Role-playing in the car
I’m subjected to many-a-things in my life as a husband and father. One of them is bending at the will of my wife to let her drive the family every now and then.
It’s not that I’m a male chauvinist pig — I’m just a regular pig — and it’s not that my wife is a bad driver by standards of the law, it’s that I’m always expected to play certain roles when I’m not behind the wheel.
As a rule, whoever is driving the car has final say on what music will be played. When I’m driving, it’s my collection of Warren Zevon songs and anything else that’s almost as good.
When my wife, Amber, is driving, it’s either the country station, which I actually enjoy about 60 percent of the time until it starts sounding like gangsta rap, or the teenybopper top 40.
It’s that or she plays Megan Traynor and Taylor Swift albums, and believe me, after listening to that duo, “I’m all about that base” jumping off a cliff with no parachute and “never, ever, ever getting” put back together.
But after a few hundred of those and similar comments, Amber now expects me to play the role of a mute.
Now, when my 6-year-old stepdaughter Emma, is driving, it’s the soundtrack to “Frozen.” You think the police would be in the better mood when seeing a cute little girl belting out her rendition of “Let it Go” after pulling her over for doing 7 miles per hour in the middle of the Turnpike, but I guess everyone has their grumpy days.
And of course, like many of us, my wife is always getting text messages, social media notifications, breaking news, traffic alerts, celebrity dead-pool wagers and Asian stock market updates on her cell phone. Thinking “safety first,” as soon as her phone chimes, I play the role of her personal assistant as she hands her phone to me to tell her what it says and then she tells me what to reply.
When it gets to the point where I start to become a disgruntled assistant with little pay and no dental coverage, I ignore what she wants me to write and just write whatever amuses me.
The following is an actual text message conversation between Amber and my mother in-law, Kim, about Emma spending the night around Halloween. I’m playing the role of Amber.
KIM: “Ok. What movies will you send with Emma?”
AMBER: “Mark has Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Dawn of the Dead on DVD.”
KIM: “That’s not appropriate for a little girl to watch lol.”
AMBER: “It’s okay. She was scared at first, but she actually laughs at it now, but she does it at the most inappropriate parts. Kinda disturbing. LOL!!!”
KIM: “I don’t want to watch that with her.”
That’s just one of the fun games I made up in the car as the others were results of Emma always begging me to sit in the back seat and play games with her as I’m then thrust into the role of daycare worker.
Believe it or not, “Rock, Paper, Scissors” gets a little boring after 391 rounds, so Emma and I came up with variations of that game.
The first is “Gun, Explosives, Bees” where gun beats explosives because a bullet can shear the explosive’s wires, explosives always beats bees because the blast will disintegrate the swarm and bees beats gun as a bee can sting a trigger finger.
The other is “Zebra, Truck, House” but I’ll leave those rules up to your imagination because that’s more of a thinking man’s game.
However, in retrospect, maybe “Zebra, Truck, House” would have been a better game choice to play with the windows down in traffic next to a state trooper, who overheard me saying, “My explosives will take out your bees, kid!”
I don’t know if any amount of singing contemporary Disney songs or “Werewolves of London” would have gotten us out of that citation, but I’ll never know. Being a singer was not one of my roles.