***

“Oh, it’s not for me.”

“You don’t have to explain anything.”

“No, I mean it. It’s for my daughter.”

“How old is she?”

“She’s two.”

“This skirt is awful big for a two year old.”

“I buy old skirts, cut them up and make different sizes with the fabric — I really liked this plaid one and thought it would look great on her.”

“You don’t have to make …”

“Look, I’m serious … oh never mind — how much?”

“Two dollars.”

“Here you go — thanks.”

“Just between you and me — I think you’ll look fantastic in it.”

“Yeah, I think so, too.”

***

Although it’s hard to see, the cowgirl patch hides what I’m hoping was just a coffee stain. Beggars can’t be choosers when you buy clothes by the pound.

***

A few weeks before first grade, my brother, Jeff, put me on his shoulders and walked toward a low-hanging tree limb. We had been watching an Our Gang movie and laughed when Alfalfa hoisted Spanky or Froggy or Buckwheat onto his shoulders — I forget the exact one — and walked under a bar. Alfalfa kept going while the other one grabbed the bar and hung suspended in mid-air, kicking his legs with glee.

It all seemed so effortless. If those ragamuffin misfits and derelicts could do it, how hard would it be for two semi-athletic suburbanites?

The doctor later said he had seen nothing like it.

The entire weight of my body crashed on my right elbow, which had found a delightfully cushy landing spot on an exposed tree root. On impact, the elbow pushed forward, torquing the two arm bones around each other. Miraculously, the injury didn’t require surgery, but I had to wear a full-arm cast for almost two months and so when first grade started, I spent recess in the classroom. Apparently my school frowned on the temporarily infirm.

I’m not sure exactly how long it lasted, maybe it was a week, maybe it was the whole two months, I don’t remember. But every afternoon when the rest of the class filtered into the sunshine, I remained behind, holding my bladder with my one good arm. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure if my seclusion was for safety reasons or for punishment for being so clumsy. But by mid-afternoon each day, I reached my limit. As the weeks wore on, I began to shun water and avoid milk. I was allowed to go to lunch like the other kids, but I swore off all liquids. Although my sunken eyes and flaky skin might have alerted me to problems with this new dietary restriction, I knew that by afternoon recess, I wouldn’t be able to hold it any more. The kids would be outside, the teacher would excuse herself, and I would sit at my desk, alone, and watch the clock — willing the second hand forward, forward to three o’clock and a quick burst out the door to the bathroom.

I rarely made it.

Later, of course, I would come to realize that any passing teacher would have let me out for a bathroom break. But when you’re six and stuck alone in a classroom for various and ill-detailed reasons, it seemed a lot less intrusive to gently lay my head on the desk, weep softly and give in.

The worst part about afternoon recess was that there was still an hour of school left before the day was finished — an entire hour to play-off a soggy, upside-down-U-shaped pee stain in my jeans. It was far easier, I soon discovered, to remain seated for the last hour than to get up and risk discovery. If we had a reading circle, I feigned paralysis.

“My legs,” I would shrug, rubbing my calves as if every first grader grappled with a crippling case of gout.

If we had to stand up and read-aloud, I found that my neck was impossibly burdened by the weight of my enormous child head and couldn’t raise itself from the desk.

“I’m sorry,” I would say, speaking into the wood, “It’s suddenly so heavy!”

This was the beginning of the era when teachers grew afraid of smacking kids with rulers or paddling them on the behinds, so I was rather confident my newfound inertness would not be put to the test.

The first twenty minutes after recess were full of anxiety. If I rose from my desk, there would be a tiny puddle left in the seat and anyone could tell what it was. But if I stewed in it long enough, my jeans would eventually absorb it, and the only tell-tale sign of my secret shame would be the wet spots running down my shins and dribbling into my shoes. Thankfully, the rest of the class seemed oblivious, but there was one boy, after a series of incidents, who began to catch on.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“Oh you know — water. I spilled.”

It wasn’t a horrible excuse, considering half the class had yet to manage drinking out of a cup and was told at all times to “be careful” and “use two hands.” Accidents happened all the time.

“But two days in a row?” he continued.

He was the Inspector Javert of urine.

A few weeks in, he smirked at my wet jeans and sneered, “I see you spilled again.”

