The slumber party represents one of the great mysteries of life. The mysterious qualities include the name, which of course suggests that someone actually sleeps, and the reasons that parents actually choose to allow their children to have one. This is sort of like allowing your child to be kidnapped by a band of wandering grizzly bears, it once again reflects that parents are not among creatures that God has endowed with a brain.
This past weekend, my wife recently suggested to me that she wanted to allow our daughter to have a slumber party. I looked at her, then asked "Now let me get this straight, my child wants to invite thirty other children to come over and demolish my
house, keep me from sleeping, and eat every scrap of organic material in my refrigerator."
"Yeah, that's pretty much it, " she replied, "Oh, and I think our son should invite some of his friends too." By now, I have learned that arguing over such an inevitable event only increases the likelihood that it will occur and be far worse than I imagined, so with considerable reluctance I succumbed to my wife's logic. Which consisted of being told, if I didn't want to allow a slumber party, we would have to spend about nine thousand dollars and have the party at one of those kid places, like Dirty Dog's Pizza Party Planet. The last time I was there, the noise, kids, and commotion drove me past the brink of sanity, and I found myself standing on a table screaming, "It's a mad house." Sort of like Charlton Heston in the Planet of the Apes. They asked me to leave.
Anyway after a few terrifying moments while these images flooded through my head, I gave in, "A slumber party sounds okay." Famous last words.
The party started out okay, a trip to a restaurant where every child was on his or her best behavior, displaying wonderful table manners, no doubt learned from their parents. One kid proudly demonstrated how she could peel a banana with her feet and then put the whole thing in her mouth while singing MacArthur Park. I was amazed, and the waitress was so impressed she went home without even waiting for her tip.
Then it was back to the house where the children played the usual party games, stuff like Twister, pin the tail on the donkey, etc. Then the girls broke out something called Girl Talk, a new fad game apparently, I stay right on the cutting edge of these things but I had never seen this one before. The thing that surprised me was that the boys also played.
I guess it must be the era, boys are much more secure in playing girls' games. When I was a boy, my sister could chase me around the yard with a game called girl anything. One of the most traumatic events of my childhood was opening a gift under the Christmas tree and finding a doll. I ripped it apart to prove how much I disliked it, my dad howled with laughter. Now the boys actually want to play Girl Talk. My son's friend was unusually enthusiastic about the whole thing. He was even willing to put lipstick all over his face and style a girl's hair when he drew the appropriate card. I wondered if his dad would be as troubled as I was knowing that his son was wearing lipstick and playing Girl Talk. For the first time, I found that I was actually proud that my son wanted to go play video games, but his friend would hear nothing of it, he was addicted to the Girl Talk game.
After the games, came the event laughingly referred to as bed time. When I was a kid, we used to do mean things to the kids that went to sleep first. Like put their underwear in the freezer or fill their shoes with shaving cream. I always found this annoying because I was generally the one that crashed first. At least this time, I went to bed secure in the knowledge that my children had never heard of such things, at least I thought they hadn't. I don't guess I'll ever get all the shaving cream out of my shoes.
