My sixth grade daughter saw the existing Pirates of the Caribbean movies for the first time recently. She has since gone off the deep end for Depp. He has unbuckled her proverbial swash, so to speak. I complained to my wife saying, that our daughter seemed to have developed a Johnny D. jones. She replied, “so has her mother.”
Couldn’t have been less helpful.
What happened to my little girl? And yes, that is rhetorical. PLEASE don’t answer that one.
I am slowly coming to terms with the idea that I must release my children little by little. But the youngest was the daughter and now she’s not quite so young. It is a bitter-sweet pill for a father to swallow.
Her class performed the Gilbert and Sullivan hit, Pirates of Penzance over the weekend and I was given another piratical glimpse into the strange landscape that is a very young, soon-to-be-but-not-yet-thank-you-very-much woman’s heart. There is that completely mandatory and inexplicable twist near the end where the pirates are all declared to be not just poor pirates but, “gentlemen who have gone wrong.” The herd of daughters (equal in number to the pirate crew) shriek “GENTLEMEN WHO HAVE GONE WRONG? EEEEEEE!” and run into the nearest cut-throat’s waiting arms.
May the earth open and swallow me, so help me these kids got the point. They hammed up this silliness with eyes open.
Speaking as one of the Good Guys in this world (and not in the tough way, like Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name) I would rather the female heart save up this interest in Bad Boys until later in life, when it becomes even less my business. It would be easier on us fathers. I begin to see why fathers were so glad to see their daughters dating me back in high school. I was such a virtuous sap.
My only consolation is that, while I’ll not be swinging on a ripped sail to set young damsels’ hearts a-pounding like the thundering hooves of raging horses, I make one hell of a Daddy.
And if Johnny Depp is a good father, this would not be a good time to tell me.
1 comments:
I'm no father, but I definitely miss my nieces who'd pull books from the shelves and hop in my lap and say, "Read."
Now they're in high school, got boyfriends and silver-studded belts, and I'm relegated off their radar.
I don't know the answer, but if you're concerned about it, then yeah, you are a good father.
P.S. "Johnny D. Jones" has just got to be a song.
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