Pirates

Since February, Isaac has been interested in "The Pirates of Penzance."

For Isaac's entire life Craig has sung him various Gilbert and Sullivan tunes, and Isaac has been singing along for the past year and a half, but his interest intensified after I got the DVD of "Pirates" out of the library. Even though we returned the movie many months ago, we watch clips from it on YouTube on a daily basis. (This has taught Isaac how to use the cursor and click functions on our laptop, although he is under strict orders not to click on anything he doesn't recognize.)

There are various issues to this "Pirates" fascination: the difficulty of explaining the plot to a three-year-old, the repetitiveness of listening to one song over and over again as Isaac tries to absorb it, the challenge of defining the vocabulary of Victorian comic opera, the idealization of pirates as disobedient bad guys. Not to mention the annoyance of having sticks brandished in our faces as swords.

But let's get to the good stuff. In fact, Kevin Kline is awesome as the Pirate King: