At the grocery store: “DADDY!!! Let’s get beer!!!”
At Lowe’s: “Why can’t we go to Home Depot?”
At a department store: “Daddy, I forgot underwear.”
But the one that truly had me anticipating odd looks of other patrons was in the grocery store when my daughter, without prompt, announced, “Dad, Hannah Montana is WAY cooler than Elvis.”
I looked around and saw several people staring at me, probably wondering what in the world led to this conversation. What led to the conversation was a mistake I frequently make: I tried to teach my kids something.
Earlier in the day, we were cleaning the house. I had some music playing a random disc of songs. My music choices are rather wide-ranging, so the songs may go from Marshall Tucker Band to Pearl Jam to George Strait to Metallica. When Allie came into the room, the Elvis Presley song “In the Ghetto” was playing. As you know, “In the Ghetto” is an uplifting song about a young man getting shot and killed after stealing a car, so what better song to sing to your 6-year-old.
She asked me who was singing, and I told her Elvis. I told her that Elvis was one of the most popular singers ever. I showed her some pictures of him online, and told her how Grandma had seen him in concert years ago. Kinda fun to show your kid concert clips of Elvis and the crowd going nuts, and watching her try to picture Grandma in the mix.
She didn’t seem to grasp just how big Elvis was (insert your own later-years Elvis joke here). I tried to relate, so I went the Hannah Montana rout. For those of you not familiar, Hannah Montana is a show on the Disney Channel about a ninth-grade girl who has a secret life as a pop singer. It’s actually a well-done show, and I have probably watched more episodes of Hannah Montana in the last year than anything I would opt for on my own. The show stars Miley Cyrus, the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus, who plays her dad on the show as well. The show writers obviously keep in mind parents are watching, because they throw in a mullet haircut joke just for us once in a while.
Anyhow, Hannah Montana is the hot thing right now, at least as far as 6-year-old girls go. She is SOOOO cool, probably the coolest thing EVER. So we had this conversation:
ME: Allie, do you think Hannah Montana is cool?
HER: She is the coolest!
ME: No, I am, but let’s stay on track here. Elvis is about a thousand times cooler than Hannah Montana. THAT’S how cool he was.
HER:
ME: Understand?
HER:
ME: Look, Elvis is the coolest. Or one of the coolest. Along with Frank Sinatra, Han Solo, Rick Blaine, Chili Palmer, John Wayne and George Clooney’s character in “Out of Sight.”
HER: Uh, can I go play now?
So I figured we were done with our pop culture lesson until the grocery store. I tried to remain calm, understanding that she is a child, and she cannot expect to grasp such things. I tried to explain again. I held my hand about waist level. “Allie, if this is Hannah Montana’s level of cool, Elvis’ level would be somewhere up in the sky. It’s not a knock on Hannah. But you’ve got to understand how cool Elvis was.”
“I think Hannah’s cooler.”
“Allie, he wore jumpsuits — and made it work.”
(For what’s it’s worth, Parker’s on my side. Granted, he’s 4, so if you just present it in an excited manner, you can get him on board: “Parker, you know what’s cool — OATMEAL!!!! YEAH!!!!!”)
Perhaps I should just let her have her icon of Hannah Montana. Hannah Montana could, I suppose, grow to super celebrity status one day. (Please, please, please, in the name of Disney teen stars, take the Hillary Duff route, rather than the Lindsay Lohan one.) Who knows, one day she may be explaining to her kids about the iconic status of Hannah Montana. All the while explaining to other shoppers that she does not, in fact, plan to get her kids beer.
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