You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About (2 page)

I
n 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, a 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 thnotbloods e 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 i
nvite 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.

Sophie and Stella spent the entire concert clutching their envelopes, vibrating and shrieking and watching the Bieber/dancer clot prance back and forth. But they couldn’t get near the stage because the crowd was too thick. Finally, as Justin Bieber went into his last song, they realized that their opportunity was slipping away. They shouted something to my wife and me—I couldn’t hear a word—then they turned and plunged into the crowd, lost from our view. A minute later, the dancer clot came prancing back in our direction. The mob of shrieking fans surged forward, and for just an instant, through an opening in the mass of heads in front of me, I got a clear view of Justin Bieber. In that same instant, I saw two large square white envelopes arc through the air and into the spotlight, then flutter to the stage near his feet.

Guess what happened next.

If you guessed that, against all odds, Justin Bieber glanced down and, somehow, amid all the dancing and shrieking, noticed these two adorable purple-tutu-clad girls in the crowd, then suddenly stopped—that’s right,
stopped
, right in the middle of the song—and then, with a winning smile and a wink to Sophie and Stella that was easily the greatest thrill of their young lives, reached down, picked up the bat mitzvah invitations and
stuck them into his pocket
, then you are (and I say this respectfully) an idiot. Rock-star pants don’t even
have
working pockets. Bieber and the clot pranced right on past, leaving the envelopes lying on the stage.

I assume Bieber never saw the invitations. I know he didn’t come to Sophie’s bat mitzvah party. Which was his loss because it was a fine event, except for a terrifying few seconds when I was hoisted into the air
on a chair being thrust wildly up and down
*
by a group of men who had consumed so much tequila that they could easily have launched me out a window without noticing it until they put the chair down empty. (“Hey! Where’s Dave?” “Dave who?”)

But other than that, the party was wonderful. Tingwonderfhe best part, for me, was the last dance of the night, the Father-Daughter Dance. That’s when I got to hold Sophie in my arms, gaze into her smiling face and marvel at the fact that my daughter—who five minutes ago was a little red poop factory I carried around like a football—had somehow transformed into this radiant, beautiful, poised young woman, getting ready to go out in the world and break many hearts.

She’ll probably have her own heart broken a few times, too. But she’ll do just fine out there in the world, Sophie will, I’m sure of that, because she’s a strong, sensible and self-confident person. Also, if any man even
starts
to treat her wrong, I will summon my inner Liam Neeson and wreak vengeance upon that man, even if I am eighty-six years old and have to use a weaponized walker. Because she’s a special girl.

And Justin, if you’re reading this: You had your chance.

Postscript

Since I wrote this essay, things have changed between Sophie and Justin. She no longer thinks he’s the perfectest person on the planet. In fact, she now thinks he’s kind of a jerk, and she has uninstalled the Corner of Appreciation. I’d be thrilled about this, except that the place in Sophie’s heart formerly occupied by Justin has been taken over by a boy band called One Direction.
There are five of them.