Fame

Walt has been dying to show Adam and all of his CLUE colleagues that one of their own had her photo in the latest Memphis Zoo magazine.  He had a copy rolled up in his snack bag this morning, and Adam's feet were still on the street outside the car door when the first and best exchange of the morning occurred:

Walt:  LOOK!!!  Look, Adam.  Look whose picture is in this magazine!  She made the news!  She's famous!

Adam, after casually glancing over at the page while I was buckling his belt: I saw a guy with a green face at Chick-fil-a once.

Luckily for Walt, most of the rest of the class was very excited about their newly-minted superstar.  Adam never said another word about it.

His Daddy's a Lawyer

It must be nice having all of your memories compacted into about two years' time.  You can remember just about everything that's ever happened to you or been said to you (unless, of course, it was said to you two minutes before and involved eating, getting dressed, getting out of bed, leaving your brother alone, washing your hands, getting into bed or anything not fun).  Or at least that's how it works with Walt.  Poor Adam.  Again he suffers abuse at the hands of Walt's selective (and generously embellished) memory . . .

W: Do you remember which episode you watched first?
A: Yeah.  Episode IV.
W: Which episode did you watch second?
A: I don't know.
W: Five?
A: No.
W: Six?
A: No.
W: One?
A: No.
W: Two?
A: No.
W: Three?
A: No.
W: Well, which one did you watch next?
A: I don't remember.  Which one did you watch first?
W: Episode IV.  And then I watched Episode VI and then Episode V, and then I watched Episode II.  And then I think I saw Episode I and then Episode III.  Yeah.  That's right.

This can't possibly be true, can it?  Regardless, Adam didn't challenge him on it, and that's going to come back to haunt him, because one day Walt's going to be all . . . "Yeah . . . she said her number was 8-6-7-5-3-0-9.  You should call her."  Meanwhile, her number is firmly implanted in Walt's brain and is nothing close to what he told Adam, and Walt has a date set up for Friday night.

You gotta watch this guy, Adam; trust me, I'm a lawyer.  Would I lie to you?

Silence Is Not An Option

(prolonged silence)

Walt:  Adam, why aren't we talking about things?

Adam: Meh.

Walt: ADAM.  We always talk about things when we're riding to school.

Adam: What?

Walt:  Adam, we are supposed to talk about things.  What do you want to talk about?

Adam:  We could talk about dinosaurs.

Walt:  No.  I'm not an expert in that anymore.

Adam:  What about Star Wars?

Walt:  I know.  We could talk about Star Wars AND Transformers.

Adam:  Okay.

Walt:  Is Captain Rex a good guy or a bad guy?

Adam:  At first he's a good guy, then he's a bad guy.

And so on and so forth.  Finally, back on track.  And all is right with the world again.

"TRANSFORMER!!!"

George Lucas, I Hope You're Happy

I was five-years old when The Empire Strikes Back was released in theaters almost thirty years ago.  But I still don't have as firm a grasp on the stories and characters of the Star Wars franchise as my two passengers exhibited this morning.  With the help of the Star Wars insert on the outside of Adam's backpack, they methodically marched through each plot line, each major character (and some minor ones I've never heard of) and their favorite types of "light savers" (per Walt) from each episode.  Wow.

Walt: How can Anakin be good then bad and then good again?  How can he keep changing his mind?

Adam: TRANSFORMER!!!

This response, of course, has nothing to do with Walt's question or the topic at hand, but it illustrates the trouble I've had coming up with content for the past few trips to school.  Thanks to Walt's Putty, Walt is able to identify and distinguish a typical pad-mount electrical transformer from the kind that turn into machines and robots and dominates the universe.  Seeing none of the latter during the drive to school, these two floppy-haired, galactic travelers have taken to screaming "TRANSFORMER!!!" directly into my ears every time they see one of the ubiquitous, green boxes.  As you can imagine, this greatly hampers the flow of their conversations and my ability to remember them.  Don't forget, I'm trying to navigate Memphis traffic, listen and remember simultaneously.

I'm waiting for a few more trips before I begin to develop the screenplay, Starformer Wars, Episode 6.5: Revenge of the Clones, or something like that.  Are you listening, George?

Evasive Maneuvers

W: Oh no! What's that?

A: It's a cwash! We can't get through! We have to stop! There are police cars in the road!

W: It's okay! My daddy is a good driver! He'll just go left then right then left again and get us around it! (As I do so.)

A: Oh!

Yes, the entire conversation, as with all conversations this morning, was screamed back and forth from the gaping distance of two feet.

Tuesday Morning Quarterbacks

Walt and Adam immediately broke down Super Bowl XLIV this morning.

Adam: "Yeah. I wanted the Colts to win, but my dad said they didn't win."

Walt: "I wanted them to win, too. They have Peyton Manning. He's a really good player. I really thought he would help them win."

That's pretty much a three-line summary of every sports talk radio show in the country yesterday morning. And I got it in 12 seconds directly from my backseat.

But the real jewel of the drive was Adam's take on what has become the most iconic image of the game, a shot of winning quarterback, Drew Brees, holding his infant son, Baylen, after the game. Being a daddy, I, of course, saw it live because I can stay up late. And CBS was eating it up. I'm sure many of you saw it, but if not, Brees had tears in his eyes; his cuter-than-cute little boy had on protective ear muffs to shield his little ears from all of the post-game noise; Brees is clearly taking it all in, and you can just see him capturing the most awesome mental image of it all for his own sake and that of his son, who will never remember it. Here's a screen cap of the moment:

Here's Adam's take on this moment in response to Walt's position on the Colt's loss even with Peyton Manning:

"Yeah. (He always starts sentences with 'yeah.') And my daddy told me that after the game there was a little boy and he had on headphones and he looked around."

Yeah. One day they'll understand.

On Star Wars and the NBA Western Conference

That, my friends, is comedy gold. I couldn't get my recorder going fast enough to get the ESPN-worthy breakdown of the Griz game, but I did get some pretty good commentary on the bonus features on Star Wars DVDs for Episodes, let me see if I get this right, 1, 2, 6 and 3. But that's all.

It took them until Peabody Ave to figure out that they had both watched the same game last night. One at home and one at the game. Adam, I'm guessing didn't make it to the end, so he was convinced the Lakers won. Walt who made it to the very end, corrected him with the addition of "And even the Lakers have the best player in the National Basketball Ahs . . . . . (pretty clear he didn't really know the word). Then Walt claimed a vast majority of the credit for the big win, and Adam told him that OJ Mayo was his player and that he couldn't be Walt's favorite, then they decided that he could be both of their favorite.

Mike and Mike would have been proud.

Of course, by the time we got to Cleveland, the conversation had devolved into a series of addition problems, massive amounts of hyperbole ("Hey, look! That building is 2 million miles away AND it's on fire!), and repeated use of the words Koo Koo Head.

That was awesome!