The narration in “Little Children,” which I finally saw on Thursday after months of strong coercion from friends with respectable opinions, was immediate and jarring. We don’t get narrators in dramas much any more — and certainly not third-person narrators. Whereas in 1944’s “Double Indemnity” it was a fine device for Walter Neff to narrate his own downfall, now he’d have to shut up and leave us to our own judgments. So why this switch? Moreover, why was the narration voiced by Will Lyman, probably best known as the firm ironic voice behind the PBS documentary series “Frontline”?

During the first few scenes I couldn’t help rewriting the film — sans narration. The narrator tells us that Sarah Pierce marks time every day until she’s relieved of child care; why do I need the narrator to tell me that when I can see it? In another scene, Sarah shakes hands with the new friend she wishes she could touch — and the narrator tells us she wishes she could touch him. Imagine listening to someone read you a story and while you’re listening to the story you’re crossing out whole paragraphs at a time. That was the impact my hyperactive editorial mind was making on this moviegoing experience.

Until suddenly I understood: This is a documentary we’re watching. It’s a fake documentary (not a mockumentary, which parodies for comedy), but a documentary nonetheless, of the stunted lives of a certain subclass of suburbanites, as depicted here by this representative (fictional) sample. The “little children” are the childlike adults who act heedlessly and (almost) suffer consequences. And in the end, they are transformed into grownups: One stays with his mate, while the other grabs up her child and apologizes.

Except….

It would seem that each remains in what has been presented as an unbearable situation. Sarah is seen back at home clutching the child she hadn’t loved, in the home of the husband she disdains; her lover is being tended by the wife who insists upon a future in the legal profession that doesn’t interest him. So our choice would seem to be: act like children and be happy but careless and irresponsible; or sacrifice happiness and live as an indentured servant to adulthood. This is a barren decision tree.

It’s odd to sit through two-and-a-half hours of a film, love every moment of it, marvel at its wit and grace, and come away having really no idea what sort of statement it is trying to make. “Little Children” is a literary film, finally inferior to the director’s previous film, “In the Bedroom” (which also investigated moral ambiguities with regard to parental response), and as such is a treat in a calendar generally full of explosions and Tom Cruise. Literature as practiced in the past 100 years asks more questions than it answers, and this film is of a piece with that new tradition. But in a way it cheats: By offering only one (bad) answer, it refutes the breadth of experience the rest of the film endorses.

Last year I took my wife to the Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Odditorium in San Francisco. I had visited it as an 8-year-old boy with my sister and it had left a huge impression of the many amazing things in the world I had absolutely no exposure to: strange cultures that reshaped their own bodies and shrank the heads of enemies, people and animals with bewildering abilities or defects, survivors of freak accidents, and outlandish events that left no doubt we were in the hands of a creative force with a twisted sense of humor. Imagine my delight in April discovering that the museum is every bit as fun and exciting now as it was 35 years ago. Either there’s still something wonderful about the world of the strange and bizarre or I haven’t grown up (or both), but Valorie and I loved every minute of it.

With that in mind, late last fall when I went to the worst going-out-of-business sale ever (that would be Tower Records, which started with discounts of something like 10% on product that was already marked 25% too high) imagine my delight in seeing the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Page-A-Day calendar. For more than 20 years at our house the Page-A-Day calendars — note the plural — have been an important tradition. What Page-A-Day calendars will Santa Claus (or Joe Stafford) bring us this year? Some years it’s the Mensa Puzzle Page-A-Day calendar (the clear favorite among family members), some years the Duh! Page-A-Day calendar or the Mom’s Advice Page-A-Day calendar or various trivia Page-A-Day calendars. I had never seen the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Page-A-Day calendar and immediately scooped it up.

