“Spider-Man Was Alive When You Were Little?”

When I was a little kid, younger than Kina, I would watch Spidey Super Stories, the first live-action Spider-Man show, which was basically an extended segment on The Electric Company—a show for kids that somehow had cast both Rita Moreno and Morgan Freeman. It was the seventies.

Anyhow, Spider-Man could climb walls, which seemed like a huge win, and I was just old enough to recognize that this was an exclusive skill and just young enough not to know it was also an impossible skill. I would stand in the family room and grip the walls, hoping to figure out how it was done, to no avail.

Eventually, I found a bottle of Elmer’s glue and just slathered the whole thing on the palms of my hands and waited for it to soak into my skin, which I figured would make me permanently sticky. It made me sticky. It was not permanent.

It did not help me climb the walls of the family room, but it did make some cool dried-glue hand gloves that I peeled off and presumably left on the floor for my parents to find.

Anyhow, that’s the context of why Kina was amazed to learn that I am younger than Spider-Man. At least somebody is older than me.

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