Tests of my unconditional love in a purely theoretical context, part 1 (perhaps)

When someday we may have children, I imagine I'll have the standard parental worries: that the child is healthy, that the child won't fall in with the wrong crowd, that the child won't be possessed by demons (requiring me to smother him or her while sleeping), and most important, that the child will not become seriously interested in modeling. (That is, being a model; I'm not too worried about interest in building models. That I will worry about after I see what models are being built.)

It's not so much that I'd worry about her (we'll assume it's a her—pardon the sexism) self-esteem possibly being hurt, as it is a terribly competitive field (reality television has driven that point home quite resoundingly); I like to think we would imbue her with self-esteem sufficiently strong to recover from any disappointments. My fear would not stem from her failing at it; my concern would be that she was moderately successful—not tremendously successful, but enough to go to events like open casting calls.

Events where there are hundreds of teen or pre-teen girls strutting around in four-inch heels, with their overbearing stage mothers in tow.

Events like one I ran into last week as I walked to lunch.

Working just down the street from the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown L.A., typically I go over to one of the restaurants in there at least once a week. I noticed a bus outside the entrance but didn't think much of it. I strolled in through the automatic sliding doors and headed toward the nearest elevator bank (the restaurants being on the fourth and sixth levels), and passed a very tall but very young-looking girl-woman (where her features reveal her to be the former but her appearance and wardrobe attempt to convince us she is the latter) in the aforementioned heels—and that, I assure you, is unusual for a weekday around lunch time. I didn't think much of it, however, until I turned a corner by the elevators, where I witnessed the doors to one of the elevators open and a passel of girls and mothers spill out. I glanced around the lobby and realized the hotel was infested with them; they were milling about by the front desk, they were streaming up the escalator, they were coming in the doors on the opposite side of the building (where I could see through the glass doors more buses and rows of suitcases still waiting to be brought in by the bell hops.

Immediately I revised my lunch plan. Anywhere else was a better idea. I squeezed past the ones blocking my path near the elevators and made my way out the doors, crossing the street to a surprisingly not-busy Koo Koo Roo, where I ate a burrito and read a magazine with no preening pre-teens in sight.

Now, the pedophiles among you will assume that my fear stems from concern that I will find the underage females sexually attractive in an inappropriate way. Oh, if only that were the issue I'd consider myself lucky.

Groups of adolescent and young teen girls freak me out. I remember as a teen myself when my younger sister had a slumber party. The giggling. Oh, dear God, the insidious giggling. When one or two girls giggle it can be quaint; when they congregate and overwhelmingly outnumber both one's self and all the adults present, it becomes a cackling cacophony that surely rings endlessly in one of Dante's levels of Hell.

I barricaded myself in my room until the next morning; neither hunger nor the chance of a urinary tract infection was going to make me leave the relative safety of my room.

Obviously, I survived. Within a few years both my sister and her friends were too old for such events and I figured I had escaped those situations forever.

Wait, you're thinking. Wouldn't you have to endure those events as a father if you had this theoretical daughter?

Not if I could help it. But now, being an adult, I could pretend to have some authority—not that I would, but I could delude myself with the belief that I was in a better position.

However, a night of adolescent girls would be nothing to having to go to the sort of events like I saw at the Bonaventure (and which I've seen in years past at that venue). At least the slumber party would consist of the girls acting like adolescents. And there'd be a relatively small amount of them at any given time. At some vast casting call (or whatever the hell that thing was I walked into), they'd outnumber me by a ridiculous factor, and they'd be trying to be adults, and their mothers would be there.

And they'd be giggling (either literally or figuratively), but I'd have nowhere to hide. But because I'd love my daughter, I'd do it.

At least until I convinced her to be interested in something—anything—else.

Her mother? She's away on some business trip in this nightmare. I know the way these things work; I'm not getting out that easy.

Unless my daughter turns out okay. Or is merely demonically possessed.