The Lady Pond

Know who's hilarious and intelligent and poignant and who I love down to my toenails even though she subjected the world to "It's Pat"?  Julia-frickin'-Sweeney.  Below is a short talk (about 5 minutes) she did at TED one year, about what happened when her 8-year-old started asking where baby frogs come from. I LOVE HER.

OK, does anyone know how to scale embedded videos from TED instead of cropping them?  This hurts me.

I didn't ever really have "the talk" with my folks, though they did sit my sister and I down in front of The Miracle of Life when we were knee-high to a grasshopper (what would become the subject of my very first post!).  You can't really blame them, though - I was teaching sex ed classes by the time I was half done with puberty.  And honestly, while I wholeheartedly support parents being open and honest with their kids about sex, I'm not entirely heartbroken that I didn't have to go through that squirmfest on the kid side.

But all kidding aside, parents, do be the ones to tell your kids about what sex is and what it's about.  I think the way Julia went about it was just right - honest, straightforward and level-headed.  It's an uncomfortable talk, especially because you want to keep them "innocent" forever, but modeling a positive and comfortable relationship with sex is one of the best ways to have a kid who grows up to be positive and comfortable in their own sexuality.  And even though you don't really want to think about the details, you know you want that for them!

So yeah, Julia Sweeney is forgiven for Pat.  She's done a couple of one-woman shows, one about about her wrestle with faith called God Said HA! (here's a link to a performance of the first 15 minutes) and another about fighting cancer (here's a link to an adaptation that was done for This American Life), and both are SO worth your time it's not even funny.  Except it IS funny, like, for reals.