Good King Wenceslas, look out

SHERWOOD KIRALY

The other night Patti Jo and two other mothers took three daughters,

14, 14 and 12, to the movies -- to “Love Actually,” actually. They

knew nothing of the picture beyond what they’d seen in commercials

and newspaper ads.

Oh, they knew it was rated “R,” presumably for language or a

“sexual situation,” but by this time the daughters had heard boys

talking tough at school, and according to the blurbs in the ads --

well, you haven’t seen the words “charming” and “irresistible” so

often since Macaulay Culkin was little. A Christmas comedy with Hugh

Grant singing “Good King Wenceslas” -- how shocking could it be?

Well, not very, evidently, but it seems there was a running gag in

it concerning a soft-porn studio and this recurring bit, which was

progressively vivid, caught the mothers and daughters unprepared. The

daughters reacted silently; one of them put a hand up to block the

glare. The moms turned red and laughed helplessly all the way home.

Patti Jo called it a “parenting disaster.”

I told her hey: It’s not like you took them to “Bad Santa.”

Anyway, I’m no stranger to this business of traumatizing the

children, having taken Keaton to “Ghostbusters” when he was 4. I

thought it was just Bill Murray and the Pillsbury Doughboy, but it

turned out to be legitimately spooky in spots. We spent the last half

of the film in the lobby and I heard about it for years.

Traditionally it’s the father’s job to scar the son and the

mother’s to scar the daughter, so I guess our parenting is sound so

far. My own parents didn’t take little Sherwood to “R”-rated movies

because there weren’t any, but they got a TV when I was 4 and I

thought the badmen were shooting their guns into our living room.

The truth is you don’t have to be a kid to experience screen

shock. Years ago my grandmother went to “Midnight Cowboy” thinking it

was a Western, and when she came out afterward she had to sit down on

the curb for a minute.

We get over these little jolts. At least, we keep going to the

movies. Patti Jo told a 14-year-old classmate of Katie’s who’d missed

the outing about the “‘Love Actually’ fiasco” and the girlfriend

nodded and said, “I’d still like to see it, though.”

Patti Jo hasn’t given up on protective parenting; there’s no

fall-of-Rome in her. Katie thinks it might be fun to go see

“Gothika,” but mom has drawn her line in the sand right in front of

the box office. Of course, you can see a movie like “Gothika” coming.

It’s the charming irresistible ones that fool you.