Step-family Talk

My brain is either metamorphosing into it’s next stage of development and it’s apparently a very painful process or Sam Kinison accidentally astral projected into my head, whatever the real cause of the headache I can barely keep my eyes straight. Mom’s not home yet and my son is eager to run about the house and play so I need to stay down here until she arrives. So, I turn on the TV to subdue whatever brain activity is still left and nothing numbs the brain better than television. I flip through stations and I get angrier and angrier, Paris Hilton has been ‘reassigned” to imprisonment in her million-dollar home. This isn’t helping the headache so I jump up to the movie selections and God Bless him, there he is, Pauley Shore. Nothing numbs the brain like the Weasel weasin’ the jui-uice, buddy.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this.” My stepdaughter is walking the down the stairs and hears me talking to myself.
“Doing what?” she asks.
“Watching Encino Man,” I answer.

She plops a seat in the recliner and Pauley works his magic. She becomes nearly catatonic as she stares at he screen. I barely notice my son standing at the edge of my chair. He is looking me straight in the eyes, I can feel them calling to me, “Come back father, come back.” So powerful is his will that my eyes are ripped from the images on the screen and are drawn straight into his. When he knows I am looking he drops his head and shoulders back in his most anguished “woe is me” pose and cries real tears. Then he throws his head in my lap and I know he is hungry.

The kitchen is less than a dozen steps away but with my headache I might as well be heading to the back 40 to find and milk Old Bessie. I get up anyway and grab a bottle of milk and my son and together we return to the comfy chair and Encino, California. I arrive just in time for a makeover montage as Pauley and Sean Astin clean-up Brenden Fraser and give him a new wardrobe. My pupils begin to constrict and I’m nearly out when—

“I like those shorts. Is that really how you guys dressed in high school.?”
I crawl back to a more conscious state and a pounding head, “What?”
“Did you dress like that in school?” my stepdaughter asks.
“No.”
“Was it just because your school wasn’t cool?”
“Are you for real?” I ask, “He looks like a golfer and a camera man collided, do you think that’s cool?”
“No, but wasn’t that how everyone dressed?”

She’s really going to make me do this. She’s making me think about the past. Mental visions of my high school days flicker and sort through the various stored images of friends, rivals, and the girls I fawned over. No, I can’t recall people dressing like that. Granted it was a small school, but those clothes had to have come from a slightly earlier era. I check the info button. Encino Man comes from 1992. I was a junior.

“No,” I say, “You have to understand, nobody dresses like Pauley Shore. He does his own thing.”
“But what about the rest of them?”

I’m really starting to doubt my own memories, perhaps we really did dress like that. “Think of it this way,” I say, “The people making this film have been out of high school for years. They are dressing up their characters in what they think high school kids at that time wore. Do you think that these people were any more knowledgeable about what is cool than an adult is now ?”

My stepdaughter laughs. She’s sees how true this is. But just to drive home the point I remind her that we never, ever, dressed like that…I think.