At the time, my cursing wasn’t advanced enough to offer a suitable riposte — “Fuck you,” comes to mind nowadays, or “Mind your own god damn business” — and so I just threw up my hands and agreed. I was clumsy. As far as schoolyard reputations go, clumsy was much preferred to jean wetter. Or desk pee-er. Or that weird kid who left a U-shaped ring of pee on the bus bench. I always felt for that poor sap. And so I nursed the new reputation, working “clumsy” into every day conversation and hoping my personal public relations campaign would work at least a few days more.

By the time the bus pulled up to whisk us home, the stains had more or less dried. Scott, the highly perceptive and increasingly annoying little brat, refused to sit next to me on the way home, sensing, perhaps, something was amiss.

I held up my hands — “What can I say? All butterfingers!” — and then stroked my cast, reminding any eaves-droppers of my newfound handicap. In hindsight, it must have looked pathetic, the sight of a shy, crippled boy, crossing his legs and hoping the stain would blend into the folds. But I stuck to my story.

“Water,” I’d tell anyone. “Silly me.”

***

Dana and I went out for a day together recently, leaving Emmeline alone with my mom, and when we returned, the child was almost completely potty trained. She refused diapers and demanded to sit on the potty like a “big grammy.” We had read books on the subject and tons of Internet tips. We began to feel guilty that she was approaching 2 and a half and most of her peers could wipe themselves while she still preferred a more legs-up approach on the changing table.

But still we put it off. I cringed at the thought of carrying around a porta-potty and stopping on the sidewalk 50 times each block, as she sought to try out the new shiny seat. And don’t even get me started on slipping into men’s restrooms when we’re out and about. On the plus side, in a lot of men’s restrooms, it doesn’t really matter if you make it to the actual toilet — the general vicinity seems good enough for a lot of people. On the bad side, of course, is trying to tip-toe to the right spot and clean it off before an accident occurs.

I was dreading potty-training.

But we came home that afternoon, and it was done. It was the four-hour potty training method.

Suck on that, weekend potty training proselytizers.

I’d like to say she was just ready. It was her time. The vision of her entire preschool class using the toilets probably had something to do with it, too. But mostly, it was the bribes. She receives a jelly bean, chocolate chip, candy corn or piece of rock cocaine every time she uses the potty. Two if she does something else in there, and the whole bag if she doesn’t require assistance.

But yes, there have been accidents. The other day, Emme and I had just come back from the grocery store, and I was busy putting away the vegetables and trying to make a sandwich at the same time, when I saw Emme climb off her seat, grab a dish rag and dart silently over to her chair.

“What are you doing, kid?”

“Emme spilled water,” she said.

I didn’t remember giving her a drink and I looked around for her stool — there was no way she could reach the sink without her stool. I drifted over to the table.

The ceiling light threw an odd shadow on the chair, and I couldn’t tell for the life of me exactly what it was. Maybe she did dash to the sink without me knowing it, fill a glass of water and dump it on her chair. Although I had a pretty good feeling she had simply peed herself, I wasn’t going to be one of those brave parents who bent down to smell the liquid or, worse, stick my finger in it. Besides, there was no cup nearby.

“Did you pee, kid?”

“No.”

“What’s this on the chair?”

“Water.”

It could have been, I considered. It was hard to tell. It certainly didn’t appear yellow, but maybe the shadows were simply playing with me. I looked at her clothes and saw her shorts were wet, and there was a little line of something dribbling down her leg.

“And what’s this?”

“Oh that’s more water.”

I told her it was OK — that I once knew a boy who peed himself all the time, and he turned out normal.

Mostly.

But she was insistent.

“It’s just water,” she said, sticking to her story. I asked where the water came from, and she looked up helpfully.

“From Emme’s bagina,” she said, pointing.

Together we went to her bedroom and picked out her favorite pair of “big girl grammy pants,” something she will love to hear about in college. Together we slipped them over her legs, while I wondered whether they would survive the next hour intact and whether I was in a suitable position to judge anyway.

***

***

“Hey, Emme, come look at these pictures — who do you want to dress up as for Wicked Day?”

“Who does Emme want to dress up as?”

“Well look, there’s Dorothy?”

“Mmmm … no.”

“There’s Elphaba the witch?”

“Mmmm … no.”

“And then here, there’s …”

“Chistery! Chistery! Chistery!”

“… Chistery, the flying monkey.”

“Emme wants to be Chistery!”

I am so sneaking her into a matinee when the show opens here next year.

***

***

Frankly, she was just as happy in the “before” costume.

