by Barry, Dave
ALSO BY DAVE BARRY
FICTION
Insane City
Lunatics (with Alan Zweibel)
The Bridge to Never Land (with Ridley Pearson)
Peter and the Sword of Mercy (with Ridley Pearson)
Science Fair (with Ridley Pearson)
Peter and the Secret of Rundoon (with Ridley Pearson)
Cave of the Dark Wind (with Ridley Pearson)
The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter
the Christmas Miracle Dog
Escape from the Carnivale (with Ridley Pearson)
Peter and the Shadow Thieves (with Ridley Pearson)
Peter and the Starcatchers (with Ridley Pearson)
Tricky Business
Big Trouble
NONFICTION
I’ll Mature When I’m Dead
Dave Barry’s History of the Millennium (So Far)
Dave Barry’s Money Secrets
Boogers Are My Beat
Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway
Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down
Dave Barry Turns 50
Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus
Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs
Dave Barry in Cyberspace
Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys
Dave Barry Is NOT Making This Up
Dave Barry Does Japan
Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need
Dave Barry Talks Back
Dave Barry Turns 40
Dave Barry Slept Here
Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits
Homes and Other Black Holes
Dave Barry’s Guide to Marriage and/or Sex
Dave Barry’s Bad Habits
Claw Your Way to the Top
Stay Fit and Healthy Until You’re Dead
Babies and Other Hazards of Sex
The Taming of the Screw
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
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Copyright © 2014 by Dave Barry
Photograph of Dave rappelling in Israel by Doug Shapiro.
Photograph of Dave on The Today Show by Katie McKee.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barry, Dave.
You can date boys when you’re forty : Dave Barry on parenting and other topics he knows very little about / Dave Barry.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-63149-2
1. Family—Humor. 2. Parenting—Humor. I. Title.
PN6231.F3B375 2014 2013037714
306.85'02'07—dc23
Version_1
To my children, Rob and Sophie, who, against all odds, turned out sane
CONTENTS
Also by Dave Barry
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
Sophie, Stella and the Bieber Plan
Manliness
What Women Want
Death
Nothing! Really
“Grammar”
Air Travelers’ FAQ
Seeking Wifi in the Holy Land
How to Become a Professional Author
This is not really a book about parenting. I say this because the title clearly refers to parenting, which may have given you the impression that the actual book is about parenting. But there’s a wise old saying that goes: “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Like so many wise old sayings, this is stupid, because of course most of the time you can judge a book by its cover. The whole point of the cover is to tell you what the book is about. For example, if the cover says Cooking on a Budget, you know the book contains inexpensive recipes; and if the cover says Lose Weight Fast, you know the book contains lies.
But as I say, this book isn’t about parenting. It mentions parenting, but it also covers many other topics, including grammar, sex, camels, women, brain surgery, sex with women, how to become a professional author, airlines, Justin Bieber and death. That’s why my original idea was to give the book a more vague and general title. Here are some of the titles I submitted to the publisher:
Dave Barry’s Vague General Book of Humor Topics
Dave Barry’s Guide to Whatever This Book Is About
Dave Barry: A Dave Barry Book, by Dave Barry
Dave Barry: You Probably Thought He Was Dead
But the marketing people wanted something more specific, and they liked the idea of a title that was about family and/or parenting. So after rejecting several more of my suggestions (including Without Family, We Would Have Nothing, Except Way More Money and Spare Time) they went with the current title, You Can Date Boys When You’re Forty.
Those words do appear in one of the essays in this book, and they are words that I have actually said to my daughter, Sophie. As I write this, Sophie is thirteen years old, which, as you veteran parents of daughters know, is a terrifying age because of puberty. Girls do not go through puberty the way boys do. For boys, puberty is a gradual process—it took me decades—and it’s not all that drastic. When the boy is done undergoing puberty, he’s hairier and smellier, but still basically the same.
Female puberty is a whole different kettle of biological fish. For years my daughter was this sweet, innocent little girl who played with dolls, slept with stuffed animals and viewed me as a wise authority figure because of all the amazing things I knew how to do, such as tell time. Then one day at about 4:30 in the afternoon, Sophie went into her bathroom (which is pink) and, WHOOM, some kind of massive hormone bomb went off in there. She emerged maybe forty-five minutes later having aged, biologically, at least seven years. Suddenly she was this woman, with legs and everything, walking around. The same thing happened pretty much simultaneously to her friends—all of them were suddenly beautiful, feminine, poised, sophisticated and several linear feet taller than the boys their age.
The day the hormone bomb detonated marked the end of the era wherein my daughter viewed me as an authority. These days, pretty much the only time she turns to me for guidance is when she can’t find the Cinnamon Toast Crunch. When she needs to discuss anything more important—school, relationships, hair, clothes, makeup, hair accessories and biological matters I don’t even want to think about—she confers with her several hundred closest girlfriends or my wife, who is also a woman. I am way out of the loop. I don’t even know where the loop is.
