Brett Berk

Do yourself a favor and check out this week’s Stick Shift column on Vanity Fair’s website. The Gay Uncle outs his first Closet Case Car.

The Gay Uncle is burning up, and it’s not simply the fact that he’s in Austin, Texas where it’s 98 degrees at 11:00 at night. He just discovered that the Mayor of his fair city has snuck a pilot program into the upcoming school-year plan allowing standardized tests to be given to kindergarten kids. He’s all for useful measurement being completed–after all, he spends a good portion of his professional life helping people like PBS make sure that their programming actually teaches kids what it claims to. But there’s a huge difference between a optional, one-off, research project intended to help a quality educational program receive federal funding; and a systematic, citywide, requisite battery of testing for five year-olds, which will be used to force them into ability tracks, and punish their schools and teachers. Wasn’t it the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution that outlawed cruel and unusual punishment (or is that another one of the ones that the Bush Administration did away with in the past few years?) Once again the G.U. repeats his mantra: young kids should be allowed to be kids. That means, early childhood education should be dedicated to open-ended materials, play, and exposure to literacy materials–not multiple choice assessment. He thinks that any funds for this kind of testing would be much better spent expanding the promise of providing UNIVERSAL PRE-K–a promise which has yet to be fulfilled, forty-plus years after it was initiated with Head Start–and which has been scientifically proven to be one of the most important factors differentiating kids who succeed in school from those that struggle. Oooh. Things like this really make the Gay Uncle ANGRY.

With global warming, the start of September no longer means closing up the pool or deep-storing your Daisy Dukes, but where the G.U. lives in New York, it still means the arrival of the first day of school. Yet for many of the Gay Uncle’s friends, this day has already come and gone. He’s received a numerous humorous dispatches from readers about this banner event, but none rivals his friend Danika’s recent experience sending her two daughters–Erica, 8 and Anna, 5–off to the bus stop for their first joint trip to school. Danika was experiencing a host of feelings–wonder, sadness, excitement–as her girls strolled down the driveway to wait. Having grown up in New York City, Danika never rode a school bus, and so all of her ideas about what goes on inside one were formed by watching teen movies, and she felt a bit concerned about the kind of hazing, seating hierarchies, and brown bags full of flaming poo her girls might encounter on the crowded bus. So she was kind of surprised when the enormous yellow vehicle gurgled up, containing not a rolling frat party, but rather…3 silent children. Her daughters were riders 4 and 5, the last on the route. (Talk about carbon footprint!) Panic averted. However, Daika did get a chance to panic at the day’s end, as her daughters failed to arrive home at the appointed time–or even 10, 15, or 30 minutes later. Terrified that they’d been ground up for gelatin, abducted by Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin for her grotesque, far-right, Christian Home-Schooling cult, or forced to star in a remake of Lois Duncan’s schoolbus-kidnapping classic Five Were Missing she dialed the school repeatedly, only to get a busy signal. When she finally got through, she discovered that the girls were not disappeared, but rather, there in the office with their other three route-mates. Apparently, their ultra-responsible bus driver “forgot” that the initial school day ended before lunchtime, and so this tiny cohort had to wait until one of the other buses finished making its deposits so it could come back for them. Gunc tips his hat to this bus driver: way to help those parents through the tangled emotions of the first day.

Gunc has a new piece up on Babble, the magazine for smart and interesting parents. If you fit into those category descriptors, you may want to check it out. It’s called “Pinocchio Parenting” and it’s all about how and how not to lie to your kids. Click here. And while you’re on the site, check out the G.U.’s other fascinating pieces. Here’s one, and another.

The Gay Uncle attended a barbecue at a friend’s place upstate the other day, and was joined by a few other friends, including a couple with two small kids. Also in attendance was the host’s puppy. The sun shone, the vegetarian-options were bountiful, and there was plenty of beer, so the G.U. was very happy. Wally (the dog) and Abraham (the two year-old) were happy as well, as they share a fascination with sticks, of which there were a plethora on the host’s wooded lawn. Unfortunately, they seemed to share a fascination with exactly the same sticks: a foot and a half long, four inches around, stripped of bark. Also unfortunate, was the fact that the dog seemed to like the sticks just a bit more…bitingly than the little boy. Both young animals attempted to communicate their desires to the other–Abe by waving his stick around in the air and shouting; Wally by licking Abe’s arm salaciously, jumping up toward his stick’s high end, grabbing it in his mouth, and attempting to play the game of fetch he assumed was being initiated. Much whimpering, running, and shouting (barking) ensued on both ends, with each party attempting to make the most of their limited brain energy and communicative skills. “He thinks you’re playing,” one grown up explained to the boy. “I am playing,” Abe responded (just not the same game, or with the dog.) In the end, it became clear that it was impossible for these puppies to dialogue, and Wally was put inside for a time out. After a few moments of uninterrupted play with his stick, Abraham looked up, bewildered. “Where’d the doggie go?”

Check out the Gay Uncle’s excellent advice for how (and how not) to get on your child’s teacher’s good side. Click here.

Another Thursday, another delightful edition of the Gay Uncle’s Vanity Fair car column, Stick Shift. Click and weep.

