Remember when there was no such thing as a VCR or DVD player and you had to wait all year for movies to be shown on T.V.?

As a kid, if I’d been asked to make a calendar, the holidays on it would have been my birthday, Christmas, the last day of school, and the air-dates of  The Sound of Music, The Wizard of Oz, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, It’s Christmas Charlie Brown, and The Ten Commandments. (Perhaps some of my choices seem odd for a kid, but when spend your formative years with not one but two very religious grandmothers, Moses is the shit.)

Kevin’s personal favorite as a youth was The Sound of Music.

Anyone who has ever been in the same room with Kevin and a musical knows that I am being highly facetious. Let’s just say that if he’d ever been a POW in any of the wars of which he is a veteran, all the enemy would have had to do is give him a bunch of No Doze, tie him to a chair, and make him watch virtually anything with singing in it.¹ Waterboarding? Child’s play.

I’ve never seen anyone more uncomfortable than Kevin when someone sings. Like that time on Pushing Daisies when Olive Snook suddenly bursts into a heartfelt rendition of “Hopelessly Devoted To You.” Kevin closes his eyes and sighs, shakes his head, lets out an indignant “Awwww!”  As the song continues, he shifts in his seat, contorting with increasing intensity until he is nearly writhing. Finally when he can’t take it anymore (about fifteen seconds), he bursts into tears, jumps up and flees the room.

Actually it is obscenities rather than tears, but it is no less moving.

I blame his father for this particular pathology, who apparently inflicted Julie Andrews upon his two sons every year no matter how much they cried. Which is really weird because this is a man who is so bored by movies that he usually falls asleep during them, including for instance such art films as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Shaun of the Dead.

1. OK, except a Grateful Dead show marathon. Then he would probably defect. [↩]