I BELIEVE THAT THE CHILDREN ARE OUR DOWNFALL

Prognosis: A very sore throat.

By the time we got him home, his fever was non-existant and by the end of the night, he was dancing and running around and laughing and eating.

Kids.

Who needs 'em?

It was about 5:00 in the afternoon when my boss from the club called me in a panic.

"What are you doing tonight?" she asked.

I didn't have a good enough excuse at the spur of the moment.

"I'm ... uhhhh ... teaching my son how to properly masturbate," I fumbled.

"Great," she said, not even listening to me. "I need you to come in tonight if you can."

She explained to me that she was having a big promotion ... Family Night ... in the dining room and that she had hired a clown to entertain the kids, but he had gotten pretty shitfaced during the afternoon football games here and couldn't make it.

I, being a teetotaler, am always available to get in a car and scurry to and fro at the drop of a hat and she knows this.

Here's the dumb part ... when she asked me how much I'd charge her to entertain kids, I foolishly said "A hundred bucks".

I should have NEVER said anything less than 500. I've learned that lesson now.

So I show up, set up my stuff and start playing Andrew's CDs of Winnie the Pooh songs, Wiggles songs and Barney songs.

There's about 75 families there, all with kids and some with grandparents.

The kids look bored stiff as they sit at their tables and eat.

My boss comes over and says "Play some games with the kids".

Huh?

Whizzat?

I guess I should have clarified that Uncle Bob don't do games with strange kids. That's just policy.

All of the games I play are adult games that are inappropriate for children. Games like "Whose Bra Is This?" and "Let's All Shave Off Our Pubes And Glue Them To The Passed Out Guy In The Corner's Face So When He Wakes Up He'll Think He's A Werewolf."

You know ... those kinda games.

So we played the old favorite of handing the kids balloons, telling them to stare at the ceiling, spinning around in fast circles for about 30 seconds and then running to the opposite end of the dance floor where they have to sit on their balloons and pop them.

This is kinda fun because you get to watch kids crash into each other out of dizziness. Some kids veered off the dance floor and went slamming into people trying to eat at tables.

So we did that and then I had nothing left in my arsenal of games, so I opened the floor to requests.

Bad move.

I was attacked like a fan at a Pistons-Pacers game by a swarm of seven year-old kids.

"Play the Macarena. Play the Macarena. Play the Macarena. Can you play the Macarena?"

So I played the Macarena.

And the kids just tapped their feet and nodded their heads like cool hipsters on acid.

Nobody knew how to do the Macarena. They just wanted to "hear" it.

The song ended four minutes and 12 seconds later.

And the swarm started.

"Play it again. Play it again. Play it again. Can you play the Macarena?"

So I played it again.

The foot tapping and head nodding commenced.

The song ended.

"Play it again. Play it again. Play it again. Can you play the Macarena?"

Jesus Horatio Christ!

"Why don't we play some other songs?" I suggested. "Does anybody like The Chicken Dance?"

They gasped. That was like asking them if they liked McDonalds.

"Play the Chicken Dance. Play the Chicken Dance. Play the Chicken Dance. Do you have the Chicken Dance?"

So I played the Chicken Dance and these kids actually KNEW how to dance to that.

For the next 20 minutes, we had a Chicken Dance marathon. The kids that couldn't catch on to this complicated dance spent those 20 minutes running around wildly like Laci Peterson trying to elude her husband.

Then it was Britney Spears.

Then Smash Mouth's "All Star".

I had conveniently forgotten that kids don't want to hear a succession of good songs ... they want to hear one song ... over and over again.

I played five songs in one hour.

One kid kept coming up and requesting music that he knew his Dad would like to hear.

So I would break up the monotony with Billy Joel's "Just The Way You Are" and the Beatles "Paperback Writer".

These songs made my seven year-old audience groan and sulk off the dance floor, leaving the nerdy kid wanting to impress his Dad all alone on the dance floor as he stood there and mumbled the lyrics to himself while spinning in slow circles.

It was fucking surreal.

At one point, a little girl came up and asked if she could say something on the microphone.

Without even THINKING, I handed her the mic.

And like rambunctious locusts, dozens of kids descended on us, each of them waiting for their turn on the mic.

Oops. I don't mean "waiting". I mean "frantically trying to grab the microphone from the little girl".

This is a hundred dollar microphone.

And I've got about 48 kids with their hands on it, yanking it in 48 different directions.

Naturally, I fucking spaz out like Urkel on uppers.

"Wait! Hold on! Stop! Don't! You! Hey! Don't! Stop!" I'm screaming at the kids, trying to save my poor microphone as it's being torn apart.

I snatched it out of the innocent girl's hand and pull it towards me.

"This is a very expensive microphone," I explain to the little street urchins as they boo me. "It's not a toy."

Newsflash Mr. DJ. To a seven year-old, microphones are the coolest toy imaginable.

So now I've got 48 kids begging me to let each of them use the microphone while I'm trying to work and mentally debating how bad would it be if I started cold-cocking the shit out of each one of them with their parents sitting there watching me.

Speaking of the parents, none of them were backing me up on this shit. It was "Family Night" which to them meant "It's the night where somebody else has to deal with my kids because they're getting paid to and I'm just going to sit back and watch them try to do just that."

Thankfully, my boss hates kids and ended the promotion about an hour earlier than it was supposed to be ended.

Mainly because next door, we had a bar full of people wanting to dance who didn't mind that I actually played more than five songs all night.

So I thanked the families for coming out and gave all the kids balloons and Miller Lite keychains because that's all I had to give them.

I waltzed over to the bar, defeated and drained and when I stepped in the DJ booth, I got a big cheer from the crowd.

"I have just spent the last two hours entertaining seven year-olds," I said into the mic. "I've never been so glad to see a room full of drunks in my life."

"Play the Chicken Dance!" some lady yelled from her table.

And I think it was right about then that I began to cry.