The real reason my wife suggested we celebrate Kathryn's eighth birthday a full two months early by taking her to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? This:
A crystal skull cake.
I'm just happy she didn't suggest we take Kathryn to Sex and the City. God only knows what kind of cake she would have made for that.
As odd as it was to be interviewed by the Japanese, it didn't hold a candle to being showered by Koreans.
Let me back up a bit.
It was late 2005, a month or two before the twins were born, and in the back of a Babies "R" Us, two Koreans had cornered my wife. Admittedly, this was not hard to do. Given her size and range of motion at the time, she could just as easily have been cornered by two pill bugs. As if you needed proof:
Sitting:
Standing:
The Koreans had clipboards and questions and the look of people way outside their comfort zone, like Lutherans with tambourines and flowered necklaces. They had been there for a while, wandering the store, timidly approaching people, and I had done my best to keep Sharon away from them, because I knew that whatever these people wanted, if Sharon could help, she would. And she'd probably bake them zucchini bread to go with it, too. And it turned out that what these people wanted was to shower an old pregnant lady. And videotape it.
Viola!
Okay, what they wanted was to interview an old pregnant lady, and in return, they would throw her a baby shower, and they would broadcast the entire thing on Korean TV. Of course, Sharon said yes. And then she rushed home to start grating the zucchini.
A few days later, our tiny New Jersey rental house was the scene of the most bizarre impromptu baby shower I've ever witnessed. The film crew arrived late in the evening, with wrapped presents, pink streamers, and a bowl of salad with no dressing. As they set up, we greeted our guests, who were really just neighbors as we had moved there not but a month before and we still knew very few people. Looking back on it, we probably should have brought in people from farther afield, because from that evening on, our neighbors never really looked at us the same again.
As everyone was getting into place, the producer told us two things about Korea. One, Korean women were beginning to have children later in life, and by that he meant in their late twenties. This has caused quite a bit of concern, because do you know what comes after having babies in your late twenties? Having babies in your early thirties! And what comes after that? America! America comes after that. America, with all its problems and social ills, comes when women start having babies in their late thirties. And that's why the film crew had been there that day, in the Paramus Babies "R" Us, looking for pregnant women in their late thirties to interview. The producer told us that, of all his previous assignments, this had surely been the hardest because it necessitated spending hours upon hours in that store approaching strange women asking, first, if they were pregnant and, then, their age, something that ranks up there with elective scrotal surgery in the pantheon of things men do not want to do.
The other thing we learned is that Koreans do not typically throw baby showers.
After a few minutes of filming idle chatter over salad, each guest was handed a pre-wrapped gift to present to my wife, then hustled over to a corner of the living room for an individual interview which always began with the same two questions: What gift did you bring to the shower, and why did you choose it? Strangely, neither of those two questions were actually included in the broadcast version of the event, possibly because the majority of the guests answered with "I don't know" and "I don't know" respectively. The questions following were much harder hitting, often including whether women over thirty-five should have children, and whether the guests thought my wife, sitting not five feet away and bending the room with the gravity of her bulk, was making a mistake. To their credit, nobody said yes to the latter. They didn't ask me.
A few months later, we received an envelope containing a videotape of the program. It turned out to be a sixty-minute science program about pregnancy, featuring footage of not one, not two, not three, but four complete vaginal deliveries, which is four more than I had ever seen up to that point. The baby shower came somewhere near the end, or so I was told by my wife who was still able to look directly at the television by that time. The whole program was in Korean with no subtitles, so we still have no idea what anyone was saying, and it will probably stay that way until we find someone with a strong constitution and the ability to speak Korean.
Maybe we'll look for just such a person at the Paramus Babies "R" Us.
