Sunday, August 31, 2008

Pop culture points out my bad parenting

A few days ago I got home from meeting a friend for coffee and my 13-year old daughter, who had been babysitting, asked if she could go to a movie with some of her BFF’s. I said yes because, well, she had been babysitting and school starts next week and I was trying to score Good Mom points. (I believe this is the first time that Daughter has been dropped off at the theater to hang with some friends, but I’ll have to check the records.)

She runs upstairs to call her friends and say she can go and when she comes back down I ask “Which movie?” YES, I realize that this is the FIRST question a GOOD mother would have asked. Especially after Daughter informs me that they are going to see House Bunny.

Yikes. I haven’t done my parental research on House Bunny. It looks pretty harmless – smart girls learn how to wear lip gloss and dumb girl learns how to use a sentence with a noun AND a verb – but it does start out at the Playboy Mansion. My only consolation is that one of the attending BFF’s has a mother who is even stricter than I am and if her kid is going then I’m not going to backtrack and be the Movie Nazi.

I really haven’t thought too much about it until I was flipping through Entertainment Weekly this morning and came to a one-page story on the styling of the girls in House Bunny and saw that Katharine McPhee and Rumer Willis are two of the “stars” of the movie.

Dammit.

I have to be honest. We live in a fairly affluent area; my daughter has an iPod, and a cell phone, and a laptop. And because my husband works in the media our children have been exposed to some pretty decent perks – suites at sporting events, the occasional front row seat at a Disney musical. They are fairly spoiled. But I am NOT ready for the why-can’t-you-get-me-a-part-in-a-movie-or-let-me-audition-for-a-reality-show-so-I-can-have-a-career-in-Hollywood onslaught that movies like House Bunny are sure to elicit.


Why, oh why, do you have to do this, filmmakers? Are there not enough cute Midwestern girls who have quit school and moved to L.A. to work the second shift at Denny’s so they can audition all day to fill your casting requirements? And I can’t even imagine the tension when the actresses are all sitting around between takes, smoking their cigarettes to stay skinny, and one of them asks Rumer how many times SHE had to sleep with the producer to get the role and Rumer says “Uh, none.” At least she had to wear the back brace, which only seems fair.

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