Look Out, Banksy

I've discovered something about life in quarantine with kids. I learned a valuable lesson and felt I should pass it along. If your child gets interested in anything for more than five minutes while staying at home at this time, just do one thing: Get out of the way.

This is an amazing, fleeting experience. Appreciate it.

Of course, you might get corralled into participating, in order to keep your kid from remembering how bored and cranky they are. Just know: This won’t last forever. And don’t worry. That Zoom happy hour will be here sooner than you know.

I got corralled. I got … conscripted. To be an artist’s assistant for an afternoon. His medium: Street art. His form: Chalk. And no, the driveway was not quite big enough to contain the epic artistic vision of our 8-year-old budding Banksy. Only the street itself would do.

Have you ever been told how to create art by a small child with a Kubrickian level of intensity and an Andersonian eye for detail and specificity? No? I have. And now I think I know what it would have been like to be an assistant at The Factory in the 1970s and being directed by Warhol to urinate on the canvasses. 

I mean, it’s not my vision, exactly, but okay …

Of course there was a story and it was very elaborate. It involved purple, multi-tentacled aliens from some distant planet, zooming down to Earth, and our street in particular, in order to steal the Street Hockey sign that had been his previous masterpiece.

Let me back up.

Quarantine does funny things to kids. Like, they decide that they must play street hockey, even if they have never played it before and the equipment has gathered dust in the garage for months. Possibly years. And because it is called “street” hockey, it must be played in the actual “street,” never mind how expansive or accommodating the driveway already happens to be.

And no sporting activity can be undertaken in this day and age without thinking about branding and a proper logo. Hence, his previous chalk art creation announcing to the world what activity this is, because the net and the sticks and the tennis ball didn’t quite get it across.

And yes, it was such an amazing work of art, the only logical conclusion is that aliens would want to come halfway across the universe and steal it.

I did my best, but he was a very exacting taskmaster and if there are any flaws in this mural, I guarantee you that they are 100 percent my fault.

“I actually made the tentacles thicker, like this.”

“That’s not the right purple.”

“Where are the controls? How is he flying the ship?”

“That’s not the right purple, either. It’s this one.”

“Just let me do it.”

Yes, I was fired from assisting an 8-year-old in making chalk art. How was your week?

The 11-year-old, of course, went his own way. And he’d never admit it, but he gets his taste in music (and everything else) from me. No question.