You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning Read Online Free Page B

isn’t-he-a-nice-young-man kind of way.
    In fact, I have an awesome crush on the entire cast and so do many of my “mom” friends.
    If we really want to piss off our daughters, we gently stroke the
HSM
messenger bags on the rounder at Limited Too and say, a tad too loudly, “Ohmigod, could Corbin Bleu
be
any cuter?”
    So, when tickets for the traveling musical went on sale I got in line quick. Good thing, too. Dirtball ticket scalpers have gotten good at getting blocks of seats at all the tween events.
    Remember how they grabbed up all the Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana tour tickets? They didn’t even know who she was but that didn’t matter. All they knew was her tour was selling out faster than (awesome and inappropriate crush of ’04) Justin Timberlake and (short-lived crush of ’94, ruined when I heard him refer to his bossy wife as his, ick, soul mate) Sting.
    So while normal and admittedly unsophisticated moms and dads naively waited their turn to buy tickets on the daythey were released, scalpers must’ve been laughing their criminal asses off at such futility. Fools!
    Oh, sure, a few would be successful (even a broken clock is right twice a day, didn’t someone once tell you that back in juvie?), but not many, on account of the fact that scalpers have computer programs that help them jam phone lines and buy up huge blocks of seats at every venue, then resell that $67 ticket for many times that amount. Suckas!
    Of course, it’s not all the scalpers’ fault. One nut-job parent paid more than $2,500 so his kid could see Miley Cyrus. Hell, I wouldn’t pay $2,500 to see George Clooney at my door toting a case of Pinot Noir from his own vineyards and hankerin’ to talk to a woman of substance for a change.
    So I get that we spoil our kids these days, keeping the mangy scalpers in business. But $2,500? As Miley’s alter ego, Hannah Montana, might say: “Scum-sucking greed-monger charged
what?
”
    But there were happy times ahead for the mommies and me. The
HSM
sequel was finally coming on the Disney Channel. I knew this because I had put big
X
s on the days counting down to it on my “The Many Moods of Zac Efron” wall calendar.
    “Omigod, can you believe we almost didn’t TiVo it?” said one mom friend before making the dreaded
L
-for-loser shape in the air above her forehead.
    “Nobody does that anymore, Mom,” huffed her mortified ten-year-old.
    “Of course they don’t, honey!” said the mom, brightly. “I believe you . . .
not
!”
    “They don’t do that either, Mom.”
    “As if.”
    “Or that.”
    Gawd.
    I’m not sure this has ever happened before. How to describe it? Well, it’s as if it’s 1964 and your parents are standing in front of their black-and-white Zenith screaming and crying because the Beatles are appearing on
The Ed Sullivan Show
and you’re a tween who’s yawning and asking them to let you know when the ventriloquist with the singing monkey comes on.
    Oh, don’t get me wrong. Kids like
HSM
, even the boy kids.
    But moms
love
it, perhaps because it’s a little bit
Grease
, a little bit
Footloose
, and a whole lotta retro goodness.
    High School Musical
makes us feel young and hopeful again. I’m fairly certain that even Disney, which has its corporate finger on the pulse of tweens to the point that they must surely feel light-headed most of the time, didn’t even expect this.
    Middle-aged parents jogging with “Stick to the Status Quo” and “Bop to the Top” on their iPods? How did
that
happen?
    Maybe this is my generation’s overdue optimism finally kicking in.
    Face it, we grew up listening to Jethro Tull describe homeless pedophile Aqualung as a snot factory with an unnaturalattraction to little girls. Compare and contrast this with the ebullient
HSM
lyrics, which simply invite everyone to join hands together in making all their dreams come true.
    Final score: dreams 1, snot 0.
    Sure, it’s simpleminded fluff, but every now and then, when you’ve had a