Picket Fence Post

This past weekend, my column on the plethora of inappropriately sexy Halloween costumes being marketed to young girls ran on the front page of the MetroWest Daily News’ Sunday Opinion Section.

It must’ve been serendipity because the very next day, I saw this photo of Miley Cyrus’ 9-year-old sister Noah dressed up for a Halloween party looking as though she’d donned one of the costumes I’d railed against as being bad for young girls and sending them the wrong messages.

The blog DListed had more photos of Noah in her costume which were just as stomach-churning as this one.

When I see these Halloween photos, along with teenaged Miley Cyrus’ recent pole dancing act at the Teen Choice Awards in August, I don’t feel confident in the message the Cyrus family is attempting to send to young girls, especially when my 11-year-old daughter’s a Hannah Montana fan.

Image credit: Juan Rico/Fame Pictures via Parent Dish.

Mad Men Returns

Have I mentioned that Mad Men’s third season premieres on Sunday night on AMC? I think I may have, once or twice.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a tad bit obsessed with the award-winning drama set in the 1960s which follows the (mostly) men who work for a Manhattan ad agency and their families. I’ve been counting down the days until new episodes air, so much so that I think The Spouse is jealous of my crush on Don Draper (Jon Hamm). He jokes that Mad Men is all I’ve been talking about lately. Of course he’s wrong. Kind of.

Speaking of Don Draper . . . when we last saw the character at the end of the sophomore season,  his wife/at-home mother of his children, Betty (January Jones) had just allowed him to move back into their suburban home. Betty had made Don spend several weeks in a hotel after he humiliated her by cheating on her AGAIN, this time with an older business associate whose husband was Don’s client. However after learning she was pregnant with her third child, Betty reluctantly decided to proceed with the pregnancy (after flirting with the idea of obtaining an illegal abortion, it was 1962) and let Don back home. The question remains about whether she’s forgiven him or whether he’s going to stop his rampant cheating.

My Pop Culture column this week at Mommy Track’d is all about not just Betty, but all the women of Mad Men.

Oh, Miley

Miley, Miley, Miley. I don’t know what to make of the recent evolution of this 16-year-old Disney star, the face of the Hannah Montana franchise, of which my 10-year-old daughter is so fond.

 What I’ve been seeing as of late has not been promising.

Take, for example, her performance at this week’s Teen Choice Awards – and the ensuing debate over whether she was actually pole dancing while dressed in sexy, butt-revealing attire backed up by dancers in bras and short-shorts – which made me deeply sad. Sure, a tween/teen star needs to evolve into a more mature image, take on older material in order to continue growing as an artist, but this road that Miley appears to be traversing . . . nothing good seems like it’s gonna come from this. Lest we forget, Britney Spears was once a squeaky clean Mouseketeer. And when Spears, I mean Cyrus, invoked Britney during her Choice Awards performance, I shuddered.

John Hughes, Creator of 1980s Teen Flicks

You might’ve heard that the director/writer of some of Generation X’s best loved teen films — Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Some Kind of Wonderful and Pretty in Pink– passed away last week. Since then, there’s been all manner of tribute and appreciations for Hughes, including a great one in the Boston Globe by Wesley Morris.

An excerpt, referencing the world of Hughes’ films:

“There was no war, no sweeping social movement during this period. Just Ronald Reagan and sad old Grenada. No one talked about race or AIDS. The world revolved around detention, crushes and proms. Sometimes it was just ‘Pretty in Pink.’ But what redeemed these movies was their sideways cool. May all so-called misfits be as hot as Eric Stoltz and Mary Stuart Masterson. And on his uneven playing field, Hughes did come up with achingly human characters. They were always on the sidelines or reluctant to get in the game — even their own. [Molly] Ringwald’s Samantha in ‘Sixteen Candles.’ [Jon] Cryer’s Duckie in ‘Pretty in Pink.’ Masterson’s Watts in ‘Some Kind of Wonderful.’ And, best of all, Jeannie Bueller and Cameron Frye in ‘Ferris Bueller.’ Jennifer Grey was the seething Cassandra of that movie, desperately trying to expose the little brother as the brat [Matthew] Broderick so star-makingly was.”

Do you have a favorite 1980s/Hughes flick? Mine’s a tie between Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club.

Image credit: Chris Pizzello/AP via Star-Ledger.

It’s been a long school spring vacation.

On Monday, The Spouse and I woke the three apples of our eyes up at the hideous hour of 3:45 a.m. in order to celebrate Patriots Day in Massachusetts. We packed everyone up and drove to the Lexington Green, the site of the Revolutionary War’s first exchange of musket fire. We thought we’d gotten there early enough to snag a good spot where we could get an unobstructed view of the green, but alas, we didn’t. We WERE able to see the colonists gather, the Sam Adams and Paul Revere impersonators dash away with a trunk of treasonous rebel papers and the British soldiers arrive and point their muskets. We heard the shots and muffled shouts, saw the cloud of smoke but didn’t see the actual skirmish. This greatly disappointed the children, especially the boys who bitterly said, “That wasn’t worth it!”  The disappointment continued later that morning when we watched the Boston Marathon on TV, rooted hard for the American runners, only to see them both wind up in a disappointing third place. I can’t remember what else happened that day as I was exhausted.

On Tuesday, the kids played outside together and bickered, then bickered some more. I think a neighbor kid (or kids) was over at our house at one point.  The Girl went to see the Hannah Montana movie with my sister-in-law that night, while The Spouse took the boys to see Monsters vs. Aliens and I logged some solid work time, alone.

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