If my kids ruled the world, every summer morning would begin with me dancing into their rooms in top hat and tails, doing high “chorus line” style kicks and singing “Let Me Entertain You” in an Ethel Merman vibrato. And then I would turn into a big pile of money.
With car keys.
Although my kids now know better than to say “we’re bored” when I’m around, they aren’t above standing by my side while I’m doing a mountain of laundry and saying things like, “We should go to the movies. We should go out to eat. We should go to the mall.” Or, for the more worldly one, “We should go to the beach. We should go to the Green Day concert. We should go to London.”
“Shoo,” I’ll say. “Go find something to do. And, for the last time, pick up all of your crap.” (The latter statement, unfortunately, being the end result of having made the former statement the day before, since, for some reason, my kids hear “go find something to do” as “go drag out every book, toy, and game you own, open them up, and leave them in a long, snaky pile that stretches from the middle of the living room to somewhere just north of Ecuador.”) Some days the trail of half-played games of “Sorry,” half-read books, and half-finished bowls of cereal stretches out like the juvenile version of the Boulevard of Broken (or at least Abandoned) Dreams.
“They should just go play in the woods. That’s what I did when I was their age.” This is what my husband says when he gets home from work and they descend upon him like a plague of bored locusts (or rather, an invasion of Ennui).
“Yes,” I remind him, and that’s why all of your childhood stories either end with ‘and then the ER doctor said,’ ‘and then the cop said,’ or, worst of all, ‘and then the ER doctor said to the cop.’ No thanks.”
But by the end of the first week of summer I’m ready to send them out into the woods myself; after all, everybody gets stitches eventually, don’t they? And lots of people get arrested, too. (Or maybe that’s just my family.)
The thing about the whole “boredom” issue, though, is this: it’s not that they’re bored that bothers me–it’s not even the fact that I, myself, haven’t been fortunate enough to experience boredom since 1996. It’s that they expect me to do something about it. What I want to know is: who died and made me Julie McCoy, Cruise Director? I mean, if I have to be somebody from The Love Boat, then I want to be Isaac the Bartender. Heck, if pushed I’d even agree to be Gopher, the yeoman purser (boy, talk about things that sound dirty that aren’t)–anybody except Julie.
Just look at how she turned out–all coked out and washed up before she was thirty. (Or is that coked up and washed out?) Anyway, while you might think that it was living the glamorous Hollywood lifestyle that did it to her, you’d be wrong. No: partying every night with the likes of Shelley Winters, Don Knotts, and Charo didn’t do it to her, it was the stress of being Julie McCoy, Entertainment Maven, that did.
Just think, for a minute, about what that means. If simply playing an “Entertainment Director” on TV is enough to drive someone to drugs, then imagine what it must do to people who have to do it in real life. Actually, I don’t have to imagine it; I’m living it.
Which reminds me: just where is that Isaac, and what did he do with my Mai Tai?