Uses for small children

One important reason for having a child is that they provide you, as an adult, with cover to do things that you remember fondly from your childhood but could not otherwise do without embarrassment.

Today at lunchtime my wonderful daughter (nearly 3.5 years old) and I took in an hour or so of classic Warner Brothers' cartoons, heavy on the Bugs Bunny, at the Michigan Theater, along with hundreds of other Ann Arbor parents and children.

Great fun was had by all, especially yours truly. But of course the inner social scientist never quite turns off, and I am left afterward thinking about how violent those old cartoons are, how politically incorrect (even cigarettes!) and about my own reaction to same. It was also interesting to see which cultural references were still current - Jack in the Beanstalk, yes, Dick Tracy and Errol Flynn, not so much.