In the Name of the Father

Nemo here is an open-faced roast-beef and cheddar (yellow and white) sandwich with radish garnish. He's cemented to his whole-wheat base by garlic and chive cream cheese and he's floating in a sea of snow peas, edamame and dill pickle slices. The seaweed is ... well, seaweed. Without the flash from the camera, he looked more matte and cartoonish and, strange to say when speaking of a fish, better.
Nemo was probably two-thirds eaten when he came home, but it was clumsily done. If you're only going to eat part of this little guy, you take alternating bites from top and bottom, leaving just a bit of sandwich between them so that you're left with a head and tail connected by fish bones. Teed up, right? You need to crush that one out of the park, son.
Anyway, I have to believe that Finding Nemo has supplanted the Lion King as Disney champ of the "Daddy's Got Something In His Eye" section on Netflix. Okay, so dad's not looking down on his son whenever the stars shine. Instead, dad watched his son's mom die violently while trying to protect her children, only one of whom survived. And his son has a disability. And he's sending his son off to school for the first time. And they have a big fight and his son, who is also all that's left of the woman he loved, rejects him and is then abducted. Thank God fish don't have the draft. And how is Daniel Day-Lewis not associated with this movie?
So, I'm going to presume, and ask the reader to allow, that better-founded pathos is being tapped into when I go one better further and get misty over Finding Nemo ... the Musical. And not just any musical, but the 30-minute almost-criminally-abridged musical currently on stage at Disney's Animal Kingdom theme park. A stage tread just prior by rollerblading monkeys. (To be fair, that was another show which, in its own way, illustrated why boys need fathers. Yes, that's a headset mic.) And not even the musical, but the soundtrack to the musical which I've included on the 8-hour mp3 cd that lives in our family car's stereo on an expired visa.
I'm not embarrassed that I enjoy the music. Even if it didn't have a modicum of credibility, I have always been unapologetic about my musical tastes. I have no regrets about 1986, Stryper! I was 12, but I had an old soul. Please note that I never said that nobody should apologize for the music I've brought into my life. It's just not going to be me. Maybe Greatest Hits: Live in Puerto Rico was their apology. It was a long time coming and they should have done it before ... April 2006? WTF? Does that mean they're still together? I wouldn't know, because I am soooo off them.
Anyway, thanks to our younger son, Secundo, "Mee-mo" has been on repeat more that its fair share. I'm sure I'll grow more and more desensitized to lyrics like "You mean so much to me, I don't know what I would do/ In this big, blue world, if something should happen to you," but, as of scant weeks ago at dusk in a supermarket parking lot, waiting for mom to run in and buy something that escapes me but was certainly not so poignant as diapers or "Sunday night sundae" ingredients or a Father's Day card, it hasn't happened yet. And, when it does, it will be time to start getting nostalgic about when our boys were young enough to love a Disney stage show unironically.