grateful

Before we went to my mother's for Thanksgiving on Thursday, we took a much-needed Family Day, organized around two special events: going out for breakfast in the morning and going to a movie in the afternoon. Funny how things that were once part of our everyday (pre-children) lives have become nothing less than momentous. All the better to appreciate them! And it was our first movie-going experience as a family, which is something to grin about no matter how you slice it.

If it had been any other new release, we might not have taken a chance with our sensitive three year old boy at the sensory extravaganza that is the movies these days (oh, it is loud!). But The Muppets had just opened. We'd watched some of The Muppet Movie at home, but the thirty-year-old jokes and pacing seemed hard for the kids to access. Kermit the Frog is universally appealing; Steve Martin as a surly waiter is not. I hoped this new movie would call to my kids in a voice they could respond to.

Parenthood, for me, has been a time of suspicion towards pop culture. My sensitivity to crassness, meanness, loudness, cynicism, bad music, bad books, and bad art skyrocketed within minutes of giving birth to Frances. I wanted to keep everything ugly and stupid away from the perfect seven pounds of person that had been entrusted to us. When I read Jonathan Richman quoted saying that he didn't want to play music that would hurt a baby's ears, I knew exactly what he meant.


We mined pop culture for things we could delight in as a family: the Carter Family and Pete Seeger, the Beattles, the Kinks, Little Richard. Elizabeth Mitchell is a favorite; she does the work of curating and translating popular and folk songs for us. There are always more and more good children's books to discover (most recently, The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright). But television and movies? That has been cloudier territory for me.

But once the interminable advertisements and trailers were finally over and The Muppets began, sitting in the dark, looking down at Frances and Gabriel and Mike, I felt not even a tiny bit of ambivalence. Something about the exuberant song and dance numbers hit me so hard; watching them was nothing short of joyful. Holding my kids' hands during this opening song, my own childhood memories ran smack into the present moment. Oh! It was just great. I felt proud that people my age had made this movie happen (love, love that Bret McKenzie), bringing all the adults and kids around me to a similar transcendent movie-going experience.

And now? Now my family has a shared pop culture gem to share. I guess we did before, but this one feels different. We all encountered it for the first time together. Mike downloaded the soundtrack so that we could listen to it on the drive to Lancaster Thursday morning, which we did--twice--and all four of us were transported. Imagine Frances grinning in the backseat, ducking her head to the beat like a miniature gap- toothed Beastie Boy, absolutely delighted by bad guy Tex Richman (played by Chris Cooper) rapping about being rich (I'm so rich I gold-plate my gold/I even I gold-plated my cat/I don't regret much but I do regret that). I wish you could see it.

Mike and I probably have no less than thousands of songs, ad jingles, cartoons, and 80s movies in common. A lot of it is crap, but nevertheless it still makes up a landscape of references that we share and that serves as shorthand on an everyday basis. Now we have new, quality little ditties to add to the mix, and our kids know them just as intimately as we do. I love it. We can't stop singing around here. Life's a happy song, friends.