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P is for (Helicopter) Parenting

There are some parents to deign to raise what have been dubbed free-range kids, children who get around on their own, pretty much as I did when I was eight or nine.

One of the things I want for my daughter is room for her to find her own way, without her mother or me hovering about. Yet I find myself looking out the window of our house, checking our own back yard, making sure she’s OK. I’m trying not to be a helicopter parent, testing the line between consciousness and overparenting.

Here’s a fact: more kids ride to school than ever before. “The most recent data on active transportation among school-age children represent a significant decrease since 1969. The number of students walking and biking to school has decreased more than three-fold over the past few decades, from 41 percent of students in 1969 to only 13 percent of students in 2001.” Surely, part of this is a function of consolidated school districts, which are generally larger. But one parent on our street acknowledges driving her child the few blocks to the school.

I can’t help but think that much of this trend stems from a six-year-old boy named Etan Patz. He walked to school in 1979 in New York City and never came home; it was only in 2012 that someone has confessed to killing the child at that time. Etan Patz was the first missing child to appear on a milk carton. In those days, one had to wait 12 or 24 hours before the police would truly respond to a missing persons report. But after other high-profile crimes, there are amber alerts that take the info about a missing child across the region, or even across the country, almost instantly.

There are some parents to deign to raise what has been dubbed free-range kids, children who get around on their own, pretty much as I did when I was eight or nine, going off to the playground with no parental or other adult supervision. And I did that before the days of cellphones. These current parents have been highly criticized in some circles. What if something happens?

I find myself regularly conflicted between safety and a more laissez-faire attitude.

ABC Wednesday – Round 11

Video reviews: Iron Man 2 and The Parent Trap

Maureen O’Hara is gorgeous in The Parent Trap.

The Parent Trap (1961), if I saw it – and surely I MUST have seen it at some point – mustn’t I? – I watched SO long ago that the details are surely erased from my memory. It was a Disney film starring Hayley Mills… and Hayley Mills! I DO recall that ad campaign. The script was based on Das Doppelte Lottchen, a novel by Erich Kastner, that had been made into British and German films, using twin girls.

Two girls, one from tony Boston, the other from freewheeling California, meet at a summer camp and take an instant dislike to each other. Each just doesn’t like that other girl with her face. Antics ensue, including a social event with the boys from a neighboring camp, ruined by the duo.

Forced to spend time together in isolation, Sharon and Susan discover they have the exact same birthday… and the same mother! They figure out that their parents separated when they were infants, with Sharon staying with their mother, and Susan off with their dad. They decide to switch places, which involves Susan cutting Sharon’s hair, in order to get their parents back together.

Susan gets to spend time with her mother (Maureen O’Hara), grandmother (Cathleen Nesbitt), and grandfather (Charlie Ruggles), who is the first to uncover the scheme. Meanwhile, Sharon finally sees dad (Brian Keith) on his ranch. His housekeeper (Una Merkel) notices a “change” in the girl. But trouble is brewing: Dad is engaged to some gold digger named Vicki (Joanna Barnes).

Eventually, Susan and mom head west, and the plot goes from there.

The not-so-good:
It’s too long! At 129 minutes, we watched it in two sittings. I would have cut some parts of the 30-minute set-up.
A couple of the songs, by Richard and Robert Sherman, were period pieces, and not very impressive.
For both of these, I blame Uncle Walt. I discovered, from the extras disc, that the movie lacked a title song for a good while. One working title was Let’s Get Together; the Sherman Brothers wrote a song by that name, and then Walt insisted that director David Swift insert the song into the movie, not once, but twice. As sung by Annette Funicello, it’s on a record at the dance; as sung by Susan and Sharon, (unconvincingly) playing guitar and piano, it’s a serenade to mom and dad.
The ultimate title song, performed by Tommy Sands and Annette, isn’t great either.

The quite good:
The winning cast. In spite of the implausibility that parents would keep the sisters’ existence from each other, and the unlikely coincidence of the meeting, good chemistry between the siblings, and with their family.
Hayley playing opposite Hayley, much more difficult in the day than it would be now, was quite effective. The filmmakers, I discovered, looked for some physical background, such as a wall design so that if the matting weren’t perfect, it wouldn’t be as obvious.
From the extra disc: highly entertaining six minutes with Susan Henning, who played Hayley’s double, who only appeared on-screen when one girl was at an angle to the other, or when you saw one girl’s back. She is uncredited in the film, but Walt Disney himself gave her a special trophy at the end of the shoot.
The other Sherman Brothers song, For Now for Always, sung by Maureen O’Hara, as mom recalls the first date with dad, is lovely. This too was a title song contender. Speaking of lovely, O’Hara is gorgeous in this film, more beautiful at 40 than the 26-year-old Barnes.

I think this review is largely accurate, especially with regards to the extras, although the disc I rented paired Parent Trap with its 1986 TV sequel.
***
Which brings me to:
The Parent Trap II (1986). A quarter century after Susan and Sharon’s successful maneuver, a now divorced Sharon (Hayley Mills) wants to move to NYC for her job. Her daughter Nicki fears losing her best friend Mary, unless Sharon marries Mary’s dad Bill (Tom Skerritt); then they would be sisters. They get aunt Susan (Hayley Mills), who is married, to pretend to be Sharon to get him interest in Sharon. Wha?

The motivation for Susan is so non-existent. It’s one thing to get her parents, who were once married, BACK together again. This matchmaking, though, is bizarre. The film had the feel of a clunky 1980s TV movie because it is. There is one rather funny scene near the end, but both the Daughter and I were either bored or confused through much of this.
***
Iron Man 2 (2010) was OK. I LOVED the first film but was concerned about the big reveal at the end that Tony Stark was Iron Man. In this iteration, Tony tangles with a self-important Senator (Gary Shandling) and a military weapons expert (Sam Rockwell). Can the secrets of the powerful Iron Man suits fall into the wrong hands? Apparently so, as Ivan (Mickey Rourke), son of Tony’s father’s colleague, poses a serious threat.

Meanwhile, Lt. Rhodes (now played by Don Cheadle) gets all conflicted about his obligations to the military and to his friend Tony. Does Tony just give Stark Industries to his secretary, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow)?! And what’s the story with Stark Industries legal consultant Natalie Rushman (Scarlett Johansson)? It all made sense at the end but felt convoluted along the way.

Oh, and obviously, I was supposed to have seen this BEFORE the Thor movie. Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) continues to be involved in the mix. In any case, I think I’m now finally ready to see the Avengers movie.

40 Years Ago: October 1972 – The Draft Board

Since my draft number was so low (002), I thought I would be doing some sort of alternative service in 1973.

After getting a letter from the Selective Service, a/k/a, the draft board, indicating that I was reclassified 1-A (eligible for military service) over the summer, I filed an appeal. Though I was living in my college town of New Paltz, NY, I had to return to my hometown of Binghamton, NY.

There were three men on the draft board. The chairman said that his daughter talked about me all the time when we were in high school; I was president of student government and involved in the theater club, among other things. Did I remember her? I said, “Oh, yeah!” I had no idea who she was, at least by name, though maybe I would have recognized her by sight.

One guy said, after introducing himself, said absolutely nothing.

The third man was Garland Hamlin. This was a man I had known all my life. We attended the same church. His wife was organist at that church, and she had tried for about a year to teach me to play piano, so I had been in the Hamlin house dozens of times. I went to school with his two daughters. So I believe that he found it necessary to ask the toughest questions.

I know that he invoked Hitler. He wondered if a Hitler were attacking my mother what I would do. I said I would defend her, but that was different than initiating conflict by going to war.

Around the same time, I had to go for my military physical in Syracuse, NY, which I passed. even though I have a minor heart murmur which I’ve lived with since I was born; the doctor didn’t even notice until I had brought it to his attention.

It did take them a month to ascertain that I was moral enough to go to war. I was asked if had ever given money to a variety of groups, only two of which I had even heard of, the Communist Party of the USA and the Socialist Workers Party. I certainly spent some nominal amount on an antiwar button or two from the SWP, so I wrote yes re: them.

Finally, the word came from the draft board. I was reclassified 1-A-O, a conscientious objector available for noncombatant military service only. I’m sure it was vital that I had indicated my CO status when I had first registered for the draft a year and a half earlier. My thanks to Jean Hagopian, mother of my friend Amy, who was my informal draft counselor through this period.