The Gay Uncle went to see a Chekhov play the other day, performed in a friend’s backyard upstate. This is the third of these annual summer Chekhov Saturdays he’s been to at this house, but it’s been a couple years since he saw The Cherry Orchard, and they’ve run out of real plays, so they had to do one called Platonov. This play is rarely staged, in part because it was shuttered in a drawer until long after Anton’s death, in part because it’s a sprawling mess, and in part because it’s seven hours long. Literally. Fortunately, the production Gunc saw had been edited down, so it was only five hours long. (However, there was a barbecue in the middle stretching it out to the full seven.) This isn’t meant to imply that G.U. didn’t find the “evening” entertaining. He liked the play. It felt like a first draft for all of Chekhov’s other plays, with all the same themes and ideas. The acting and direction was top quality. And the staging–at this old lakefront house, and using it’s yards and the lake itself as sets–was magical. There were a few notable drawbacks: The lack of booze at the barbecue; the marathon-like length; and the dearth of real hotness among the male actors. Oh, and one other thing. That in the intervening years since his last attended performance, literally everyone that the director knows had a kid, so the audience was littered with 18 month-olds. This wouldn’t have been an issue in and of itself–G.U., as you know, likes children. But for some reason, parents forget that tots this age aren’t invisible…or inaudible. So, for example, when their baby begins making noise during the performance of a seven hour play–and Gunc doesn’t mean just the occasional gurgle or coo, but hours of constant gobbles, shrieks, and squawks–they tend to just sit there and pretend like nothing’s happening. He wants to tell these parents something. This “response” does not solve this problem. Gunc’s advice? When this happens, do everyone a favor: leave. And that doesn’t mean just taking a few paces backwards. It means Walk Away. Far away. Out of hearing range. (Test: if you can still hear the sound of the performance clearly, the audience can still hear your screaming baby; you are not out of hearing range.) This is not only better for your child, who sincerely believes it’s having a two-way conversation with the actors, but for the rest of the audience who–contrary to what you may think–came to listen to the performance, not your barking offspring. We call this “Play Time Etiquette”, but it applies equally to most other public productions like movies, ballet, or fashion week. It doesn’t, however, apply to NASCAR, because it’s so fucking loud at those races already.

Yes! The New York Times continues to satisfy the Gay Uncle’s insatiable appetite for stories about “loving” parents who steadfastly refuse to have any life of their own. You may remember his ridiculing of the gray piggy’s summer camp coverage earlier this season (or, at least, the headline concerning that topic). Now, he’s rejoicing in the fact that they’ve apparently written an article about parents following their children to college. It used to be that, when the youth were finally old enough to leave the warm, guano-filled nest, those lucky enough to be able to afford it were allowed to go away to college, where they would commit plagiarism, continue picking on people unlike them, and experiment with being into rugby or not really from Long Island (“I was born in Manhattan”). Now, all that is apparently over. Now, according to the Times–the most reputable source of trends in the world–when the kids age up and head to Madison, or Burlington, or Kalamazoo, their folks simply purchase a condo nearby, and tail them. There are two things that Gunc finds weird about this. 1) That the kids tolerate this (his theory: 2/3 of them are actually still nursing). And 2) That the parents feel like they can get away with acting as if it’s perfectly natural for them to purchase a second home in South Bend, Indiana, like they’d been looking exactly there for years. (There’s a Middle Eastern restaurant! And a Target! And it’s only an eighteen hour drive from our normal house!) G.U. understands that parents and kids are all BFFs now, and there’s none of that rebellious teen “anger” that existed in the past. But still, isn’t this idea kind of…smothering? He supposes that, given the cost of housing, and the crumbling economy, about four-fifths of these kids will end up living at home right after college anyway, so maybe the idea of having a condo in their university town is a better option than moving back to a basement in Bergen County. But, is there no such thing as adulthood anymore? Will these kids be expected to remain under their parents’ soft, smothery boobies until they have kids? At which point, what will they become? What will all of them become?

The Census Bureau just issued a report demonstrating that the number of 40 year-old American women who have never had children has doubled in the past thirty years. A full fifth of ladies who’ve hit the two-score age benchmark–that’s 20% for those of you who aren’t good with fractions–are now without kids. While some of these women might be sad about their lack of offspring–and the Gay Uncle graciously pretends to sympathize with their pain–he ultimately sees this info as a positive sign. Though the Census Bureau doesn’t do anything in the way of causal analysis, Gunc’s willing to guess that this group is probably full of women who have carefully weighed their life choices–education, career, late night martini guzzling–and decided that kids don’t fit into that equation. Or perhaps it reflects the portion of our female population who have worked with children and parents in their professional life (as a teacher, in Buy Buy Baby, serving Happy Meals), or simply have many parent friends, and have seen first hand the difficulties and compromises involved in raising a child, and decided, Wiping up another animal’s shit? Fuck no. That’s not for me. Of course, it ‘s also possible that this statistic simply represents the two tenths of the ladies who are too damn ugly to land a man, or too cheap to spring for some donor-batter. G.U. is down with that too. Whatever the cause, he wants to take a moment to toast the childless. He supports you! Of course, if the parent population continues to decline, there will be no market for his amazing book, The Gay Uncle’s Guide to Parenting. So support him right back and buy it right now.