What your child drags into your home can change the course of your life, at least temporarily. I'm not talking about the occasional stray mutt or nasty case of impetigo (although those can really wreck your workweek); in our case, it was a simple song. If I were a scientist, I could chart the movement of this butterfly effect, noting the sensitive dependency on initial conditions with squiggly lines labeled attractors a and b. Instead, I'll try to plot the course of this most curious condition
that I call "Chinese Food Makes Me Hungry for Superheroes."
1. Poppy returns home from spending a week with her cousins in California and brings with her the following hand-clapping song:
"I went to a Chinese restaurant to buy a loaf of bread-bread-bread./They asked me what my name was and this is what I said-said-said:/My name is L-i, L-i, pickle-eye, pickle-eye, pom-pom beauty, sleeping beauty./Indiana Jones don't move."
At the end of the song, using index fingers and thumbs, both parties create guns to point at each other and freeze. The first person who moves loses both the game and any sense of what's meaningful in this life.
2. Since I have an appetite for deconstruction, I ask Poppy to repeat the lyrics and wonder:
a. Why would someone go to a Chinese restaurant to buy bread? They don't even serve baked goods other than fortune cookies at such places, and if they did, I'm sure it would be a helluva lot cheaper to buy a loaf at a grocery store.
b. Does anyone ask your name at a restaurant unless you're waiting for a table?
c. Does the narrator of this song have a stutter and is it curable with modern speech therapy practices?
d. What kind of stoned hippie parent would name a kid THAT? (This from a man who has kids called Poppy and London)
3. As London is still trying to learn this delusional ditty and the accompanying hand jive, I do a little research and find there are a few variations to this song that include:
a. An impish character named Willie Wally Whiskers.
b. The presumably Asian restaurant employees wrap the bread in chewing gum, foil or a 5 pound note (UK version).
c. The preposterous (and rather foul) lines: "Elvis Presley/looking sexy/on the toilet/drinking Pepsi."
4. London wants to know "who the heck" this Indiana Jones guy is. We go to the video store and rent
Raiders of the Lost Ark
so London doesn't associate temporary paralysis and sissy patty-cake with former tough guy Harrison Ford.
5. After watching the unshaven professor teach, whip, shoot and ride various types of people and animals and then win the girl, London asks me, "Is Indiana Jones a superhero?" We start comparing our new fighter of felons in the felt fedora to Batman. Both men offer:
a. Some sort of costume or uniform (leather jacket and hat vs. creepy cape and cowl).
b. Weapons (whip vs. bat boomerang or-as London corrects me-"batarang").
c. Deep, unresolved parental issues yet no supernatural powers.
d. Sidekicks (London mistakenly refers to them as "psychics").
e. An ability to attract women who will put up with more man drama than you'd find on a Rufus Wainwright album.
6. So it goes. Satisfied that even actors doing bad schtick have the ability to be super, London has moved on to Captain Jack from
Pirates of the Caribbean
while Poppy now has to clear any urban legends or limericks with the parentals before she willingly infects her brother. As for me, I long for a decent Chinese restaurant that delivers. It doesn't even need to sell bread.