Here’s the kicker, though. Since my draft number was so low (002), I thought I would be doing some sort of alternative service in 1973. But since the Vietnam war was winding down, and there were many older people whose temporary deferments had lapsed, they drafted NO ONE born in 1953 before the draft law ended on June 30, 1973. Moreover, on January 27, 1973, Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird announced the creation of an all-volunteer armed forces, negating the need for the military draft. So all of that rigamarole had been for nothing, as it turned out.

Those were interesting times.

The Lydster, Part 103: In as a clown, out as an angel

She’ll be performing on Saturday, December 16 at 6:30 p.m. at the Egg.

What a strange weekend we had in the middle of last month.

On Saturday, I took the Daughter to play her first soccer match. She had gone to the practice on the previous Monday night and been assigned to a team in the U8 (under eight) division. But when we got there for her 11:10 a.m. match, we found that she had been moved to the U10 division, and thus on another team. Worse, because the opposing team in their 12:20 p.m. match was initially shorthanded, she was temporarily traded to the other side. She was more disappointed than unhappy by all of this, but she particularly enjoyed being back on her U10 team when more kids arrived. She was a little bored on defense; her teammates kept the ball at the other end of the field most of the time. But she liked being on offense. And we got to see a bald eagle flying overhead.

On Sunday, the Daughter tried out for the Albany Berkshire Ballet’s performance of The Nutcracker. Based on her age, she was supposed to be trying out to be a clown. But based on her height, she was asked to wait around so she could try out as an angel, which tended to be a role that slightly older girls get. At the end of it all, she got the role of an angel. She’ll be performing on Saturday, December 16 at 6:30 p.m. at the Egg, a local performing arts venue.

The commonality of these two events was that it took a bit longer than we had anticipated, but ended up with a good outcome.

Movie Review: Argo

The hostage crisis is an event I remember all too well, watching the ABC News crisis news segment each night with Ted Koppel; that Koppel show eventually became Nightline.

It shouldn’t have worked: six Americans avoid being taken in the Iran hostage crisis, which started November 4, 1979. They hang out at the residence of the Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor (Victor Garber) for several weeks. The CIA, trying to get them out, rejects the idea of pretending the six are Canadian farm aid workers. Instead, CIA operative Tony Mendez (Ben Affleck) came up with this ridiculous idea of wanting to scout Tehran as a potential backdrop for a science fiction movie called Argo, with the six becoming part of the crew, a plan approved by his boss (Bryan Cranston) as the “best bad idea” available.

It shouldn’t have worked: the movie was based on real, known events. You might know how it turns out. And yet my wife and I are on the edge of our seats for the last third of the film when we saw it Sunday at the Spectrum Theatre in Albany.

This is a wonderful movie, directed by Affleck. It is also, at times, rather funny, with most of the laughs generated by John Goodman, as John Chambers, a Hollywood make-up artist who’s done work for the agency before, and Alan Arkin, as film producer Lester Siegel; they set up a phoney film studio to put out a non-film, even getting a story in the entertainment periodical Variety. Yet the tension is never far away, as the Iranians are developing their own intelligence about the missing Americans.

At the beginning of the film credits, a picture of the actual passport of each “fake film crew” member is shown alongside of the performer in the film, which reflected the sometimes astonishing similarities between them. Also, Kyle Chandler is almost a dead ringer of President Carter’s chief of staff Hamilton Jordan. Then we hear from the President, giving thanks to the CIA, while expressing only passing regret that the US government had to give all the credit for the rescue to the Canadians, lest the 52 hostages, who weren’t freed until January 20, 1981, the date of Ronald Reagan’s inauguration, suffer the repercussions.

Interesting fact from the IMDB: “In order to make the movie feel like the 1970s, Ben Affleck shot it n regular film, cut the frames in half, and blew those images up 200% to increase their graininess.” This is done to great effect.

The hostage crisis is an event I remember all too well, watching the ABC News crisis news segment each night with Ted Koppel (shown in the footage, along with ABC’s Frank Reynolds and NBC’s Tom Brokaw); that Koppel show eventually became Nightline. If you’re younger, an important history lesson, even as the film takes a couple of liberties, especially near the end.

The Oscar buzz is warranted.
***
There’s a Kickstarter project about the story behind this story, involving Jack Kirby, Ray Bradbury, and Buckminster Fuller, among others.