“Parenting: Idiot. Expert. Idiot. Expert. Idiot.” Six Words for My First Father's Day
Among the many true clichés about parenting is that you fall madly in love with your child. True, true. For me, I both near-instantly fell in love with my boy but something else happened that I hadn't quite planned for: I fell in love all over again with my first baby, SMITH Magazine.
How so? Well, if I've learned one thing about what drives people to write Six-Word Memoirs in more than five years of editing the project is that it's passion. When you're passionate about a topic—your own life overall or in a particular part of it (your love life, your food life, being a mom)—you tend to write often and from the heart. When my son Lukas was born I was overwhelmed and underslept but I still wanted to somehow document this major time of change, confusion, and amazingness. Like so many of you, I decided to tell my new dad life story six words at a time. (And then, years after we launched Six-Word MOMoirs, finally got Six-Word for Dads going).
If you look at my SMITH profile which lists all my stories, 31 of my last 33 Six-Word Memoirs are about my new dad life. Over at my friend Johanna Myers McChesney's blog for her company, Isis Parenting, I've highlighted a handful of my recent Six-Word Memoirs and included a short backstory or life lesson for each.
“Mormon is clearly the new black.” Six Words at the Tony Awards
Picture this: It's the big luncheon to honor the Tony Award nominees at the InterContinental Times Square hotel. The place is wall to wall with some of the finest actors, directors, composers, and set designers of our time. The event is closed to the media, but we've got the inside track on how some of these year's finest stage actors, producers, directions, musicians, and others who make Broadway buzz described the feeling of being told they've been nominated for a 2011 Tony Award—in just six words. As this storied group of Broadway talent, up-and-coming and luminary alike, sat down at their tables, they found a card with this request: "Can you describe what you are feeling, right now, in just six words?" Here are a few of their six-word reactions below, and in a wonderful video that follows.
“Mormon is clearly the new black.”
—Robert Lopez, best book and original score nominee, The Book of Mormon
“I enlisted in Larry Kramer’s war.”
—Ellen Barkin, actress nominee, The Normal Heart