***

The crazy began in third grade. Mrs. Rudolph, my teacher, was circling the classroom with a new assignment, cackling about its difficulty like a grade-school Elmira Gulch. Only instead of riding a bicycle and threatening to put down Toto, she pointed out that she had spent all night conjuring up the most horrendous quiz we could imagine.

“Good luck,” she sneered, leaning over my desk.

I was wondering why she singled me out specifically — did I need it? Jesus, was I the dumb one? What did she mean? — when I saw it. Her nose. Her nose started like a lump of fleshy pudding between her eyes and then suddenly sprouted forward as if someone had installed a tiny stick in the taste treat that was her main feature. The stick came to a sudden stop and seemed to split at the tip. The forked effect was frightening. Considering how big of a witch she was, it didn’t necessarily surprise me that she had what amounted to two pointy noses, but it was still discomforting to behold them up close. I stared too long, a moment too much, and Mrs. Rudolph recoiled a bit, as if to say, “What?” So it didn’t put me in her good graces when my hand instinctively reached for my own nose, feeling whether my proboscis split as well.

She put her hands on her hips and huffed, “And what exactly are you doing? That’s not polite, you know.”

But I couldn’t help it. I was enthralled. My fingers felt around my nose, examining the tip points. Just like Mrs. Rudolph, I had two nose tips as well. Only, mine were buried beneath a layer of flesh like a normal person. It quickly became an uncontrollable habit. Whenever I saw Mrs. Rudolph, my hands jumped to my nose and felt for the two tips. At some point, as the year progressed, I began to feel badly for the poor woman, as I hounded her with habitual nasal mimicry. She began to not even look in my direction, as I would spend hours staring at her nose while examining my own. Most children picked inside their nose. I felt mine up. But her nose had cast a spell on me, and it became something of a ritual to enter the classroom, glance at her face and then put my hands to my own, assuring myself that my nose hadn’t visibly split over night.

It was my first quirk, my first small, nascent bit of what would become a lifetime devotion to crazy.

A few months later, I entered the class to find Mrs. Rudolph with her back turned, engaged in a conversation with another broom-rider. I was devastated. Didn’t she know so much depended on our new routine? If I couldn’t see her nose right away, I couldn’t feel my own and then I couldn’t walk the exactly three steps to my desk, circle it once and sit down so that both of my ass cheeks touched plastic at the same time. Didn’t she know that my quirks were reproducing like rabbits and that her oddly shaped features were the cause of my burgeoning personal torment? I stopped in the doorway as other students pushed around me. But I couldn’t move. I craned my neck, hoping to catch a glimpse of her nose.

“I know you’re there Michael,” she said suddenly, her back turned. “Just take your seat.”

My feet were glued to the floor.

“Go on,” she insisted, “I’m not in the mood for your little antics.”

My foot lifted off the ground and simply fell back in the same place. It tried again. And again. But I was motionless. I could see my desk. It was only three feet away. But I couldn’t make it. I couldn’t move.

It would become a familiar feeling throughout my life, this inability to function if my quirks and superstitions weren’t first sated. Some people can’t leave the house, for instance, without checking the coffee pot or making sure the lights are off. A lot of people can’t go to bed without first checking to see whether the stove is turned off. But how many people have to touch each dial, ensuring they are all in the off position before crossing the room and flipping the light switch exactly twice? I’ve been playing in a Sunday softball beer league for seven years now and I have yet to step on the third or first base line, and every time I jog into the outfield, I am forced to pick up a clump of grass and toss it into the air to test the wind — even on perfectly calm, windless evenings. Flying is of course a nightmare, as the entire flight hinders on whether I can utter an exact phrase exactly six times in the time between the first engine roar and take-off. That kind of responsibility is daunting.

But it gets really embarrassing when I have to knock on wood.

A lot of people subscribe to the superstition that if you don’t knock on wood, whatever fate-tempting statement you just made may well come true, or not. A lot of people don’t know, however, that you have to be precise in the administration of this superstition. What if, for instance, you accidentally knock on wood more than the usual two times?

In my view, if you accidentally knock three times, you have to knock one more time to make it an even four. But four, oddly enough, balances out two knocks because it is the polar opposite — it is double two knocks, in other words, and therefore carries more weight. So if you accidentally knock on wood three times instead of two times in the very beginning, you have to just go ahead and knock on wood six times to make the number round and to cancel out all the ill-effects of having an accidental knock in the first place.

But did you know that six is part of the devil’s notorious numbers, 666?

