Okay, this is gonna be a little rough. As some of you may know, Jane over at Baby Squared wrote a post about our recent play date. Apparently, she didn’t have a very good time and decided the best way to go about venting would be on her blog. A class act.
I don’t want to do a long rehash of everything she wrote, but I guess she found Josie a little hard to handle, and she wasn’t too crazy about me, either. It’s true that Josie is an energetic kid, and she did sort of dominate Jane’s twins, Clia and Elso. It’s also true that I’m obnoxiously fawning as a dad. I guess some of my “humor” didn’t quite go over with Jane.
But if I can offer a word in Josie’s defense: I think she was just bored, and I can’t exactly blame her. I mean, I’m sure that Jane’s relatives are fascinated by her Power Point presentation on Trends in Early Socialization of Twins. And I’m sure they love her It’s a Twin Thang t-shirt and her Make Mine a Double tea cozy. Just like they probably can’t get enough of her twin scrapbooks, her twin memory boxes, her twin placential burial plot, and the thirteen home videos – yeah, I counted, it was the only way to stay awake – I was shown of her twins, most of which consisted of the girls staring blankly into the camera, while Jane screamed helpful stage directions such as “Clita! Wake up, Clita! Give mama a big twinsy smiley-wily! Hey, Oslo! Look over here. Over here!”
See, the thing is, Jane’s daughters are going to be famous. As she informed me on four separate occasions, they’ve already been “recruited” by a major infant modeling firm. In fact, Jane has a giant stack of 8x10 headshots of the girls in various “theatrical” getups (the girls as Tarzan and Jane, the girls as Britney and Lindsay, the girls as Dog the Bounty Hunter), several of which she pressed on me, with explicit directions to “pass them along to any casting agents you might know.”
Jane herself – and I know this may come as a shock – was a child actress. She starred in some play as a high school freshman, that was later released on video, though apparently only in the Beta format. I myself was forced to watch a portion of this production (“The Princess and Her Cheese”) in her scarily large home theater setup, which includes an ancient VCR that plays Beta videos.
As for her children’s prospects, they do have one major thing going for them: they know how to sit still. Really really well. Occasionally, Oswalda would flop over on her side and start to cry. But Clisa was basically catatonic for the duration of our visit. The thing that’s so especially sad is that Jane truly believes her girls are destined for Broadway. She referred to her blog as her “golden ticket,” and explained how she was going to parley it into a development deal “the way the Geico cavemen did.” It was all so Gloria Swanson.
So, yeah, I can see why Jane had a tough time with Josie. When you’re that pathetically invested in your “little starlets” (her words, not mine) it must be unbearable to encounter a kid with actual charisma.
P.S. – A quick word on the note-taking thing. Jane has apparently forgotten why I asked her for a pen – to write down the name of a dermatologist friend of mine, who I thought might be able to help her with a painful rash, the location and texture of which you really don't want to know.