Nevertheless, I am, legally, Sophie’s father, and I have certain fundamental obligations, the main one being to protect her from harm, with “harm” defined as “men.” As a lifelong male mys
elf, I am well aware of the way we think, and I don’t want anybody thinking things like that within a thousand-yard radius of my daughter.
The problem I am facing right now is boys, which, biologically, are nothing more than short men. My daughter’s school is infested with them. Lately they have taken to hanging around our house, darting around out there on bicycles and skateboards and trying to act as though they are not thinking about what they are thinking about, which we all know is exactly what they are thinking about.
Here’s what really bothers me: Sometimes they get inside the house.
I blame my wife. If it were up to me, our house would be surrounded by giant (but humane) traps baited with some kind of bait that would be attractive to thirteen-year-old boys, such as fireworks or shorts that are even baggier than the shorts they’re already wearing. Every now and then we’d hear the loud THWONK of a steel door slamming shut, indicating that a thirteen-year-old boy had come too close to the house. I would then go outside and, after a stern warning, drive the boy out to the Everglades and release him into the wild.
But my wife allows them to come in. She has never been a thirteen-year-old boy, so she thinks it’s OK if sometimes one of them watches TV with Sophie, the two of them eating popcorn and sitting in the family room on the exact same sofa. If it were up to me, I would insist that the boy had to sit on an entirely separate piece of furniture, which would be located in Iceland. But because of my wife’s naive softheartedness we have this potentially catastrophic situation that requires me to casually stroll past the family room every eight to ten seconds, back and forth and back and forth, a dad on patrol, each time casually glancing inside to make sure Nothing Is Happening. I’m thinking of getting some kind of firearm, which every now and then I would casually discharge into the family-room ceiling. Ha-ha! THAT will give Mr. Short Man something to think about!
Only twenty-seven more years to go.
But I have drifted away from my point, which is that this is not really a book about parenting. It’s about many things, which you will find out if I ever stop introducing it so you can go ahead and read it. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope that, amid the laughs, you find some actual nuggets of wisdom. If you do, let me know what they are, OK? I’ll be hovering right outside the family room.
In the movie Taken, Liam Neeson plays a father whose daughter is kidnapped by evil pervert sex traffickers with foreign accents. Fortunately, Liam’s character is a former spy, and he uses his espionage skills to go on a desperate quest, during which he terminates an estimated 125 bad guys with his bare hands before he finally tracks down his daughter and saves her.
Taken is on cable a lot, and every time I stumble across it I watch the whole thing because it combines two artistic themes with classic enduring appeal:
Liam Neeson beating the crap out of foreign perverts, and
Fatherhood.
If you’re a man with a daughter, you can’t watch this movie without imagining yourself in Liam’s position—wondering how far you would go for the sake of your daughter, what desperate life-threatening measures you would be willing to take.
Well, I don’t have to wonder anymore. I know exactly what I would do because I have already made the ultimate sacrifice: I took my daughter to a Justin Bieber concert.
How bad was it? you ask.
It was so bad that I cannot hear you asking me how bad it was. My hearing has been destroyed by seventeen thousand puberty-crazed girls shrieking at the decibel level of global thermonuclear war. It turns out that the noise teenage girls make to express rapturous happiness is the same noise they would make if their feet were being gnawed off by badgers. Also, for some reason being happy makes them cry: The girl next to me spent the entire concert bawling and screaming, quote, “I LOVE YOU!” directly into my right ear.
She was not screaming to me of course. She was screaming to cute-boy Canadian heartthrob Justin Bieber, as were all the other girls, including my daughter Sophie and her BFF,* Stella Sable. Sophie and Stella wore matching purple tutus (purple, as you are no doubt aware, is Justin’s favorite color) and spent the entire concert bouncing up and down, shrieking and vibrating like tuning forks. They are big fans. Sophie has covered one corner of her room—she calls it the Corner of Appreciation—with pictures of Justin Bieber gazing at the camera with the soulful expression of a person who truly believes, deep in his heart, that he is the best-looking human ever. On March 1 (which, as you are no doubt aware, is Justin Bieber’s birthday) Sophie posted on Instagram* that he is, quote, “the perfectest person on the planet.”
One day, while I was looking at the Corner of Appreciation, Sophie and I had the following exchange:
Me: You know, Justin Bieber doesn’t have any idea who you are.
Sophie: Not yet.
