A Sailor's Promise

Would you trust this man to keep his word?

In our family, television = love. It's how we communicate and connect and understand the world. Some might think that's sad, but, frankly, I have enough to feel guilty about and this one doesn't really bother me. It works for us and it gives us a lot of cultural capital, which we can share with the world. Sam can ride to Sunday School carpool and reenact the opening skit from Saturday Night Live for all his buddies, and Emma and I can have meaningful discussions about the pitfalls of meeting your future mate on a reality television show; or the reasons that it's not necessarily advisable to put your toddler in a beauty pageant; or the dangers that ensue when you're Tori Spelling and you have a secretly psychotic boyfriend, or your dad is Tony Danza and he secretly has multiple personality disorder. It's all part of the joy and wonder we call "parenting."

So it's no surprise that, like the rest of us, Molly loves her TV. Since our old DVR died, we lost all of our old Teletubbies episodes, which was a little sad, but Sesame Street still comes on every day, and at last count, we had 29 archived episodes taking up TiVO space. Her favorite episode changes weekly. Lately it's been all about the Curly Bear. She has her favorite episodes memorized, word for word, so that she sounds like the annoying guy you know who insists on quoting lines from Caddyshack all day long. Or like my late grandmother who, when for some hard-to-fathom reason we took her to see National Lampoon's Vacation, proceeded to loudly sing along with "La Marseillaise," much to our dismay. But I digress.

Molly has "Curly Bear" memorized, and "Mine-itis," and many other classic episodes. But as I've mentioned here before, she also loves the opening themes for all television shows. When we watch a grown-up show, she wants to see the opening credits again and again: "Again Teeth?" she asks at the beginning of Ugly Betty or "Again Gone?" at the start of Top Chef. It's kind of cute, but then it quickly gets annoying because we want to watch the actual show instead of watching the credits roll again and again and again.

So one night, Emma, being an expert in child psychology and a highly motivated television watcher, came up with a plan. She told Molly that she would make her a "Sailor's Promise" that we could watch the "song" at the beginning of the show we were watching as soon as the show was over. She and Molly shook on it and sealed it with the immortal words, "It's a deal."

I feel a little bad about this. A "Sailor's Promise"????? It's not as if sailors are particularly trustworthy. It seems to me that a "Sailor's Promise" is what Fletcher Christian gave to Captain Bligh, and look how it turned out for him. But now, Molly thinks it's a thing. And so, whenever Molly wants something and we don't want to or can't do it right away, we shake hands and solemnly pledge a "Sailor's Promise." Molly pledges right along with us. I know this will come back to bite us all.

It's an outrage.

Ok. The fix is in. I don't know how to explain it, but I'm not happy about it. Let me start at the beginning.

In an episode of "Elmo's World" on Sesame Street, Elmo's goldfish, Dorothy, casts her fishy mind back to the day Elmo was born. Here is the scene, with Elmo's parents, George and Gladys:


This seems about right. George is clearly Elmo's bio dad. They look exactly alike. Gladys and George are happy, excited about their new baby. God knows why they chose to name him Elmo, but whatev.

Fast forward to our favorite episode of Sesame Street, the one with the elephant stuck in the bathtub. There's a song segment called "Elmo's Riding," that features Elmo learning to ride his bike with his "Daddy." A man who is clearly not George in any way shape or form. In fact, this is Elmo's new "Daddy":

I know, right? He looks nothing like Elmo. Look at the face shape. And the nose. According to the Muppet Wiki, his name is "Louie," and this Arlo Guthrie-looking, folk-song-singing, hemp-wearing dilletante has entirely elbowed George out of the picture. We figure that Louie must be Elmo's stepdad. And that's fine. Maybe George and Gladys broke up when Elmo was small, so Louie's the only Dad Elmo's really ever known. Maybe George is a crappy absentee father who doesn't pay his child support. Maybe George died, which would be really sad, and you'd think there'd be some acknowledgement of it. Maybe Gladys is just a tramp. Who knows? But I bet there's not even a picture of George on the mantle at the Monster house. And that's not OK.

I'm not implying that Louie is a bad dad, although he does seem a little shady to me and he has a weird Willie Nelson-esque accent and a creepy goatee and apparently way too much time on his hands. God knows that I'm not saying he's not Elmo's "real" dad, if he's the one loving and raising Elmo. But the Muppet Wiki claims that the reason for the George bait-and-switch is that Dorothy the Goldfish "imagined" what Elmo's birth-day and his parents looked like. Imagined!?!?!?!? Since when do goldfish possess that kind of imagination? And why on earth would Dorothy "imagine" them names like "Gladys" and "George"? If this is the case, then Elmo's mom probably looks like Mama Cass or Suze Orman or someone equally improbable. Muppet Wiki, you have really failed.

It seems to me that George's parental rights are being denied here, and if I were him, I'd quit paying my child support, too. I'm just saying.