People sometimes remark that my six year old niece seems more like me than she does her mother. Maybe it's the goatee, I don't know, but often I just don't see it.
So, I was driving with my niece yesterday, and she had a notebook and was doodling in it. She's in first grade and practicing her letters, her spelling, and artistic expression. "What should I draw?" she kept asking, and I gave her a couple suggestions (such as her and her dog, where she'd like to live, her friends, maybe a scene from a movie she liked).
A minute later, she passed the notebook up to me with this:
If you're not psychic, you'll need to be told that this was her imitation of the front cover of POLTERGEIST, which we picked up at Best Buy together. At the store, the girl who rang us up asked my niece if she would be watching it, and I said she probably wouldn't, as it was too scary for her. I mentioned that my own parents wouldn't let me watch it when it came out.
The girl who rang us up was so young, she thinks of the Clinton Administration as not having happened yet, and told my niece that she used to watch JURASSIC PARK when she was a little girl.
I reminded my niece of this. So, the child decided to next draw a dinosaur.
Again, for the uninitiated, this is "a try-ranosaurus stepping on a guy."
I laughed over that one, and I guess that inspired her (the kid may not get a lot of praise on her artistic abilities), 'cause she did another drawing, hoping to please me. I didn't include some of them because they were just ordinary sketches of dogs and horses and little girls.
I had picked up PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2 for her to watch during the drive and I told her to draw something from that. She drew this (which you can plainly see is the tentacle of the Kraken pulling some dude into the water):
She also drew Davy Jones, remembering that he had a claw for a hand. She's still at the stage where you have to ask her what the drawing is when you look at it, but hey, some painters are still that way at the highpoint of their careers.
I told her to keep going, and she asked me, "What's the name of the girl?" "The girl in PIRATES?" I asked, "Her name's Elizabeth."
A moment later, the child had not one, but two drawings of Elizabeth Swan.
In the first, she has a dagger in her, complete with blood.
In the second, a sword.
At one point, though, she really started in on the sick stuff and my head just started spinning. This one, I believe, is the piece de resistance:
Yes, this is from my ill-advised viewing of THE OMEN with her, the early scene where the nanny kills herself. I just can't imagine how other people would respond to these drawings.
"Okay," I said, "You'd better not do drawings like that at school, okay?"
But she just laughed, perhaps enjoying the horrified attention the same way I did by drawing wangs and babies crapping on the chalkboard during recess.
Again, I wonder if I am somehow the child's father, since she inherited so many of my "unusual" traits.
Unca Rish Outfield
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