This is What Happens When You Send Your Child to the Paul Shaffer School of Music

At Dinner

Your children and your spouse are sitting at the table. The dinner you've made, steak strips with potato wedges and asparagus, has taken you an hour and twenty minutes to prepare. You emerge from the kitchen with the tray of steak, whereupon your oldest son shoots up from the table and to the console piano in the front room. Before the tray reaches the table, your son is playing simple chords on the piano and singing, "Steak strips, steak strips! Get yourself one of those hot hot hot steak....striiiiips!" You try to smile and then head back to the kitchen for the rest of the food. Your son is still on his way back to the table when he sees you reemerge from the kitchen. At this, he turns quickly back to the piano and sings the "Taters and asparagus, riding the bus...all the way to those taters and aspara-GUUUUS!" This time you do not try to smile. Instead you return to the kitchen once more, where you spot your knife rack.

Now you smile.

Driving Your Child to School

The radio, you tell your daughter, is broken. This is not true, but it will prevent your daughter from making up new lyrics over songs you are fond of in their original version. Unphased, she invents jingles for stop signs, pedestrians, and the act of making a left turn. Her song about honking gets especially irksome when she insists on actually honking the horn in order "to capture the real essence of what the song 'Honky Tonk Honk Town' is all about." She gets testy when you question if songs like "Honky Tonk Honk Town," or "Hang me a (One, Two, Three, Four) Louie Louie Louie!" have essences in the first place. Agitated, she angrily begins, "Mom's great for a lot of things - but doesn't know squat about music YEAHHH!"

You finally reach school and your daughter hops out. Watching her run up to the school steps, you wonder how little it would cost to contract one of the other students into pushing her down at recess today.

At Night

"Havin the sex, havin the sex...mom and dad think I can't hear them having sehhhhhx, YEAH!"

(With Casio Keyboard accompaniment.)

Attending Your Child's Music Recital at School

You are encouraged that your daughter is turning over a new musical leaf by joining the music section of the high school's performance of Fiddler on the Roof. When the curtain goes up, you are apparently not the only one surprised when your daughter is heard playing an up-tempo rocker and singing, "Jew on a roof, kind of aloof. Baby you got a Jew, on that roooooooof. Yeah!" Although she's not wearing a microphone, you can hear your daughter trying to convince the actors and the other musicians to "just go with it", and that Jerry Bock's original composition is "something Paul Shaffer could've written in his sleep if Paul Shaffer was sleeping in an idiot chamber...[screw] Jerry Bock."

You have already left the theater by the time your daughter begs Tevye to "go with that Top Ten list [they] talked about earlier".

Sending a Care Package of Worms to Paul Shaffer

It's funny: Six months ago you never would have guessed you'd ever send someone a care package of worms.