Fathers and Sons

So erm, my Dad and I are currently not on speaking terms. We were watching a game show earlier and I correctly answered a question about Celine Dion… He got all angry and started shouting ‘No son of mine is going to get a question about Celine Dion right!’ yep, and then to make matters worse the following question was a sports question… I got it wrong. It all just kind of made me realise what a disappointment I must be to my father, an ex-world wrestling champion and twice runner up in the world’s manliest man competition… yeah I’ve never seen it either but apparently it’s a real thing though, each round they do something manly such as the burping round or the ogle women from a scaffolding round and then whoever’s left over goes into the “leaving the toilet seat up” round.

And this isn’t the first time I’ve disappointed him, the other day I helped him out with some DIY around the house, we were fixing some shelves and he asked for the screwdriver, I didn’t hear him, and as he turned round he saw me using it as a wand, pointing it at the cat saying ‘expelliarmus’; yeah needless to say he was not best pleased, plus those shelves still haven’t been fixed, probably just as well, I was gonna put my home made pottery on them. Oh and he was less than impressed when he found my secret stash of playbills from musicals hidden under my bed like porn magazines. He was like “Where did ya get these?! Huh? Where did ya get this filth?!” I think he probably would have preferred it if they had have been porn magazines.

I guess the reason why I disappoint him so much is because I didn’t exactly turn out the way he’d hoped, ya know the super manly, weight lifting, sport playing, beer drinking, Rambo watching, power tool using kinda guy, but after witnessing me struggle to open pickle jar after pickle jar I imagine that dream quickly died… but in my defence those pickle jars are devilishly difficult to open, it’s like the pickle company are trying to tell us “Hey, you want a pickle? Well you work for it you lazy pickle maniac! You work for it!” I don’t even like pickles! Although the word is hilarious!

He tried numerous diabolical schemes to toughen me up such as the drive out to the middle of nowhere and leave me, in the hopes that I would return home a man. It didn’t quite work though as I was picked up by a passing minibus that was taking a Barbara Streisand appreciation club to the local community theatre where they were putting on a production of Funny Girl. It was great, on the way home we sang “Don’t rain on my parade”, yeah my Dad wasn’t too impressed when he saw us roll up in the driveway yelling out the lyrics “Hey Mr Armstein here I am!” He also made me go to the gym. Have you been to the gym lately? The machines are so high-tech nowadays, it seems that you need a PhD to operate them, I mean I tried to figure out how to use this one machine for like two hours until one of the gym instructors informed me it was a coffee machine. It didn’t give me much of a work out but it made dynamite coffee!

I have tried to take an interest in his interests as a way to bring us closer together but it never works, for example I wrote, produced and performed a musical about his favourite action movie star in Bruce Willis the musical… but he never showed up. It’s probably just as well, it got some pretty scathing reviews, but then again it wasn’t really aimed at the local feminist movement, they don’t care much for blonde jokes, its not gonna stop me though, next week is the premiere of my new musical “Matthew McConaughey we get it you love your body now go put a shirt on!” its 90 minutes of rip-roaring McConaugheyness… yep.

I don’t know maybe we can never live up to our father’s expectations, I mean Einstein as smart as he was still probably had a father who expected more, he was probably like “Hey Dad I just discovered the theory of general relativity” “Well what do you want a cookie? Big whoop! Come back when you’ve got yourself a girlfriend!” And Kiefer Sutherland, he’s always been seeking his father’s approval, every time you see him in anything he’s like “Hey Dad! Dad! Look! I’m in 24! Dad Look I’m on TV!” “Hey Dad look! I’m in LA confidential! Dad hey Dad! Dad! Dad! Are you proud of me yet?”