Disneyland

Serious (formerly Curious) George

Tomorrowland, named after Disneyland’s future-themed neighborhood, is Spy Kids in space. Which turns out not be a bad thing although it may come as a surprise to those who have watched George Clooney do the endless P.R. rounds, hefting his epic charm as if it were Thor’s hammer.

On screen, the crinkly-eyed mega-star and activist — who plays spunky boy inventor turned fifty-something paranoid crank Frank Walker — disappears from the movie for nearly an hour in a very awkward and not particularly magical script bubble.

Precocious prepubescent Walker escapes to the future with his home-made jet-pack created from an Electrolux vacuum cleaner, landing in a silver-and-light Oz of the future that would have suited The Jetsons. (Interesting side note: at the theme park, Tomorrowland was intended to be 1986. So, if you’re relatively into Einstein, the future is technically the past).

Walker the boy makes this time leap from the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows Park with the help of a magic pin handed to him by a girl named Athena (Raffey Cassidy). If you know your mythology, Athena cracked out of Zeus’s head with an unmatched warrior spirit, which is what the Greek Gods had instead of spunk.
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Playdate,Lance,SAHD,birthday party,Brooklyn,pony,Kensington Stables,Hover Parents

No ponies were harmed in the writing of this blog

We’ve all done it: thrown an overcompensating birthday party for our kids. Maybe it was the party we wanted as a kid, maybe we were trying to impress other parents and, sure, part of it was our desire to make our kids happier than a sugar rush. In my novel Playdate, the stay-at-home-dad (SAHD) Lance often speaks from my hard-won experience raising my own kids. In some ways, he’s the Zen parent I wanted to be, with an added dose of my husband’s common sense stirred in.

One of the key plot points is that Lance’s wife, Darlene, hooks the opening of her new diner on the special event of their daughter’s eleventh birthday, She throws her daughter Belle a big overcompensating party with a guest list larded with strangers, when all her daughter wanted in her heart-of-hearts was some chill time with her parents. And it comes as a surprise to Darlene that Belle is sulky about the event. Lance sets his wife straight. He tells her:

“Today’s party oozes with Disneyland syndrome. It’s like this: if you take Belle to Disneyland, and scream louder than she does on the Matterhorn and buy her every pizza-popcorn-pretzel she requests, every souvenir that will fall forgotten under the car seat by the time we reach home, she’ll remember that as her childhood.”

I think I made up the idea of Disneyland syndrome, but it’s a common mistake. I look back and laugh at my son’s fourth or fifth birthday. [Read more…]

Time is of the Essence for George Clooney in ‘Tomorrowland’

Disneyland Syndrome