Kid Spontaneously Sings “Mahna Mahna”

I remember bouncing around the living room with Kina when she was six months old, singing along to “Mahna Mahna”, the classic Sesame Street jazzy absurdity. She’d stare at me, puzzled, as I scatted my way through the verses, then laugh as I bopped her around for the chorus like a Muppet. “Mahna Mahna” is a classic of the genre. “Mahna Mahna” is on my playlist of emergency toddler car songs. It is only in the five minutes that preceded my first draft of this newsletter that I discovered the origins of “Mahna Mahna”—a scene from an Italian mondo documentary about Swedish sexual mores. From its Wikipedia page: “The song accompanied a scene in the film set in a sauna which gave its original title ‘Viva la Sauna Svedese’ (Hooray for the Swedish Sauna).” This tawdry new information does not in any way diminish the joy I felt when my kid, out of nowhere, strutted across the living room yesterday singing our favorite song. I am looking forward to the day when she randomly bursts into our second favorite song: Midnight Star’s groundbreaking 1983 classic “No Parking on the Dancefloor” (whose origins, best I can tell, are less spicy).

“Lemme Show You. You Don’t Know What I’m Talkin’ About!!!”

In today’s episode of “Lemme show you. You don’t know what I’m talkin’ about”, we are sitting at the breakfast table, and Kina is explaining to us why she does not like toast. “It makes my teeth grind,” she says, then thinks for a moment about her choice of words. “Grind! Grind like the pink box with the pig!” We have no recollection of any box with a pig on it, no pink boxes, no grinders. It sounds ominous. We ask her, repeatedly, to describe the pink grinding box with a pig on it, as she grows progressively more frustrated. Finally, she takes Laurea’s hand and says, “Come, let me show you.” She takes Laurea to the kitchen, points to the top of the pantry at a bag of pork rinds—pink, with a pig on it. “Those are pork rinds,” Laurea tells her. “Rinds! Grinds! Pork Grinds!” She is thrilled. We feed her pork rinds for breakfast. She makes a little sandwich of them with her toast. We live, we learn.

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