Some Page-A-Day calendars don’t make the grade. Last year’s Duh calendar seemed less about stupid people and their antics than about the sour grapes attitude of its writer. This year’s George Carlin Uncensored Page-A-Day calendar lived in the kitchen alongside our other calendar for all of two days before being relocated to an interior bathroom far from children, mostly because a) it’s not funny and b) it features wisdom like this, for today, Monday January 8th: “Haven’t we gone far enough with colored ribbons for different causes? Every cause has its own color. Red for AIDS, blue for child abuse, pink for breast cancer, green for the rain forest. I’ve got a brown one. You know what it means? ‘Eat shit, motherfucker!'” My wife and I are fans of Mr. Carlin’s, but we think his humor works better off the page, as when he is saying it. Moreover, we imagined asking one of the kids to pass the broccoli and being told, “Eat shit, motherfucker!”

The Mensa Puzzle Page-A-Day calendar, as I said, is the most important calendar in the house. (And I guess we’ll have to get one for this year, since neither Santa Claus nor Joe Stafford brought one.) The esteem in which it’s held is clear: In November our eight-year-old daughter was taken to publicly musing over it, pencil poised, then flipping it over to the solution when we were not looking and writing the answer on the front as though she’d solved it. (I asked her to stop.) One of our son’s proudest moments last year was when he proved that the Mensa puzzle was wrong. (No wonder I hadn’t solved that one.) It hasn’t proved to be an indication of Einsteinian intellect, and he didn’t lord it over us, but I do appreciate his ability to question authority — in this case, the geniuses at Mensa.

Given all this, you can see the anticipation that greeted the 2007 Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Page-A-Day calendar. Not only is it a Page-A-Day calendar, it also features sightings from the world of the bizarre. I looked forward to more tales of, say, the man with a 10-foot steel rod stuck halfway through his body who walked to the hospital, or the little boy born with bat wings, or the church made entirely of Spire Christian Comics. (These latter two don’t exist — That I Know Of.)

Imagine my response, then, on seeing Believe It or Not! panels with “amazing” reports such as this (from today): “Believe It or Not! Basketball great Michael Jordan played wearing his University of North Carolina shorts under his Chicago Bulls uniform to bring good luck!”

Um… I believe it. No problem.

Or this one, from April 6th: “A thorn from the crown of Christ, brought back from the Hold Land (sic) by a Crusader in 1185, is preserved in the Church of Chalandry, France, and exhbited each Good Friday.”

Yeah, again, no problem. We call them “relics,” they indeed date from the late Dark Ages and Medieval Age, they are now universally believed to be false, and they led almost directly to Martin Luther’s starting the Reformation. The only part of this that I can’t readily Believe is that the editor of the calendar didn’t catch the typo and correct “Hold Land” to Holy Land.

To be sure, this year’s calendar does still feature what I would call Robert Ripley-quality Believe It or Not!’s, as shown by this one, for October 9th: “Chou Kung, the inventor of the compass, had a swivel wrist and could turn his hand completely around.” To me that’s not only odd — and I hope there’s a picture in one of the Odditoriums around the globe — but useful information for a future dinner party. Or this one, from November 2007: “Sir Winston Churchill, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, once worked as a greeting card designer at Hallmark!” That gives one thought as to the nature of his output, for example on Valentine’s Day: “I shall never never never surrender! Except to your love. Happy Valentine’s Day.”

I hope to discover over the course of the year that there are more tidbits that are hard to Believe than not. We need to have our disbelief pricked every day; it’s part of staying alert. Every day the Page-A-Day calendar gives flight to our imagination. Or at least, it should.

All right, all right. After months of people looking at me incredulously because I’m a comic-book fan and hadn’t seen the TV show “Heroes,” I finally watched the first two episodes last night. So far, I’m not hooked.

Don’t get me wrong: there was the occasional frisson when something from my little corner of the universe got referenced in the big, bad mass media. Knowing who Spider-Man is hasn’t counted since about 1967 when his title was selling 345,000 copies a month and the character had his own cartoon show. On the other hand, Hiro’s only form of ID being his membership card in the Merry Marvel Marching Society does.

But, while I enjoyed watching the cheerleader grind her own hand in the garbage disposal, I don’t care about her mother who raises show dogs or her search for her biological parents or her upset at the gloryhogging of her rival blonde. Similarly, I can’t get too worked up about the guy whose brother is a heartless politician (yeah, there’s a unique problem). The episodes felt very padded. At least “Lost” didn’t start out feeling padded; for that to happen we had to wait for the backstory romance of characters like Rose and Bernard who don’t matter.

