Friday, April 13, 2007

A Conversation with Charlie (Age 6) About Sports

(Setting: in the car, listening as always to Movin 92.5, music to make you feel good. Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack" is playing. The chorus features the incessantly repeated line "Go ahead, be gone with it" but with all the engineering and funkification it sounds like "Go hippy go".)

HIM: What does she mean, "Go hippy go"?
ME: He.
HIM: He. That's a man?
ME: Yeah.
HIM: What does it mean about "Go hippy go"?
ME: Well, do you know what a hippy is? Like long haired guys, they wear a lot of brown, say "man" a lot?
HIM: Yeah, I think so.
ME: Well, people used to race them. They'd put numbers on their backs and line them up at a starting line on a race track and then see how fast the hippies would run and which hippy would come in first.
HIM: Really?
ME: And you could place bets depending on which hippy you thought would be fastest. So in the song Justin Timberlake is perhaps recalling some old hippy races he attended as a boy, the practice faded out in the early 90's due to some lawsuits resulting from injuries, and he's remembering how he used to cheer for his favorite racing hippies.
HIM: Hm. Cool.









3 comments:

Scott Chicken said...

Our next new song must be about Hippie Racing. If only so we can stage a race for the video and prehaps resurrect this long-lost sport. Because if Roller Derby is back why should Hippie Racing be left out in the cold?

srah said...

I want to be Calvin's Dad when I grow up.

Matthew said...

Calvin's dad is a role model for an entire generation of fathers.