Doesn't fall far from the tree

My dad keeps insisting that Natalie Wood is the hottest of all of the classic Hollywood starlets, and I'm trying to tell him that it's Ingrid Bergman. This is one of our rare conversations about simply nothing, where the topic isn't about money, or my career, or the last time I've gotten an oil change. That's just the way we talk to each other. Not my fault. Occasionally when he's feeling friendly, we'll discuss politics, but for the most part there's no shooting the shit with my dad.

Today is different. "Ingrid Bergman is perfection," I'm trying to tell him. "She's got that fair-skinned, doe-eyed Scandinavian thing going for her. She's the pinnacle, the crowning achievement of all female beauty. If you combined Jessica Alba and Natalie Portman into one incredible uber-babe, and if you stood this hypothetical Jessilie Portba next to Ingrid Bergman and asked me to pick the better one, I just, I wouldn't know what I would do."

My dad grunts in disgust and fishes a cigarette from out of his shirt pocket. Violently shaking his head, he glares at me the same way he would if I had told him I was planning on renting an apartment for the rest of my life. He's all, "You, bigger fool than I thought. Ingrid, attractive in black and white, yes. But in color, she look-a like shiet. Shietnam!"

I'm pissed. I'm about to insult him in other ways, like tell him his boy Steve McQueen probably participated in gay sex orgies, that at some pool party he was the meat in a Brando/Olivier/McQueen/Dean sandwich, but I decide not to go there. I just sit on the couch, watching my movie.

But my dad still wants to pick a fight with me. He lifts up my DVD case and reads the title. "Invasion... of... Body Snatcher. Bah! Why you watch such nonsense?" he asks. "There is no culture! No class!"

And I'm trying to tell him that it's an entertaining political allegory of the McCarthy-era 50s, where the pod people represent the Soviets and their loss of personal autonomy, and while I'm explaining all of this my dad is just staring and glaring at me like, What the Phuket, Thailand is my son talking about?

"Weirdo," he mumbles. Weirdo is my dad's go-to word for me and just about everything I do. He doesn't find me amusing at all. He doesn't get my humor. He thinks my adventures are bizarre and immature. He thinks I waste too much time. He's terrified of the fact that I consider Catcher in the Rye one of my favorite books, because he thinks he might have raised his own little Mark David Chapman. That must be why he asks my mom every two days if I've called home lately. To make sure I haven't assassinated anybody. Whatever. Reading a good book or watching a fun sci-fi b-movie does not a psycho-killer make, but whatever.

Anyway. This afternoon when I was hanging out with my sister, she pulled out her laptop and showed me the funniest thing ever. It's a bizarre short video clip of my dad running out of the family room doing a dance. It brought me to the floor laughing, and I enjoyed the pain in my lungs so much that I asked her to put it on auto-repeat.

Yeah, and he says I'm the weird one.