With any luck, that future nuclear blast will come quickly. On the other hand, “The Road” has already been there and been better.

Writing plays is easy. But acting in them requires real imagination.

…to dear old Captain Noah.

My friends in South Jersey and environs will appreciate this clip of Philadelphia children’s show icon Captain Noah, which I just found on YouTube.

When I was a kid I was in daycare for the year before kindergarten when my mother went back to work. The lady who ran the daycare from her home always kept the television tuned to Captain Kangaroo, a show I hated. Compared to the animated adventures of Popeye and assorted pals over on Captain Noah’s ark, I didn’t give a hoot about whatever Mr. Greenjeans and the talking clock were up to. One day I stood up and made a plea to please, please, please change the channel to Captain Noah, giving every good reason on Earth, most of them I’m sure having to do with Popeye. The woman put it to a vote — and I was the only child who raised a hand for Captain Noah. That was my first lesson in democracy: that sometimes the just cause loses.

On Thursday I took the kids (and fortysomething guest kid Trey) to Sea World in San Diego, also known as the Land of Shamu. Almost nine months earlier we had bought five tickets through a Chamber of Commerce promotion and had only a few days left to use them. I was willing to just let them go, but when my wife told me they had cost almost $200, we agreed I should use them with the kids even if she couldn’t go — and that meant going two days after Christmas.

Given that it was a few days after Christmas, my wife had asked, “Is Sea World even going to be open?”

Trey wondered the same thing.

A check of the website showed it was going to be open. I figured that since it was the holidays, we would have free run of the place.

Not quite.

I’ve been navigating the two-hour-plus course to San Diego for years, to attend the San Diego Comic Con (naturally!), to drop in on friends, conduct business, and put in at Tijuana for cigars and reminders of how fortunate I am. Comparatively speaking, it’s a drive I enjoy. On Thursday, though, it was a crawl all the way down, and once we arrived at our destination we learned why:

Evidently, everyone that day was going to Sea World.

After the three-hour trip down, we spent probably half an hour looking for a place to moor in the parking lot before I thought my head would explode and finally decided to dock in the middle of the pelagic puddle everyone else had been avoiding. I figured I’d grab out each kid, throw him or her clear of the water, jump clear myself, and leave Trey to swim for it. Even though we parked in Lake Erie and left the van about as far from the entrance as Lake Erie, this turned out to be a good decision, because during the 20-minute hike to the gate we never saw another parking space.

Once inside, the kids needed to eat. Immediately. We surfed past the Anheuser Busch pavilion, home to all the major park eateries, because I was sure we could find a hot dog stand or food cart inside and be done with it and then get on to rides and exhibits and shows and such. Here’s what I found out about Sea World: There are no hot dog stands or food carts, unless you classify snacks or candy as food. The restaurant we found with the shortest wait was an Italian fast-food chain. Forty minutes of waiting in line later, we had lunch for four, which meant pretty much a slice of pizza and a Coke for each, for $54. And then we spent 20 minutes eating it and watching the wealth of humanity shuffle by in short steps so as not to knock into each other. It was much like the classic Star Trek episode where the overpopulated planet is signified by 50 people jammed into a small viewing room.

It wasn’t too long before late afternoon arrived and the crowd thinned dramatically. Then we discovered that Sea World actually has many wonderful rides, shows, and attractions. The Shark Encounter is eerily beautiful — you walk down a tunnel encapsulated by a glass shark environment, and the sharks head right for you, mouths open, teeth bared. The Wild Arctic Base Station features polar bears, beluga whales and walruses in a mock frozen shipwreck environment both above and below ground. The penguin exhibit is entirely open air, with the penguins only inches away from us; that was very cool. And whoever put together the dolphin show knows how to do theatre: it was cleverly staged, highlighted the tricks and talents of the dolphins, and was performed with great panache and comic timing by both the humans and the animals. Really a great show.

Then there was Shamu.

