Imagine your most embarrassing moment from childhood...
Now imagine your mom had a blog.
The G-Man was burned once when his friend's older brother Googled him and found a story I wrote about concerning the definition and purpose of testicles. From then on, each time I sat at my computer, he watched me like the cashier at the corner bodega.
He's nine now and reminds me daily that I am, "an embarrassment to nature." There are not enough twenties in my wallet to put in the therapy jar for my every indiscretion. I am trying to find the balance between telling my stories and exploiting his. It's a very delicate juggling act.
For his ninth birthday, G requested a slumber party with a "Monster" theme. Monster movies, monster video games, monster cake (see photo) and six little boys who, at 2 o'clock in the morning, certainly qualified as monsters.
"What kind of monster movies are you thinking?" I asked, remembering that at last year's sleepover, G found The Tuxedo with Jackie Chan too violent and left his own party to snuggle up in my room and watch The Princess Diaries. ($20-in the jar *ching*)
"How about Gremlins?" asked G-Man. An excellent suggestion. So, after pizza and cake and ice cream and running around the backyard with sparklers, ("Remember, they're called sparklers. Don't go home telling your moms that I gave you fireworks,") and the Belch Idol final round, we set up the sleeping bags to watch Gremlins.
Perhaps forty minutes into the movie the little Mogwais unplug Billy's clock and he feeds them after midnight. This causes them to mutate into the green, scaly, slimy, angry gremlins. It also caused previously puffed-up, macho, little boys to freak right out. Unless you have a boy, or were one, it's easy to forget that their bravado is a front. These boys who want to be dropped off three blocks from school and won't wave back if you acknowledge them in public, call their mothers "momma" when they're tucked in at night. For some of G's friends, this was their first sleepover and there was some jockeying between looking weak and asking for a new movie, or sticking with it, knowing that they'd never get to sleep. It was time to call in the reserves. It was time for teddy bears.
Each boy was given one of G's menagerie of stuffed animals and a glow stick, like the kind you get for Halloween. Then, I pulled the pillow and comforter off my bed, stepped over the sea of sleeping bags and candy wrappers and set up shop on the couch. I haven't seen Gremlins in ages, it's not bad, it has Phoebe Cates. No one asked to turn it off, everyone was asleep by 3 a.m., no harm, no foul, no reputations irrepairably damaged. One more year down, nine more to go.
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