Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

Three 12-year-olds are in my living room, finally slowing down for some screen time before heading off to sleeping bags and whispered late night boy humor. My best friend was just visiting, and somehow the topic of The Three Stooges came up. She asserted that the timelessness of their comedy is dependent on Curly. I have nothing in my history to support or negate this claim, but I trust her implicitly. For tonight’s sleepover, I’d looked first on Netflix, but all the original Three Stooges are on DVD only, nothing to watch instantly. So I went to the tape store and picked up three options – a Star Trek movie, Jeeves and Wooster, and a six-episode DVD of The Three Stooges, called Curly Classics.

They’d seen the second Star Trek too many times, and although they trust me unconditionally for most parental style decisions, hadn’t heard of the P. G. Wodehouse classic, so the Curly episodes won. They’d never seen The Three Stooges, but I told them I was pretty sure they’d find them funny. 

At this moment, I have three boys who are at the edges of the furniture, laughter growing louder and higher pitched at every slap, punch, mallet blow. They’re chomping potato chips and watermelon and chocolate-covered strawberries, not the healthiest movie treats, but not the worst either. They are well-nigh delirious with the slapstick, an aspect of life that exists for them only in black and white. They know nothing of real slaps or violence, so relentless hair pulling, name-calling, yelling and forehead whacking seem so outrageous and impossible that the boys are literally bouncing off the sofa, kicking their feet, hands flying to their wide open mouths, squirming, squealing, slapping their thighs; their response almost as violent to their own bodies as for the three impeccably timed, lovable, black and white buffoons.

Laughter is erupting out of them, and I wonder if their growing bodies can contain it or whether it will blow them up from the inside, unhinging their already wide-open jaws, sending their braces flying into the wall, their eyeballs soaring to the ceiling, returning their body tissue to the 70% water they contain, a biological fact they pronounced proudly at dinner.

I love the sight and sound of this unbounded laughter; self-consciousness dissolved, amid the safety of knowing they are with loved ones and all is right with the world. There is no need for them to act, prove, do anything. The sight and sound of the freedom of young boys, before they’re lost in the one-upmanship of manhood, the holding in to impress, the need to achieve, provide and protect. Tonight, I’m the provider and the protector, the one who feeds and the one who reminds them to get into their pajamas, brush their teeth, the one with the responsibility to bring home the entertainment, craft a day’s experiences to cement their friendship while enjoying the increasing freedom of being a preteen in summertime.

They are just on the cusp of developing their own provide/protect roles. I hope they remember that such freedom is still possible, even after they are fully ensconced in adulthood. Too few men claim it, then seek out tiny moments of it under the guise of beers and boobs. But I’ve never had a guy guffaw or sputter out potato chip bits once he’s seen my boobs or drunk a few beers. I’ve had girlfriends who will let themselves get silly with laughter, temporarily lose the self-consciousness of their body, but even that is rare.

If it was a dinner party for grown ups, I couldn’t have shown The Three Stooges. We’re too serious, too mature. Or perhaps we’re too familiar with the violence of life, the way we have been slapped and whacked and poked and humiliated by things as dangerous as the passing of time, the waning of love, the disappearance of hope, the way disappointment sneaks up, in disguise, and hits us right between the eyes. Every time.