Niki Tehranchi

I take baby to the local Gymboree about once a week so he can play with the other neighborhood babies in a safe setting. The moms (and a few dads) sit Indian style in a circle with respective infants in their lap, all facing each other, as the teacher goes through a series of baby exercises (clap your hands, stomp your feet, etc.).

'Bout halfway into the session, teacher puts out a big, fluorescent green plastic tube filled with squeeshy, multi-colored balls in the middle of the circle. Parents are then allowed to let babies loose from their lap and have a small break amongst themselves.

As I sit watching my little one and his friends crawl, limp and wobble their way ever so slowly from all directions toward that hypnotically beckoning giant fluorescent green tube in the middle of the floor, all of them drooling profusely and babbling inarticulate nonsense ('Ba-Ba', 'Goo-Goo' and so forth) as they go, I can't help but think of the Zombies in 'Night of the Living Dead.'

Have you seen George Romero's classic? Even if you haven't, just think of any of the old Zombie flicks you may have seen in the last 40 years. Not the newer ones. The new Zombies are way too sophisticated. I am talking about the extremely slow moving, drooling, inarticulate, human-like drones who would crawl, limp and wobble from their tombs. Like our little Zombie-babies, the movie Zombies would always be moving with one collective intent and purpose towards one common destination. That would be the movie Hero's hide-out, either an abandoned house or a barricaded shopping mall or the like.

On a tangent, I always wondered why the stupid movie Hero would just stand there scratching his head for 2 hours of the movie, wondering how to escape the ever slow moving horde of flesh eating monsters. Eventually, he would end up being overwhelmed by their number and ending his short movie Hero life as Zombie hamburger. He could have just WALKED past them in the first five minutes of the movie, damn it.

Back to the Gymboree. As the cute Zombie-babies finally attain their coveted squeeshy balls in the middle of the circle, they proceed to pick them up in their chubby little hands and then shove them straight into their painfully teething mouths. They stand or sit, (some teether on the edge of the tube, the 'undecided' voters), gumming the little plastic balls with all the voracity of the movie Zombies feasting on fresh human heads, drool dripping in surprisingly abundant amounts from the tiny, ferocious mouths.

I have never seen something so gross and so funny at the same time :)