheel-O. This was a toy that, by federal law, was issued to every American boy and girl who was alive during the Eisenhower administration. The Wheel-O consisted of a red wheel and a wire frame: