Cheaper by the Dozen

Signals. But five- and six-piece dance bands were turning out huge piles of graphophone records, and we tried to buy them all.
    We already had an ample supply of graphophones, because of the ones Dad had acquired for the language records. And we still weren't allowed to neglect our language lessons. But once we had played the required quota of French, German, and Italian records, we switched to "Stumbling," "Limehouse Blues," "Last Night on the Back Porch," "Charlie, My Boy," "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles," and "You've Got to See Mama Every Night or You Can't See Mama at All." Not only did we listen to them, we sang with them, imitated them, and rolled back the rugs and danced to them.
    Dad didn't particularly object to jazz music. He thought some of it was downright catchy. But he felt that we devoted far too much time to it, that the words were something more than suggestive, and that the kind of dancing that went with it might lead to serious consequences. As he walked from room to room in the house, jazz assailed him from phonograph after phonograph, and he sometimes threw up ids hands in disgust.
    "Da-da, de-da-da-da," he bellowed sarcastically. "If you spent half as much time improving your minds as you do memorizing those stupid songs, you could recite The Koran forwards and backwards. Wind up the victrola and let's have some more jazz. Da-da, de-da-da-da. Let's have that record about 'I love my sweetie a hundred times a night.' "
    "You made that song up," we told him. "That's not a record, Daddy."
    "Maybe it's not a record," he said. "But take it from me, it's well above average. Da-da, de-da-da-da."
    When Anne came home from school one afternoon and announced that she had been invited to her first dance, she seemed so happy that both Dad and Mother were happy for her.
    "I told you that if I started dressing like the other girls everything would be all right and that I would be popular with the boys," Anne crowed. "Joe Scales has asked me to go with him to the prom next Friday night."
    "That's lovely, dear," Mother said.
    "That's just fine," Dad smiled. "Is he a nice boy?"
    "Nice? Gee, I'll say. He's a cheerleader and he has a car."
    "Two mighty fine recommendations," Dad said. "If only he had a raccoon coat I suppose he'd be listed in the year book as the one most likely to succeed."
    The sarcasm was lost on Anne. "He's going to get his raccoon coat next year when he goes to Yale," she hastened to assure Dad. "His father's promised it to him if he passes his work."
    "That takes a load off my mind," said Dad. "It used to be that a father promised his son a gold watch if he didn't smoke until he was twenty-one. Now the kids get a raccoon coat as a matter of routine if they manage to stumble through high school."
    He shook his head and sighed. "Honestly, I don't knowwhat the world's coming to," he said. "I really don't. Friday night, you say?" He pulled a notebook out of his pocket and consulted it. "It's all right. I can make it."
    "You can make what?" Anne asked him suspiciously.
    "I can make the dance," said Dad. "You didn't think for a minute I was going to let you go out by yourself, at night, with that—that cheerleader, did you?"
    "Oh, Daddy," Anne moaned. "You wouldn't spoil everything by doing something like that, would you? What's he going to think of me?"
    "He'll think you're a sensible, well-brought-up child, with sensible parents," Mother put in. "I'm sure that if I called up his mother right now, she'd be glad to hear that your father was going along as a chaperone."
    "Don't you trust your own flesh and blood?"
    "Of course we trust you," Dad said. "I know you've been brought up right. I trust all my daughters. It's that cheerleader I don't trust. Now you might as well make up your mind to it. Either I go, or you don't."
    "Do you think it would help if I called up his mother and explained the situation to her?" Mother asked.
    Anne had become philosophic about breaking Dad down a little at a time, and she had suspected all along that there was going to be a third person on her first date.
    "No, thanks, Mother," she said. "I'd better announce the news myself, in my own way. I guess I'll have to tell him about some people still being in the dark concerning the expression that two's company and three's a crowd. I don't know what he's going to say, though."
    "He'll probably be tickled to death to have someone along to pay for the sodas," Dad told her.
    "Shall I tell him we'll go in his car, or ours?"