You know, you try your best. You try to raise ‘em right. You love them, teach them, and send them out into the world, hoping they’ll make the right choices.

And then they break your heart.

:::sigh:::

So the other night I was in the kitchen working on dinner and flipped the radio on. I’m an NPR junkie, but Alison’d had it tuned to one of her stations. It was getting late, and I didn’t bother to fiddle with it; it was just supposed to be background noise after all.

And then, like in some terrible, mullet & silicone-filled horror movie, things…changed. Apparently after 7 the station switches over to some sort of light n’ easy format: Air Supply, Bee Gees, Bette Middler, you know the type. But I was up to my elbows in frying beef, and tuned it out. How many parents say that? “Oh, I thought it was harmless, I didn’t think anything of it…” Until Kenny Rogers came on. I groaned, but still didn’t grasp the seriousness of the situation.

Pratchett started whistling, very excited. I won’t say he was dancing, but he was running back and forth across the top of his cage. He even puffed up with his wings curled around him in a semi-aroused stance. It seemed my little boy had experienced his first rush of sexual excitement.

For damned Kenny Rogers.

God, where did I go wrong?

I grabbed the pocket Canon, hoping to document this shocking behavior and show it to him later, maybe do a little “Scared Straight” act. “This is your brain on Kenny Rogers” kind of thing. But he was so worked up he lunged at the camera, grabbing the case and pulling the protective cover off the inside of the lens. See what being hopped up on the Gambler’ll make you do?

But it was too late, the moment had passed and all that was left was the awkwardness.

It immediately made me think of the Kathy & Mo show from a decade ago & a skit called “Kenny and the Prostitute.” I searched everywhere but just couldn’t find it online anywhere. I remembered that I had the dvd and did the po’ man’s copy- set my sad and newly injured camera to tape it while it played on the computer. It’s no longer focusing correctly, thanks to Pratchett’s job, but it’s the audio that’s the important bit anyway:
(youTube Link here)

I laughed my ass off when I first saw this, because it touched such a nerve. (Particularly the look she gives at the 4:30 mark, where it’s especially clear that if she actually had to live with Kenny, one of them would have to die.)

You see, I know all too well the pain of growing up in a Kenny Rogers affected household. My mother wasn’t a big music fan- she only had a handful of cassettes, all greatest hits collections: Kenny Rogers, obviously. Anne Murray. Neil Diamond. Barry Manilow. And yes, even Helen Reddy.

Bizarrely sappy, every one- particularly strange since my mother was neither a romantic nor an idealist. In retrospect, her musical tastes were so out of character that I wonder if it wasn’t a cry for help that I was too young to understand. Honestly, my siblings and I wondered if we weren’t a product of immaculate conception, because we’d never seen anyone so seemingly disinterested in the opposite sex- although her uber-nasty divorce might’ve been the very thing that made her decide that fantasy Kenny was the only kind of guy she could be bothered with, and since his songs are about as realistic as the Tooth Fairy, the odds of his doppelganger coming along and sweeping her off her feet were slim.

But in the end I can hardly be blamed for that metalhead phase in high school, can I? And the fact that I’m lactose intolerant after all being force-fed all that cheeze can hardly be a surprise…

So now we’ve come full circle, and Kenny’s claimed a new victim. Of all the things you thought could never happen to one of your own…

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