You have to go higher than that — but you can’t stop at seven because it’s an odd number, and you can’t stop at eight because it’s double four and therefore evil. Ten seems too even for some reason, so why not just go up to 12? But wait a minute — how many knocks have you done now?

Was it 12 or 13?

Friday the 13th?

You can’t risk that.

Just keep going to 14, but shit — there’s a four in it. Fifteen … no. Sixteen? Please, it’s double of eight, which is double of four — you might as well just give up, go lay down somewhere and wait for the fates to anal rape you.

So there you are — approaching 20 knocks on wood because you said something a little too gloating maybe or too wishful or boastful.

Once, I knocked on wood 522 times.

The worst part is when I’m around someone else who knocks on wood three times. It is apparently my lot in life to even things out for these imprecise imbeciles. At a work party a few years ago, a coworker knocked on wood three times. My boss was just a few feet away, and because I was relatively new to the job, I didn’t want to appear as out and out bat shit loopy as I usually am, and so I didn’t run to a nearby table or door frame in search of wood. Rather, I relied the one allowable substitute for wood: my head. I stood there holding a drink with one hand and tapping my head with the other.

As I was approaching 30 knocks, my new boss nudged me on the shoulder, “Um … are you OK?” she asked.

“Whatever do you mean?” I replied, trying to play it off by using my finger instead of my knuckles. I lost count, however, and had to start over. At the time, I imagined I simply appeared thoughtful, tapping my reddening pate with a finger as if pondering something important. In retrospect, tapping yourself 58 times in the side of the head probably doesn’t come off as intelligent. I remember thinking that if I didn’t wind up fired or institutionalized the next day, my new coworker owed me his annual bonus.

Almost every time I knock on wood or check the stove or skip lightly over the third base line, I am taken back to standing in the classroom doorway in third grade, waiting for Mrs. Rudolph to turn around so I could see her nose. The bell rang and she still hadn’t turned around, which meant I couldn’t touch my own nose and then find my desk.

It was a pivotal standoff — we were nose to nose, so to speak. And to this day I wish I had backed down. I wish I had simply returned to my desk and forgotten all about this fledgling system of twitches and quirks. Sadly, Mrs. Rudolph turned first, pointing a finger in my direction.

“Don’t you dare — do you hear me?”

And there it was — her nose. It was a two-pronged beacon, pulling me toward a lifetime of regret. I tried my best, I really did. But there was no stopping my hands. They jumped on their own accord to my face and felt the tip of my nose, as Mrs. Rudolph shook her head and sighed. She went to her desk and pulled a slip of paper out of a drawer.

“Try explaining this to the principal,” she said, while I fondled my nose, hopped over the doorway, being sure to land on my left foot, and took a long, precise route to the school office.

***

Although I never met this particular cat, I loved to hear Dana tell stories about Bill. When she was in college, Bill lived with one of her roommates, taking up residence in a room down the hall. Dana explained that when she woke up in the morning and headed to the bathroom, she would slowly, silently open the door and peek down the hallway, searching for Bill. If the coast was clear, Dana would leap out of her room and dash down the hall, trying to make it to the safety of the bathroom before Bill emerged and amputated her legs.

“He caught me a few times ….” she recalled with the same momentary shudder of a war victim.

At night, all of her roommates would tuck their feet tightly into blankets, bounding themselves for safety should Bill somehow manage to slip into their rooms and smell feet.

“Why didn’t you just get rid of Bill?” I asked one time.

“Oh we all loved Bill,” she said. “He was really a nice cat … except for drawing blood, I mean.”

I was thinking about Bill the other day when I was writing in the office and saw Dana passing by the door quickly. She tripped and nearly tumbled over, and I could see the look in her eye: She was caught. Emmeline followed quickly behind her, lunged at her legs and grasped at her toes.

“Mommy has toejum!” Emme screamed, peeling my poor wife’s toes apart to inspect the spaces between them.

“Let go!” Dana shrieked, while Emme determinedly clawed at her toes.

“Toejum!” she screamed, “Emme needs to clean your toejum!”

The child has become obsessed with toe jam.

We make it a habit to remove our shoes at the front door, and every time Dana exposes her toes, Emme pounces. Only instead of biting, Emme gingerly grooms. In the morning, the first thing she does when we pull her from bed is inspect her toes.

“Ooh,” she says, as if we house her in a barn. “Toejum collected in the night!”

