Mary and Nelson meet Twilight

I don’t have what anyone would call “cool parents.”

You might think of them as cute, but not cool.

When I was a kid, this was quite embarrassing. I secretly wished my parents could be cool.

But they weren’t. They were much, much older than my friends’ parents, and perpetually out of the loop when it came to the latest music, movies, and TV shows. I remember a friend’s dad coming over once to pick up his daughter from my house. He stood in the doorway for a minute chatting to my mom while my friend put on her shoes. The topic of conversation turned to a recent Seinfeld episode about double-dipping party snacks.

It was a pretty funny episode. My friend’s comedic timing was pretty good. It would have been a pretty funny moment in the conversation, all around, if my mom knew what he was talking about. She laughed and nodded like she did, pretending to go along with it, but I knew she had no idea what Seinfeld even was, despite the fact that the show was at its prime time peak at the time this conversation occurred.

When I was a kid, I was only taken to the movies three times by my parents. I’d begged and begged to see All Dogs go to Heaven but had to wait for my uncle to bootleg it on VHS for me because my parents remembered the theatre it was playing at as a place that “smelled funny” last time they were there. So I missed out on that but did see Home Alone and its sequel, as well as the Lion King.

The rest of the movies I saw in theatres happened with friends.

As I got older, I grew out of my parental embarrassment, as kids do, but the embarrassment was replaced with a sense of protection. Not because I don’t think they can’t get around – at 75, they are still really active. They go out a lot, have solid routines, and friends they see regularly.

But because they remain people who refer to made-for-TV-movies as “stories,” and remain removed from anything remotely resembling popular culture, with the exception of Dancing with the Stars and American Idol (although, I must qualify that they don’t always know who the dancing “stars” are), I sometimes wonder what they might be exposed to.

Is this how parents feel about their young kids when they worry about what they’re looking at on the internet?

My mom hates anything gory, scary, or gross. Last night, I was watching Stephen King’s Bag of Bones, which has a lot of dry, normal moments: a nice couple, a guy trying to write at his laptop, a guy in a cabin in the woods. There are flashes of scary things, but if my flipped to the channel at the right moment, I could imagine her saying to my dad, “is that a Christmas story? Let’s leave it there and see what it’s about.”

This weird picture was taken over drinks at a party this past summer.

Which brings me to a recent conversation I had with my parents that helped me intercept what surely would have been a huge disappointment for them.

Last Christmas, they were given a gift card for a movie theatre. Since they don’t go to many movies, though, it’s sat unused all this time.

The other day, they told me they’d wanted to see The Help, but had waited too long to go. By the time they were ready to get to the theatre, its run was already over.

“But we’re going to use it this week,” my mom said. “We want to go see this one movie, but we aren’t sure if it’s still playing. So if it’s not on this week then we’re going to see Twilight.”

“Twilight?” I said.

Twilight? Really?! My dad thinks vampires are stupid and my mom would think it’s too scary (she’s pretty tame, remember). I like real vampire movies and so couldn’t live with myself if I recommend Twilight to anyone.

“You can’t go see Twilight,” I said. “You haven’t even seen the first movies in the series.”

“But it says it’s 'part one' in the paper,” my dad said, pointing to the movie listings.

What he was seeing was Breaking Dawn: Part One. How was I going to explain this?

“It’s still a continued series, though,” I said. “So if you haven’t seen the first ones you won’t understand this one. Besides, you know it’s a vampire movie, right?”

Doesn’t everyone know Twilight is a vampire movie?

“Oh, is it?” My dad said.

And so I had to explain:

“It’s a really stupid movie about a teenage girl who falls in love with a vampire,” I said. “There are werewolves in it, too. And the werewolves and the vampires are feuding. And in this new movie, the girl’s pregnant with the vampire’s baby.”

“Oh, well we’re not going to see THAT,” my mom said.

I took the paper and underlined some options I thought would be safer bets for them.

Later, as I was getting my coat on to say goodbye, I said, “so you’re going to see one of the other movies I told you to go to, right? Not Twilight, right?”

“No,” my mom said. “We probably would have had to walk out if we went to that.”

Disappointment averted. For now. My mom told me she’d update me about which movie they ended up going to see.

Here’s hoping they get it right.