Solo Act - FILM WORMS

“Get him. GET HIM.”

That was the entire battle plan for our July 4th water fight upstate. Freedom, as advertised, just several degrees wetter. Sunny afternoon, my wife and me on one flank, my son and the neighbor’s kid dug in on the other. An arsenal of buckets and one Super Soaker held like a bazooka.

What followed was less a water fight than a regime change. Alliances formed and collapsed with the speed of Love Island relationships. There was a brief period where my son discovered the tactical advantage of higher ground and became a tiny aquatic Napoleon. Every bucket in the house suddenly had military value.

My son laughed so hard he forgot which side he was on, forgot there were sides, forgot the entire premise of the game while still, somehow, winning it.

Nothing says independence quite like blasting your own child off his feet with a garden hose.

Two days later I drove them to the airport and did not get on the plane.

Wife and son, off to France for the summer, the vacation we always do, the good long one. This year I stayed behind in New York to finish my film.

Now the apartment is enormous and so is the silence. No lunches. No 7:40am camp sprint with one shoe on and a bagel in hand. No fart joke he’s rewriting the timing on over breakfast, like I’m giving him notes on a pilot.

Freedom, technically. Just the other kind. The kind where nobody needs you for anything, ever, and you finally get to find out what that’s like.

I have the free time of a retired oil baron and the social calendar of a lighthouse keeper. I could eat cereal over the sink at midnight like Bill Murray in Lost in Translation, minus the karaoke, minus Tokyo, minus anyone worth saying anything to.

Longest we’ve ever been apart… a full month. He’ll come back taller, tanner, fluent in a few new French insults, having lived a whole life I wasn’t in. Good for him. Genuinely.

Me, three days in, thinking that’s not actually freedom. That’s just the second half of Bill Pullman’s Independence Day speech, minus anyone left to save.

Turns out nobody warns you: when your two favorite castmates relocate to France for the month, you just get quietly written out of the season.

xLenski

‘BUGGIN’ OUT’ · A TRIBE CALLED QUEST (1991)
Dir. Jim Swaffield · TRT 5 min
Jazzy, sun-soaked, the sound of a summer spent quietly bugging out, missing these two, out in France.

The Red Balloon (1956)
Dir. Albert Lamorisse · TRT 34 min
(available on multiple streaming services)
A boy in Paris loves a balloon more than most people love their spouses. The world takes it away anyway. Then it doesn't. French, wordless, devastating in exactly 34 minutes.

MON ONCLE (1958)
Dir. Jacques Tati · TRT 120 min
A nephew who ditches his parents' chrome-plated, fish-fountain-having modern house every chance he gets for his aimless, delightful uncle. A four-year-old's entire argument for what freedom is supposed to feel like. (Merci for the recco Phil Andelman, and Emilie Chanin!)

That’s all for this week. Class is dismissed.

P.S. Got a clip, short, or lost gem you or your kids loved? Send it my way. I’m always looking for the strange and wonderful stuff that slipped through the cracks.

xLenski