Shamu is Sea World’s star. Trey and I wondered about Shamu on the way down. For one thing, given that there are three Sea Worlds and all claim to have Shamu, at least two of these three parks have to be Shamu-less. Either that, or this is one very travel-weary whale. Shamu’s show, when it is not Christmas, is called “Believe.” Shamu’s stadium features stadium seating, of course, around a watery playing pit backdropped by enormous rotating video screens. Hundreds of stage lights throw light from all sides. For the Christmas show, a large center screen showed either a solo guitarist playing Christmas ballads or, later, a female singer accompanying him not very skilfully. Between these two and then two different choral groups, gauzy lighting, and weepy music with a very 80’s lounge keyboard sound on the bottom, I thought, “This show is very over-produced.” Here’s the contrast:

Dolphin show: Minimal effects. Great show, displaying spot-on sense of timing and real talent.

Shamu show: Innumerable lights, giant rotating video screens, warbling overly sentimental music, candlelit chorales, and an almost utter lack of animal ability.

That’s right: The three whales did almost nothing. Each beached himself briefly to be rewarded with a fish, and they swam around a few times before going back into their holding tank. The rest of the time Shamu’s Christmas show was an old Lawrence Welk Show on an especially bad night.

Worse, none of the whales was introduced as “Shamu.” My kids wanted to know which one was Shamu. After all, he’s the star, isn’t he? (And a quick check on wikipedia upon return home confirmed that Shamu is indeed dead — died in 1971 — and no, Virginia, there is no Shamu in Shamu’s Christmas show.)

While we were watching this spectacle I started cracking wise to eldest son Lex. You could just feel everyone in the stadium falling for the beautiful gentle-seeming pony-tailed guitar player, everyone but us. I said to Lex, “Girls just love a guy who plays guitar like that. They get confused and think he’s sensitive, when really he’s just a jerk who plays guitar.” Lex laughed and said he’d have to learn guitar.

But Lex had the best line of the entire show, if not the entire day. Surveying the Shamu show and having noted Shamu’s evident absence, I said, “What do you think is on Shamu’s Christmas list?” Lex said, “Revenge.”

Fecal cube or pizza-delivery dessert add-on?

With the help of readers, Slate’s Seth Stevenson decodes some commercials so popular I’ve even seen them. (They must run Friday nights on Sci-Fi.) The ad agencies think they’re telling us one story, but under a different microscope dessert looks like free walking hashish.

When you speak in metaphor, there is no universal translator.

I recently saw a terrific one-person show that I almost missed because I’ve grown to hate the form so much.

For writer and performer Debra Ehrhardt it was almost as difficult getting out of Jamaica 25 years ago as it was getting me to see her show, “Jamaica Farewell.” I don’t begrudge anyone their opportunity to spin self-indulgent tales of their comically tortured childhood; I just don’t want to see them anymore. (Even if — especially if — your name is John Leguizamo. Note to John: less mawkishness next time. And please don’t ever again mime a baby suckling at a breast. We get it, even if you don’t — you’re a demanding infant. Jeez. And note to Mr. “Frank Sinatra Fucked Up My Life”: No, that was you.)

So, having been annoyed so many times, my preference to seeing most one-person shows that don’t feature Dame Edna or Elaine Stritch would be to stay home. Or even to shoot heroin into my eyeball. Anything. Ehrhardt, though, was charming and persistent and I decided to accept her invitation to see the show one night in December just before leaving town. I’m glad — no, lucky — that I did.

Every once in a while you see a show that rewards your devotion to the theatre. Some months ago I asked a group of fellow playwrights how often they were glad they’d seen a show. How often had it been worth the effort involved? Responses ranged from 25% (the always upbeat and bright-eyed comedy writer Stephanie) to 10% (me) down to 5% (the would-be curmudgeon in the group who is a closet romantic — and isn’t that what every cynic is: a romantic who got burned?). The theatre is notoriously difficult to pull off. The writing has to be good, as well as the performing, it has to be pulled together and presented well by a director and designers, the theatre had better not be too hot or too cold, the right audience has to have found it because they are very definitely part of the experience, there had better not have been a bad parking or driving or box-office experience, and on and on and on.

