Brett Berk

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.

The Gay Uncle wants you to look over to the top right of this page. See that cute little blue button with the word facebook on it (it looks just like the one on the left, but bigger)? If you’re a facebook person, you can now click on that link and travel right to Gunc’s facebook fan group where you can JOIN UP. You’ll be the first to get updates on all the G.U. scuttlebutt–readings, events, articles, gossip, etc. You can write Gunc personal messages which he may ignore, respond to, or simply use as fodder for this blog. You can even give him gifts of cupcakes and hamsters and whatever that other crap is that he sees other more popular people receiving on facebook and doesn’t really want because it looks kind of idiotic but wants to be wanted enough for someone to think to send him something like that so he can then reject it. You will not play Scrabble with him because he hates that game. Click and join!

The most recent dispatch in The Gay Uncle’s weekly Vanity Fair car column, Stick Shift, is officially up, and guess what? It outs the Gay Uncle’s very own gay vehicles. Want to see how Gunc gets around when he’s not swishing along the sidewalks? Click here.

Here’s an extremely infectious concept the Gay Uncle would like to sow in your brain: Virgin Bikini Waxing. Apparently the idea here is to depilate the pigmentless hairs from the body of a little girl before she hits puberty (which is not an uncommon occurrence in the high single digits these days) and her pelt gets all wiry, dark and coarse. Salon owners say that business is “booming” in the under-10 market, and are calling the treatment revolutionary. Apparently, they claim that if a second grader goes under the hot wax just five or six times, her grody real body hair will never grow in. The Gay Uncle is not sure if there’s any research to back up this claim, but he does think that the whole thing seems kind of…nasty to him. He wonders what will be next? Pre-pubertal breast implants (kids heal faster!) Toddler dermabrasion (prevent zits from forming; keep that soft baby skin growing forever!) Infant nose jobs (the cartilage is so soft and pliant at that age!) Gunc is not opposed to cosmetic procedures prima face. He’s had a few himself (though you could never tell.) But he believes kids deserve to be kids for as long as possible, and that when we’re dealing with them, we need to balance utility or functionality with the lessons we’re imparting. Have you ever had a Brazillian? Think about how that would feel to an 8 year old, and what that’s telling her about her body. Do you agree? Disagree? Let us know below. [Thanks to the G.U.’s loyal reader Irit for the tip.]

The Gay Uncle was perusing the pages of TimeOut NewYork Kids online today, searching for an interview with him that’s supposed to run this month (why else would he read this stellar journal; he has no kids!) when he came across this headline about kids going bare-ass in New York City playgrounds. He didn’t read the article because, frankly, he doesn’t really care about other people’s opinions, but seeing this reminded him of a question he’d recently been asked by a reader regarding a similar situation at a public beach. This mom had been troubled by the sight of a five year-old girl playing naked in the sand and surf and wanted to “throw a towel around this young child”. Said reader wondered if she was in her rights, or “just uptight”? The G.U. had to think about this for a bit, particularly since the subject of beachfront clotheslessness reminded him of being forced to look at photos of his parents’ vacation to a nudist resort in the Caribbean, circa 1978 (there’s dad eating a live sea urchin with a crowd of strangers: Nude!) But when he cleared his head of this memory, he gave a measured response. His recommendation: do what you want in private–in the tub, in the backyard, at clothing-optional birthday parties–but when in public, put something more than sunscreen on your kid’s lower half. He thinks brief exceptions can be made–let them take it off underwater if they want to feel the waves in their sails–but otherwise, they should keep their private parts private in public: it’s respectful to others, it helps keep dirt/sand/mud of their various cracks and creases, and it prevents viruses and parasites from leaking out of their butts and going into other kids’. That said, he advocates letting your kid go naked in a like-minded and safe environment without freaking out that they’ve got something else on their mind (or that everyone around them does); nudity is interesting in a society where we’re always clothed, and bodies are fascinating and not something for your tot to be ashamed of. With respect to the specifics of his reader’s question, he also strongly recommends against throwing a towel around anyone else’s kid on the beach, or anywhere else. That might get you punched in the face.