Get That Little Man Away From Me!

There are stories that become part of who you are in a family.  In my extended family I am perpetually a toddler as that was the last era of my life of which The Aunts have intimate knowledge .  Even in my forties I am still announcing parental bedroom activities at family dinners, hug torturing small pets and screeching at GI Joe.

I was absent from a family gathering last weekend.  I received the above photo from my Dad with the caption "Get that little man away from me!". This is a story that has been told to me over and over.  There are two official versions to the story.  I find a naked GI Joe in the toy box and scream "get that naked man away from me".  I find GI Joe in the toy box and scream "get that little man away from me". 

Judging by the picture, and this is just pure speculation on my part, but I'm just guessing one of the above versions occured on one occasion, after that it became pure entertainment for some (or all) of the adolescent girls in the house to present GI Joe to me just to hear me holler "Get that man away from me!"  If you were a "naughty" teenage girl, who conceivably have the same dna and raising that provided me with my sense of humor, you might actually find a female toddler screaming "get that man away from me!" as a) ironic, knowing that it was not a situation that would persist in into adolescence and  b) hilarious that a child could be provoked into screaming by the viewing of a plastic naked doll. (Neither the dna nor the raising having contributed to a good sense of empathy or child rearing but only to a vastly warped sense of humor).

I wonder - how handy would it have been to have maintained my terror of naked and little men?  I could have just kept Joe in my purse. In retrospect I find that there could have been multiple occasions when it may have behooved me to peek into my handbag and screech "Get that naked man away from me!"

I'm honored to still be relevant in my toddler form at family gatherings forty years later although I'm wondering why did Joe get invited and I didn't?  I think they like that little man...