After bath-time, Emme seems amazed at the cleaning powers of water. I can almost see the disappointment in her eyes as she dries off her toes and frowns.

“No toejum,” she sighs, mulling it over until a light-bulb goes off. “Maybe there will be toejum in the morning!”

It’s like Christmas Eve at Dr. Scholl’s house.

At the playground, it has become impossible to take off her shoes anymore. She used to like feeling the cold loam on her feet. But now she stops every other step to sit down, peel her toes apart and clean them.

“Emme has toejum,” she will say, earnestly digging while other, normal children played around her. One time, it took her a half hour to get from the slide to the swings, for all the cleaning.

“Come on, kid — let’s go!”

“Can’t,” she said, sitting down and curling her feet into her lap. “Emme has toejum.”

If they made chastity shoes, I would make her wear them, locking them up tightly before we left the house.

On the way home from the playground the other day, we were walking down Valencia Street when Emme suddenly stopped, sat on the sidewalk and removed her shoes.

“Emme can feel the toejum,” she said, pulling off a sock.

“Well Emme can feel the toe jam at home — put your shoe back on.”

“Can’t.”

We had stopped near a worn down Victorian, a tired, dilapidated ode to haunted houses and crack dens. There were gum stains on the sidewalk and busted beer bottle shards in the gutter. A lonesome, gnarled tree grew out of the cracked sidewalk, and when a potato chip bag floated past it and bounced into Emme’s lap, she paid it no mind. She removed her other sock and shouted with glee.

“Oh! Toejum!”

I was already annoyed and slightly embarrassed at having to wait on the sidewalk while my child groomed herself like a hairless primate, so it was just remarkably bad timing when a pair of hipsters in too-skinny, black-washed blue jeans shuffled past us, talking about a future band gig or job interview.

“I hope it goes well,” one of them said. “I’m sure it will.”

“Well,” said the other, “Knock on wood.”

Honestly, these two guys were in and out of our lives in two seconds flat — strangers meeting fleetingly on the sidewalk only to hurry away again in a rustle of motion. They couldn’t have picked the next block to have this conversation? They couldn’t have picked another tree to knock on three times?

Uncontrollably, as if pulled by some horrible magic, I inched closer to the tree and started counting as Emme picked at her feet in the middle of the sidewalk. For the next five minutes, Emme contented herself with foot grime while I knocked on a wind-tilted tree limb, losing count as strangers and passers-by smiled and chuckled at Emme. I smiled back, shrugged and nodded my head knowingly, as if to say, “I hear you. I do. But what can you do? The kid is just plain weird.”

And then they’d move on again, as the sound of gentle knocking eventually replaced their footsteps.

***

If you’re getting sick of these, let me know — but I wanted to share the view of our living room, which after six months is finally, thankfully, coming together. The pictures come from our summer trip to Detroit and show off what became of the very street where Dana’s relatives used to live. Considering that I’ve met all her relatives by now, this is a marked improvement. (Hi everyone!) Dana made the pillow, and we got the rug half off from the Pottery Barn floor sample bin — score!

Have a great weekend.

***

Mike, 9:52 a.m.:

“How’d it go?”

Dana, 9:54 a.m.:

“She was ok at first in the car. But then she was crying pretty hard when we pulled away from the house, so I suggested she close her eyes, hug the green monkey and suck her thumb, which she did, which looked so sad. But it seemed to help settle her down, and then we sang songs all the way there. (Why did you teach her Winger!?)  Once we pulled up though she started crying again — in the car, up the walk to the door, in the doorway — and very sadly, as we went up the walk she kept saying in a gaspy, crying voice: “Daddy picks Emme up, Daddy picks Emme up…”.   But then right when we got in she saw the teacher putting up photos of the kids (including one of Emme painting) and she stopped crying immediately and smiled when she saw the teacher and her picture.  But then started crying again when we went in the room and was crying when I left.”

Mike, 9:58 a.m.:

“So it’s going much better!”

Dana, 10 a.m.:

“I could still hear her crying as I walked down the hall.”

Mike, 10:02 a.m.:

“At least not down the block like last time?”

Dana, 10:04 a.m.:

“You have to drop her off from now on. I want to be the hero-savior who rescues her.”

***

I used to think they were dichotomies, these shifting visions of age and maturity. Just this morning, for instance, Emmeline was standing in a classroom next to a bin filled with a foamy, newfangled Play-Dough I had never even heard of before, dipping her hands deep into the mush, when Dana and I approached — our hearts in our throats — and said we had to go.

