Takoma Parents – We’re Falling Down on the Job

I went on the Takoma Park Folk Festival pub crawl on Saturday and saw lots of older parents and empty nesters having a few drinks, listening to music or ignoring it and generally relaxing.

But what I also saw was an embrace of theatricality that usually subsides with teenage angst.

How else to explain the singer songwriters now retired from desk jobs? What else accounts for the manic dancing by the Revels and the boisterous singing of “What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor?” (The 20-somethings who witnessed it all had looks on their faces like they’d been accidentally caught up in a field trip for inmates of an insane asylum.)

There is a serious problem in this town. 

We are falling down on the job of being button-downed, repressed and closed to new experiences. (Except gangsta rap. “TURN THAT OFF”, we can yell like early 1960s housewives when gangsta rap comes on. We can be closed to gangsta rap.)

There’s retired people in Takoma Park with purple hair. Not blue hair. Purple. 

The town is awash in tie-dye, along with lots of outfits from various sporting good stores. Hiking pants, a tie-dye-ish tank top and Keen sandals? You’ve got the Takoma Park uniform.

We have to stop listening when kids say they really want to change to a different musical instrument. We choose the instrument and that’s that.

We have to force them to wear matching outfits without rips or stains even though this means that they will never wear their favorite T-shirt: “Soccer is Life. The Rest is Just Details.”

If we do not, we run the risk that our children, our beloved babies, the apples of our devoted eyes will *gasp* become cheerleaders. Become accountants. Become all the things we rebelled against.

The girls will break the hearts of their feminist mothers and fathers, yes, fathers by cheering on boys with no desire of ever having their own athletic career. (Yes, yes, cheerleading is athletic but the goal is to cheer on boys. Case closed. No appeal.)

The kids will grow up to be bean-counters who revel in paperwork, or worse, become the designers of online expense systems that change every few years but are easy to fool if you’re a born liar.

We don’t want them to be used car salesmen. Or members of Congress who tweet their junk. Or worse. 

We must begin repressing the children now.