Our neighborhood goes all out for Halloween.
Parents from other neighborhoods drive their kids over, park on our street, and turn them loose. It has pissed rain on Halloween the last two years, and both years we still handed out more than 300 pieces of candy.
Our block goes especially hard. One house was on the news. They hand out tickets, supply hot cocoa, run a line out into the street, and build a full experience inside their garage that has to cost them $5,000 to $10,000 in labor and materials, not counting the hours they put in throughout October. On Halloween night the wait is about 45 minutes. But it’s truly amazing—they spare no expense!
The last few years they've started holding previews for the kids who live nearby. “Come over the day before so you don't have to stand in line on the night of.” It's extremely considerate. They also run two versions of every show, a kid version and a “scary” version, because their audience ranges from toddlers to teenagers.
This is the story of how I handled that choice last year when I took my daughter, who was three at the time, to see “Jurassic Park in Lake Oswego.”
(Poorly, is how.)
When dinosaurs ruled the earth
We walk over for the preview around 3:00 pm on the day before Halloween and get our tickets (they’re free, but those little mementos are part of the fun). The staff is wearing the khaki Jurassic Park vests. A video plays on a loop with the theme song and a voiceover they recorded themselves.
One of the attendants asks us, "Do you want the kid version or the scary version?"
“How scary is scary?”
The attendant hasn’t given this much thought, but motions toward the scene taking place a few feet away from us: a girl who is clearly older than my daughter is crying in her father's arms. At the time, this information struck me as irrelevant.
I turn and face the three-year-old girl standing next to me.
"What do you say, sweetie? Kid version or scary version?"
"Scary."
I turn back to the attendant and point to the child. “I think she’ll be fine. She’s a… clever girl.”
“So the scary version then? That starts in 10 minutes.”
A perfectly placed reference, completely wasted.
The experience
We enter the dark garage, led by two vest-adorned guides who immediately begin to explain the electric fence and how it keeps us safe. It's straight out of the movie.
A goat is lowered into the enclosure beyond the fence. The surround sound speakers let you know it’s a very scared goat. We hear stomps. Then the goat is eaten, violently, behind some big fronds, and blood spurts.
Suddenly, the electric fence powers down. An alarm sounds. We are informed that the entryway has jammed and is now locked behind us.
One of the guides panics (genuinely good acting!) and runs into an annex off the side of the enclosure. Moments later, from inside the annex, she starts to scream. More blood spurting.
Cool. Cool cool cool.
My daughter has been a trooper up to this point. Then something starts clawing from inside the annex, and between the clawing and the screaming, it's a bit much. When a second claw comes through the fence, she looks at me with goat-fear in her eyes.
"PICK ME UP. PICK ME UP."
She has no idea this is not an actual dinosaur claw. I pick her up. Her head is buried so deep in my jacket, and her eyes are so full of tears, that she misses the most terrifying part of the show, which is a perfect velociraptor replica head pushing through the fence, inches from the guests. It is the only break I catch all afternoon.
Miraculously, the surviving guide figures out how to unlock the gate, and we all rush out.
End scene.
The walk home
She trembles the whole way.
I spend the walk trying to come up with a version of this story in which I don't come off as a complete idiot, because in a few minutes I'll be explaining to my wife why putting our daughter down is going to take an extra hour for the next four months. Nothing materializes.
We get home.
“How was it?”
“Uh… well… they asked if she wanted the kid version or the scary version and she said she wanted—”
“You let her choose?”
“I mean…”
“She’s literally shaking. Is she going to be okay?”
I pause for a moment. Then, in my best Goldblum:
“Life, uh, finds a way.”
“What?”
Am I the only person who has seen this movie??
Kids say the darndest things
Wife: “She’s going to be the kind of doctor who delivers babies.”
4-year-old daughter: “She gives babies to people?”
Got a funny kid story?
Respond to this email and I’ll highlight it in a future newsletter.
Thanks for reading! Hope you laughed. See you next time.
-Will
If you enjoyed this newsletter, please consider forwarding it to your parent friends. If this email was forwarded to you, consider subscribing to Parental Advisory here. Outside of this newsletter, I run a financial planning firm that pretty much exclusively serves millennial families with 1) variable incomes from sales or sales adjacent jobs and/or 2) concentrated wealth (usually from a lot of employer stock).