ALBANY, New York. Amanda Baines has two children separated by a decade in age due to the tragic death of her first husband Peter in a dental-flossing accident shortly after their son Michael was born in 1998. “I was depressed for a long time,” she says as she glances down at her son Tyler by her second husband, Josh, “but this little guy’s dad brought me out of it.”
“Aargh!”
With the perspective that experience brings, Baines finds herself making wiser decisions regarding her younger son’s education. “We don’t let him eat Play-Doh, the way Michael did,” she says with a rueful shake of her head, “and we have him enrolled in college-prep classes, even though he’s only in second grade.”
“Yum!”
In addition to Mandarin Chinese, Amanda brings Tyler to a once-a-week play group with other parents concerned that their children will matriculate at expensive liberal arts colleges and find themselves far behind students whose parents subscribed to The New Yorker, the general circulation magazine that features wry cartoons whose point is often lost on the uninitiated. “Michael’s first-year roommate Ian from Manhattan showed him one their first day at NYU,” she recalls with a look of anguish, “and he made the mistake of saying ‘I don’t get it.’ It set his social life back two months, and now we’re concerned he may end up homeless someday.”
The New Yorker has included cartoons since it was founded in 1925, and the inscrutability of some of its offerings has been the subject of pop culture references from Seinfeld to The Simpsons. Aptitude for deciphering New Yorker cartoons is measured by the Schiff-Benet Ironic Double-Bozac Humor Test, and the CIA has used them to send coded messages to agents held hostage in dentists’ waiting rooms behind enemy lines.
But all of that is beside the point to Baines, who only wants to do what’s best for her child. “We’re combining it with his karate lessons,” she says, a comment that causes the other mothers in the group to look at her quizzically. “Instead of saying you don’t get it, you attack and say ‘I get it–it’s just not funny.’”