Do you ever catch yourself trying to calm your screaming child down, thinking how useless you’d be trying to hide from the Nazis in the Warsaw ghetto in Schindler’s List? Or when your kid is screaming at you because her DVD doesn’t work – the same DVD she’s gouged whole iron filings out of – do you find yourself reminiscing about the pre-CD days when the record player was out of your reach, and the only damage you could really do was to small animals?
This week’s featured performance, Lecture, is also taking us back in time, to a period of our lives that some of us might prefer to forget: puberty.
It’s kind of personal, and not always easy to relate to other experiences. I was a late developer, and it’s hard to imagine what it would have been like to enter puberty at the age of nine. I remember taking a bath with a friend back then and being asked: “Oi Benj. How come you haven’t got any pubes then?” Little did I know that they would take almost double the number of years his took to arrive, although he was a Hungarian adoptee and we always suspected there’d been a mix-up with the birth certificates.
I also remember being 13 and listening to someone a clear foot taller than myself talking with such vitriol menace about two boys who hadn’t entered puberty by the time they were 12 – like they’d committed war crimes. To be fair, he had already sat down a year and I spent the next five years tormenting him.
Yeah. Instead of waiting in the showers, pubeless in shame with a todger the size of a small pencil (I would have also made a great bully) I launched a pre-emptive strike, cutting down all my perceived enemies with sledgehammer lines. If somebody had a girlfriend, I wanted to know the name of their guide dog – I quickly acquired the nickname poisonous dwarf.
Elsewhere this week, there are no little people in Going Underground, but we’ve got Santa in bondage and a whole lot of craziness, and we’ve got Nichole Accettola’s last food blog before she takes an extended break. Being a late developer has at least made me more sensitive (get the sick bucket out) to the efforts of others and I would like to personally thank her for her sterling efforts over the last three years.
