Daughter's First Concert. With a Boy.

My fourteen year old daughter went to a concert. With a boy.

And I drove.

Daddy panic. Yeah, I had it.

To start with, the band is called My Chemical Romance. Perhaps you've sung along to such titles as "Thank you for The Venom", "Kill All Your Friends", and "Honey, this mirror isn't big enough for the two of us."

I'm not making any of these up.

Don't get me wrong, I was a scarer of parents from way back. My poison was Alice Cooper with his faked suicides and songs about blowing schools to pieces.

Let's just say that karma took it's sweet time, but she finally showed up.

But if I was worried about these two kids trysting in a mosh pit, the conversation between them during the ride calmed my nerves.

She: You're a butt.
He: No, you're a butt.
She: Are you calling me a butt?

They're both butts.

Before dropping them off, there is a moment for a dad to address the boy who will be escorting his daughter for the evening.

Mine was this: "Anything happens to my daughter, and there's no mark on you, I'll fix that. Got it?"

We bumped knuckles.

We cool.

Talking to girls, when they happen to be your daughter

Since the hormone fairy waved her wand over my thirteen-year-old daughter Sparkly, there's been a lot of silences. Sullen ones. Distracted ones. Oh-I-left-my-ipod-on ones. Yet you can practically hear the hum of her thoughts. They just don't seem to want to come out.

Picture it: Sparkly looks just like me. Has my personality.  Should be simple, right? Just imagine what I would do, if I was a girl, and....yeah. Doesn't help. And unlike my son, Dusty—who will plop himself down on my lap and talk Legos all day long—I have to go seek out Sparkly. Find her in whatever thought-hole she might be at the time and try to coax her out. Sometimes this works. Sometimes it goes wrong.

Me: What'cha doing?
Sparkly: Making a fun quiz up.
Me: Want to try it on me?
Sparkly: If you saw a boy trying to pick up your girlfriend, would you A)....

This was not the conversation I wanted to be in. Hello, uncomfortable. And that's just it, isn't it? She's a woman and I'm a guy. In a sense, her archetypal guy. The one by which all others in her life will be measured. I didn't want to blow that responsibility. That's why I didn't want to answer the quiz. I was caught between the honest answer and the parent answer.

I'm still working out which is the better answer.

How do you stuff an underage bikini?

Kinda catches your attention, doesn't it? Even though nobody is inside. Now imagine that your thirteen year old daughter is wearing  this two-piece, sluicing down the ole slip and slide. Boys galore.

Yeah.

We have to have that talk, Sparkly.

Go Green - But what shade?

I’ve been obsessing about green. As in which color green for my book cover? There’s this real trendy green, you see it everywhere. Magazines, candy wrappers, web pages, race cars...



Even rock groups.

If a book is green, chances are it is this green. So when my thirteen-year-old daughter asked me what color to paint her room, I suggested:



She loved it! I told her that was the color I was thinking for the cover of my book.

She: Isn’t yours about a boy who tries out for baseball?

Me: Yes.

She: What about grass-green?



Even better.