I've spent the past two evenings sitting on a plastic chair in a high school gym watching my son swagger around the stage in a fedora, enacting his role as sexy 20s crime boss in this year's school musical. It is a bemusing position to be in, and I suspect the parents of the girl who played the demimonde vamp had similar feelings. Here we are, sitting in an audience, watching our children perform roles in which they are dolled up to entice. With his long curls and his smoldering glare, his pinstriped suit and his fur-trimmed overcoat, my son looked like some sort of hybrid Johnny Depp/Red Hot Chili Peppers version of a gangster. But in real life he's a 17-year-old junior at a rural high school who coos over cats, hugs his mother every day, and still forgets to brush his teeth. He's also the same boy who paced around the kitchen in his bathrobe yesterday afternoon, orating an impassioned defense of nineteenth-century Kentucky senator Henry Clay along with a grouchy diatribe against present-day Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell. I said, "Honey, you write that all down, and I will publish it." My guess is that he'll get distracted by cat videos and cross-country running in the rain. But we can hope.