So why do so many of us go so often? Just to get angry at ourselves for our blockheaded refusal to give up? No — because when it is superb, nothing surpasses the visceral thrill of performers and material connecting with an audience in a defined space. I love great performers of all stripes and honestly feel blessed to have worked with so many wonderful actors, and I love great provocative writing. Put the two together and you’ve got the theatre — when it works.

I haven’t seen a lot of that in one-person shows, and that’s probably because the form has become confessional, with the goal of arousing our sympathies. Mostly, I have no sympathies. Life is hard, and if you’re doing a one-person show I can unequivocally guarantee you that by comparison your life is not at all hard — in fact, it’s ridiculously easy. How easy? Unlike these people in Lagos, you aren’t grateful for the opportunity to live deep in a pit at the bottom of the world’s largest dump. Despite what you think, juggling your waiting job with acting lessons is not a great tribulation.

Everything about Ehrhardt’s show is in delightful contrast to the new proclivities of the one-person show. In relating her tale of trying desperately as a young woman to get to the U.S. and start a new life, she never asks us to feel sorry for her. Rather than drowning us in bathos, she shows us pluck and determination. Nothing will stand in her way. She’s also generous in her characterizations: Although she stars in her own life’s story, all the peripheral characters are given fair treatment and deft handling. She sketches in her mother, her father, her boss, and sundry townspeople with wit and charm. Her portrayal of her father, a drunk who has squandered every family opportunity, is remarkable in its final kindness. In an age of visualized revenge, we don’t see that sort of kindness and understanding often. (Except at the end of Paula Vogel’s “How I Learned to Drive” — in which our protagonist shows great empathy for her molesting uncle, in a closing that elevates the play into art.)

Somehow or other, she also manages to meld comedy with high-wire tension in this 90-minute show — as when she is threading her way through the strange terrain of darkened backwaters with a million dollars in cash in a briefcase and men with machetes or would-be rapists stalking her. The writing, and her performance of it, is riveting. I promise you that I’ll never forget some of it.

There are two upcoming performances of “Jamaica, Farewell” at the Whitefire Theatre in L.A., on January 7th and February 4th. I strongly, strongly recommend the show. It hasn’t had an extended run yet, but it deserves one, and it deserves to tour.

• Pere Ubu providing live soundtrack to “X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes” at UCLA Live
• Knott’s Scary Farm (despite this year’s absence of the 3D killer clown maze, which must return!)
• Debra Ehrhardt’s one-woman show “Jamaica Farewell” (more about that soon)
• “The Car Plays,” Moving Arts at the Steve Allen Theatre (one of the most memorable theatrical events of my life)
• Election Night 2006 (after a 12-year unhappy spell)
• San Diego Comic Con, of course
• Taking my wife to San Francisco for her first visit
• Seeing Thomas Dolby’s first concert in 25 years with good friend Trey
• Taking my kids fishing (two of them for the first time) and everyone catching a fish
• Being a guest star on Orlando’s Joint and not completely embarrassing myself
• The interactive “Marvel Superheroes Science Exhibition” at the California Science Center (and yes, my kids can shriek louder than Banshee)
• “The Bog People” exhibit at the Natural History Museum — and my daughter deciding to replicate it at home in her own museum
• The dada show at Museum of Modern Art in NYC
• The Paul Auster reading and conversation in LA (even though I didn’t like his new book)
• One night in one of my classes demonstrating conclusively that everyone there could write a play if they’d stop thinking so much, and the feeling of joy and abandon in the room when everyone had done so (if you never get a buzz off teaching, you shouldn’t be teaching)
• Putting together an interactive booth at the Western Food Expo featuring the health nightmare that was “Sloppy Joe’s Cafe” and decorating it with fake roaches, spiders, rats, dung, and vomit
• Seeing Mark Chaet on the back of The New Yorker
• The Black Cat Inn with good friends

These were really really bad.

• Poseidon. Who knew that the original was an art film? It’s not just improbable — which we expect — it’s unenjoyable.
• Lady in the Water. Somehow or other, even the billboard made it look bad. Just not as bad as it turned out to be. For some reason the alien mermaid chick sits in the shower for long stretches while a wacky cast of characters talks to her from outside the bathroom. Is it over yet?