Awake

It's a cold and sunny Saturday morning in NYC and Minky Moo has a raging cold and a fever that makes her stomach feel like a hot water bottle against my back. So, we choose "Across the Universe" from the hotel movies, I pop to CVS conveniently located next door to the hotel and grab some NyQuil DayQuil MultiSympton BumperPack, dash down Union Square to Starbucks (I hate Starbucks but NYC hasn't yet acquired the Coffee Bean bug) for a hot apple cider and chaser of hot chocoate for her and an enormous AWAKE tea for me (yes it did). Plus bagels, cream cheese, a croissant, some Madelines, you know, sick treats. All is now well. She's feeling better. She's stretching like a cat and telling me she's excited for MoMA.

Eddie is here too and last night's excursion with both thirteen year olds to "Spring Awakening" was interesting. People had warned me that there was a sex scene in the play, but I don't think you fully visualize what that will be like until there you are in row H, about twenty feet from the naked adolescent bottom bopping up and down in front of you. Minks is next to me and she cocks her head towards, cups her hand around the side of her face, away from the stage and opens her mouth and eyes in that "O-M-G" way. I squeeze her hand and tell her that I will explain afterwards as a full on masturbation scene (boy on chair, center stage, penis - covered lightly by a pale blue nightshirt - in hand, hand moving rhythmically) unravels before our eyes. The play is very, very good. It won 8 Tonys including Best Musical. The kids in it are wonderful, and they look, as Eddie points out, like kids, not like thirty year olds pretending. The music is beautiful (by Duncan Sheik). And it does fill in the blanks AND visuals for everything I've ever left out while talking to her about sex. Thank God for that. But, it is quite difficult, and I challenge any other liberal-minded parent to try this, to not squirm while watching "mature" subject matter with two giggling thirteen year old girls next to you, while listening to a lyric about stallions and mares mating without shame among their young foals, or whatever the words were. A picture of a beautiful white horse on the back wall of the stage suddenly illustrated this point for me and I forced my eyes to focus on that rather than the wide-eyed expression of my spawn. You know, a good time was had by all. And we live. And we learn. If I had a third child, or maybe a fourth, I'd be a perfect mother.