This exchange disturbed me. I don’t want my daughter’s life goal to be to meet (and I say this respectfully) an overhyped twerp. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not one of those fathers who think no man will ever be good enough for their daughters. I’m sure there’s somebody out there who is worthy of Sophie, and I sincerely hope that she meets him someday, with “someday” defined as “after I have been dead for a minimum of three months and all efforts to revive me have failed.” Even then, if Sophie is going to go on dates with this male, I want to go along. My body can ride in the backseat, with an air freshener.
Speaking of death: My wife nearly experienced it before the concert started. I have seen my wife perform some amazing physical feats; I once saw her produce, from somewhere inside her body, a live human being. But nothing I’ve seen her do was as brave, if not foolhardy, as what she did when we got to the Justin Bieber concert; namely, she purchased officially licensed Justin Bieber merchandise for Sophie and Stella. To do this, she had to battle her way through what was basically a mom riot—several hundred frenzied women* engaged in a desperate elbow-throwing struggle against other moms to reach the merchandise counter so they could pay upwards of fifty dollars apiece for Justin Bieber T-shirts for their daughters.
God forbid this should happen, but: If we ever go to war with Japan again, and they embed their forces deep inside heavily fortified caves on Iwo Jima again, instead of sending in the Marines, all we need to do is put the word around that the Japanese forces are in possession of overpriced Justin Bieber merchandise. Within minutes they will be overrun by moms fully capable of decapitating an opposing shopper using only their MasterCards.
The concert itself was also pretty brutal, lasting (this is an estimate) twenty-seven hours. We had to stand the whole time because everybody else stood the whole time because that is how excited everybody was. Justin Bieber was preceded by two lesser heartthrobs. You could tell they ranked below Justin because they had fewer backup dancers. Your modern singing star does not go to the bathroom without backup dancers. Your modern musical concert consists of the singer prancing from one side of the stage to the other accompanied by a clot of dancers, everybody frantically performing synchronized dance moves and pelvic thrusts, looking like people having sex with invisible partners while being pursued by bees. At times the dancing looks silly, but it serves a vital artistic function; namely, keeping you from noticing that the music (and I say this respectfully) sucks.
OK, perhaps “sucks” is too strong a word.* Perhaps I am just being a flatulent old fossil clinging to memories of the Golden Age of Rock ’n’ Roll, back when I was young and all four Beatles were alive and nobody I knew had ever heard of gum disease. Musical acts in those days didn’t have to distract you with dancers because, goldarnit, they had talent. When you went to see, for example, Sly and the Family Stone, you did not go expecting to see dance routines. You went expecting to see a funktastic band made up of highly entertaining musical performers who, in all probability, were not going to show up.
Headline acts that failed to appear were a distinguishing feature of the Golden Age of Rock ’n’ Roll. Back then, the concertgoing experience
often consisted of sitting in an auditorium amid dense clouds of smoke, listening to some nervous promoter announce, for the eighth time in three hours, that the headline act was at that very moment en route to the venue, when, in fact, the headline act was passed out facedown in a puddle of vomit in an entirely different time zone.
But my point is that during the G. A. of R. and R., on those occasions when the headline acts did show up, they didn’t race all over the stage inside a clot of hyperactive backup dancers. They stayed in one place, which made them easy to keep track of, which was helpful if you had spent some time inside the smoke cloud, if you know what I mean. Here’s an example of what I mean: In approximately 1969, I attended a performance by Jesse Colin Young and the Youngbloods at the Electric Factory in Philadelphia, and I was able to watch the entire show lying on my back on the floor next to the stage pretty much directly underneath one of the Youngbloods, who was known as “Banana.” I did get stepped on occasionally, but overall I had a relaxed, mellow experience as well as an excellent view of the band, which stayed in one place the whole night and never attempted any dance maneuvers, and which for all I know is still standing in basically the same spot at the Electric Factory.
If I had lain on the floor at the Justin Bieber concert, within seconds I would have been trampled into human lasagna. I had to stay on my feet in the throbbing, screaming crowd, which shrieked even louder whenever Justin and his backup dancers pranced past, or when Justin did something especially awesome, such as remove his sunglasses. The most exciting moment, which caused a level of shriekage that I’m sure alarmed dogs as far away as Canada, came when Justin took off his shirt and revealed his physique, which reminded me (and I say this respectfully) of the Geico Gecko.
But as thrilling as that was, it was not the highlight of the concert. The highlight, for me at least, came toward the end, when Sophie and Stella decided to execute their plan to invite Justin Bieber to their bat mitzvahs.* They had both brought large square white envelopes containing official invitations: On Stella’s envelope, she had written, “Justin please come to my bat mitzvah .” Sophie’s envelope said “I you! Please come to my Bat Mitzvah!” Their plan was to somehow get the invitations to Justin Bieber, who would read them and decide to attend their bat mitzvahs.