“OK,” we said, “A kiss and a hug and then we’ll be back soon.”

For the past week, we had been preparing her for this moment, whispering encouragement into drowsy ears or reminding her that we would always, always come back for her. When the time came, she simply returned her hands to the foamy bin and said good bye. I watched her from the door for a moment, stealing a last glance. I saw her hold up a hand sticky with foam and ask a teacher, “What did Emme do!” and knew she’d be OK. She looked so big then, towering over the bin. Dana and I had prepared for cries and wails and pleas for us not to leave. Instead we got into the hallway and shrugged, unsure of what to do next.

“So do we just leave?”

On the way home, we had to ride a bus and a train, and Emme spent the entire trip telling me what she did all day, recounting a few minutes in a sandbox with a “yellow thing” and a few more minutes at an easel, painting. She tried to tell me about a book she read, something about a frog and a pot of water, and I wondered if she hadn’t just stumbled upon a nice cookbook. On the train, she didn’t want to stand like she normally does. “Like a big girl,” she insists, using one hand to hold my knee and the other to grab a low-hanging rail. Instead, as we neared our stop, she curled into my arms and was quiet for a moment. The train wheels hobbled over the tracks and I could feel her breath through my shirt.

“Daddy?” she whispered.

“Yes?”

“Did Emme cry a little bit?”

“You did?”

She nodded.

“Was Emme a little bit sad?” she asked.

The train rolled into a stop and I asked her why.

“Mommy and daddy leave Emme,” she said, beginning to sniff.

At home for only a few minutes, she rubbed her eyes and said, “Emme’s ready for a nap.”

On the way to her room, I followed behind, watching her bounce lazily down the hallway — her tiny body bobbing this way and tripping that. It had been a long day. She was loopy. We reached the door together and I towered over her. Her head barely reached my hip. And to think that just this morning, she was such a big kid. By afternoon, curled in my arms again and rocking gently in the afternoon sun, she was something else. These fleeting glimpses of older and younger, big kid and baby — they’re not mutually exclusive. Often we’ll look at her and think, “She’s a kid now — she’s old.” But she’s not one or the other, I realize.

On the way home, she told me about all the kids she played with — all the kids I feared she would run away from. At home, she asked me to sing her one more song and read her one more book and “not to go yet, daddy — just one more minute.” I turned off the light and for one more minute watched the afternoon shadows play off her face, creating a quiet accord on her features I knew would remain for a long time to come.

***

They say these places have vanished, erased by decades of neglect and a shifting societal want: Who needs baroque facades and Wurlitzers when there’s two CGI robots about to attack the jebus out of each other? Give me 20 movies at all hours — that’s what everybody wants.

So naturally these places are disappearing. There’s one in Cow Hollow that’s boarded up now. Gone is the palace on Geary. The elegant, moorish-themed oasis right around the corner from our old home in Russian Hill is now a gym.

What’s happened to family time at the movie theater? What’s happened to Main Street American values?

It’s no big deal now, to pay $10 to sit in a darkened box and listen as George Lucas first blows out your ear drums and then bores you to death. At those places, there are no less than three advertisements telling you to turn off your cell phone, sit down and shut the fuck up. But whatever happened to the Good Ol’ Days? That rose-colored epoch when you could dress up like a Fleet Week princess on a balmy Thursday night and meander slowly over to the pi’ture shows, when you could listen to the organist, stand on stage with a cross-dressing mermaid and sing-along to a Disney cartoon with 600 of your closest, gayest friends?

At one point, I glanced over at Emmeline and saw a thin sheen of sweat on her cheeks as she jumped wildly in her chair, clapped her hands and repeated “Under da sea, under da sea,” 500 times while the lesbian couple in front of us turned to cheer her on and the gay techno aisle dancer stopped mid-routine to slap her five, and I thought: It’s nice to find the occasional pocket of hometown traditionalism to pass along to the younger generation, to say — This is how it once was, and this is how it should be.

“That was the best thing we’ve ever done,” she says afterward, the exhausted crowd spilling into the night and laughing.

“In our whole lives?”

“Ever.”

I wonder, “Do you think she’ll remember this?”

“How could she not?”

“Yeah, I suppose I’d remember being abandoned on stage with some glammy mer-tranny while the audience sang “Part of Your World.”"

“See? Best thing ever.”

***

Fleet Week Ariel.

***

You’d never guess that she actually sprinted to the stage.

***