Despite the fact that he is only in kindergarten, and that some of the students he goes to school with are literally twice as old and twice as tall as him, my son Clyde decided to participate in this year’s school talent show. Actually, “decided to participate” makes it sound like it was some kind of wrenching decision for him, something he agonized over; in reality, it was not: Clyde heard about the show, and, when they said they were looking for “talent,” naturally assumed that they meant him. More to the point, he assumed that they meant his talent on the dance floor. (His signature moves include “guitar solo jump,” “power slide,” and, of course, the real crowd pleaser: “Mr. Roboto arms.”)
And just like that I was left to wonder once again where in the world this child came from. Not that I’m a shrinking violet on the dance floor: on the contrary, I’ll get up and shake my booty with the best of them, (or, if the best of them are too reticent, all by myself). And, thanks to an early decision to limit my participation in dances like “YMCA” and “The Hustle” to a minimum, I’d like to think that through the years I have managed to shake said booty without causing myself any serious embarrassment. However, my personal record as a Macarena abstainer aside, I’m still not so confident in my dancing skills that I would ever enter myself into a talent contest–not even one where all of the other participants had to get permission from their parents to stay up past 9 pm. And that’s where Clyde is different.
Whereas I get dressed for a party and immediately ask myself: “Does this decade make my butt look big?” Clyde puts on his party clothes, looks at himself in the mirror and immediately says, “I look fabulous!”
And whereas I am more reluctant to get my picture taken than some kind of mutant cross between Michael Jackson and a vampire (wait–is that redundant?), Clyde is always ready for his close up. In fact, when he was a baby, one sure way to get him to stop crying was to hold up our hands, pretend we were taking a picture, and yell “Cheese!”: like a seasoned professional hitting the red carpet, he would go from “despondent” to “delighted” before we even had a chance to find out what the problem was (although, in retrospect it seems like not enough fawning had been the problem all along).
For a while I was afraid that Clyde’s “movie-star quality” meant that the real reason for his odd (for this family) anti-anti-social behavior was a touch of the dreaded acting bug (just what we need in our house–more drama); luckily however, before I had completely resigned myself to living with a (shudder) thespian, I noticed that, for Clyde, it’s not really about being the star of the party–it’s just about the party, period. (Not that it’s much better to be harboring a future Kato Kaelin instead of a future Charlie Sheen, but still: you take what you can get).
And yet, even with all of this–even with knowing about Clyde’s love of the spectacle–the talent show still had me worried. What if they laughed at him? What if they booed? What if, worst of all, they did neither, but just sat and stared, blankly uncomprehending? After all, even though I might not quite understand my little extrovert, that doesn’t mean I want him pulled back down in the gutter with the rest of us.
In the end, though, with luck (and, I must say, talent) all of my worries proved groundless: Clyde rocked the house. So what if the end result was more on the Napoleon Dynamite-ish side than Saturday Night Fever–at least it wasn’t Little Miss Sunshine.