Mr. Mime

Remember Pokémon Go? It was that phenomenon where kids walked in the actual outside and caught adorable digital monsters on their parents’ smartphones.

They made a Pokémon movie in a crass, marketing attempt to bring back all the kids who abandoned their parents’ smartphones for Fortnite violence. The boys were interested in it enough to allow me to pay for those nice, cushy seats that recline two suburbs over.

I took this movie opportunity to take a nap. Maybe top five naps of all time. I slept hard and deep, with gallons of drool. Elijah kept poking me in the face so I wouldn’t miss any of the good parts. I sleepily explained I was sure there were no such parts in that particular movie.

One face poke scene involved a Pokémon called “Mr. Mime.” As you can see from the attached image, he’s, well, a mime. I have no idea what his Pokémon powers are or what he does besides be a mime. But I thought he was hilarious and thanked Eli for poking me in the face.

Inspired by the movie (nice work, marketing guys), the boys jumped passionately back into Pokémon Go. Diana and I were all for it because of the whole not sitting on your butt aspect of it.

Cut to last weekend. I had to leave for a series of meetings in Germany with a super cool client of ours. The boys begged me to catch some European Pokémon. I guess there are some adorable monsters you can only catch on that side of the pond.

I said sure. Grabbing them some digital critters sure beat having to hastily purchase a fist full of Kinder chocolates from duty free on my way home. Plus, they told me the only place to catch my favorite Pokémon, Mr. Mime was in Europe.

Every time I fly to Europe I pretend I’m international movie assassin Jason Bourne. Every. Time. Every passport check in, I pretend “Richard Hamann” is my alias. Every bar, I check for suspicious looking guys with pistol shaped bulges in their leather jackets. Every time I make a call, I expect the person on the other line to exclaim, “Oh my God, it’s Jason Bourne!”

I did a little Pokémon hunting while I was there, but one of the casualties of working on a super cool client is they take your phones a when you're looking at super cool things. I also felt weird about pulling out my phone to hunt down adorable monsters at client dinners.

But there is really no sense in naming this post “Mr. Mime” if I didn’t nab the little jerk.

It went down extremely Jason Bourne-esc. I was alone, at night, on a rainy German street (my real purpose was to run to the ATM to get beer money) and crossed under an extraordinarily German commuter train. The tunnel was drippy, cold and grey. Some shady dudes lurked a few blocks down. They were totally assassins. In hindsight, I may have been slightly in danger. I pulled out my phone, booted up the app, and there he was. Mr. Mime. Doing…mime things. I won’t go into any more details about how Pokémon Go works, because this post has been enough of an ad for them already. Needless to say, it was a battle of Bourne proportions.

I immediately texted the boys, who were giddy at my success. I think they were genuinely proud of their old man.

24 travel hours later I came home a hero, a jetlagged, stinky bad breathed hero. Just like Jason Bourne.

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Afrienders Assemble!

A few months ago, the topic of Elijah’s birthday party came up at the dinner table. Where to go? What to do? Hibachi restaurant? The salt would kill me. Medieval Times? The dorkiness would kill me. Hire a clown? The clown would most likely kill us all.

Eli decided on taking a few friends to see the new Avengers movie. Seemed like a choice everyone could get behind. Did I manipulate him into this choice? Since I am the sole author of HamannEggs, the answer is no.

The day of the party came, and Diana announced that instead of wrangling 12 tweens, she would be staying home to order pizza. I congratulated her on her ability to get out of stuff and recruited my brother to take her place.

My mission was the usual when interacting with Eli’s friends: be the coolest, raddest, phattest dad ever. I turned my dad joke dial all the way to eleven. When each kid showed up at our door, I serenaded them from the piano with a custom song based on their name. I gave out copious high fives. I swore, because cool dads swear.

Eli pulled me into the dining room and asked me to knock it off.

Fine. I took the opportunity to ask him if any of his friends would be mad if I had a beer during the movie. He said if it would shut me up, I could drink 10 beers. BTW, I did not drink 10 beers.

Steve and I carted the kids to the theatre and made our way to the concessions stand. I gathered everyone together and said, “Okay. Let’s try not to bankrupt rad dad. Maybe you could all pair up and then you can have one popcorn to share. Sharing is rad, right?”

The scene immediately devolved into tween social complexity the likes of which I had never seen. Who was friends enough to share, but not boyfriend/girlfriend share? Were they best friends or second best friends? What if you wanted to sit next to someone but not share popcorn? What if you had braces and can’t eat popcorn but still wanted to sit next to someone? I stared longingly at the beer stand.

I finally just said forget it. Everyone gets their own snacks and drinks. Go nuts. Who needs to save for college, anyway? The cashiers gathered around to see the total bill, which was staggering. But your son only turns twelve once.

We made our way to our seats, which thankfully were assigned. But they were in two rows, which caused its own tween complexity. I eventually snapped at Eli in front of his friends, which ruined all the dad-radness I had built up over the last few hours.

The movie was great and fun and the kids had a good time. I managed to regain some of my dad-radness on the ride home by singing along off key to the radio.