Wait... You Want To Rent How Many Donkeys?

You know how you are always supposed to tell your kid they can be whatever they want to be when they get older?  Yeah... That doesn’t always work. 

Six or seven months ago at the stoplight outside of one of the local Chuck E Cheese restaurants, our (then) three-year-old son declared that he no longer wanted to be an astronaut.  “Fair enough,” I said, “You can be whatever you want, buddy.  What do you want to be instead?”

“I think I want to be Jesus when I grow up,” he said.

The wife and I looked at each other   She shrugged, deferring to my greater “spinning a line of B.S. on a moment’s notice” ability.  Just super.

“Well,” I said after the light had turned green, “They already have one of those, big guy”.

“Well,” he immediately volleyed, “If there were two Jesuses, then maybe we could help more people.”  

Ahh, I see.  The boy thinks that the Cosmos is pretty much like a badly run Wal-Mart where the lines wouldn’t be so long if someone would just open up another damn register. Well, we’ve all been there in our darkest hours, I suppose... All in all, an admirable career choice.  Not really a lot of room for advancement, though, but admirable nonetheless... Hmm.  I haven’t said anything in a while. Next Sunday I should really ask the pastor what...

He continued excitedly “What if there were ninety Jesuses?  Then we could help whole bunches of people!”

I thought: Look, dude, Jesus’s aren’t like shopping mall Santas.  You don’t just slap a beard on some wino and call him the Savior of Mankind. There’s kind of a tough vetting process involved, and don’t even ask about the exit interview...

Ninety Jesuses, indeed.  No wonder there was no room at the inn.

Aside from Leonardo da Vinci needing roughly half a mile of canvas to depict it, the Last Supper would probably be less known for it’s austere messages and holy symbolism as it would be for the story of the eleven hundred or so dudes who crammed themselves into the Upper Room for dinner, violated the heck out of ancient Jerusalem’s very strict fire code and noise ordinances, and obviously didn’t get their security deposit back.

I mean, with ninety main participants, the Stations of the Cross would turn into a complete farce scored by Spike Jones or something - Station 9: The Jesus’s Fall for the One Hundred and Eighty First Through Two Hundred and Seventieth Times”.  

Ridiculous.

I could go on and on about lepers being accidentally vaporized from overdoses of healing magic and sightless beggars being alternately healed and re-blinded until everyone in the parade has had a turn, but I won’t.  Also, I will hold my tongue regarding a thought I just had about Roman soldiers singing a horrifically modified version of “Ninety Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall”...

All I could do in the end is agree with him and just be thankful that he didn’t say he wanted to be a bank robber or something.

Wait... 

Actually, how cool would it be to plan and pull off a high-stakes heist with your son?  Damn straight, it would be the most awesome thing ever...  Excuse me, I need to go talk to the Lego folks about an idea I have for an “Ocean’s Eleven” themed play set...