Pandamania

You know you are getting old when you graduate to Vacation Bible School "crew leader" and find yourself performing exaggerated motions to rhyming evangelical rhythms.  Then, before you even realize it, your caught clutching a monogrammed L.L. Bean tote, equipped with name tags and a "Women's Devotional Bible" that dangles absently against your stone-washed Coldwater Creek denim skirt, rendering you officially, an "adult."

Coincidentally, adulthood apprehended me on the balcony of Pandamania VBS at Chelten Baptist Church, the literal sanctuary of my inaugural VBS as an impressionable six year old, reveling in the Reagan Revolution. (Boy, do I miss that man!) It was there, in the filtered topaz-glass-stained window light that I was baptized into this evangelical sub-culture phenomenon. And it was there, twenty-five years later, as I pranced like a panda, I found myself inducted into "totally not cool" adulthood. Perhaps there is some redemption to be found in my self-conscious resignation to the primordial dance or the absence of a denim skirt or the noteworthy fact that I still like to salsa.

Oh, but there exists one final damning, irrevocable trait of adulthood: I could wax poetic about the decline of morality as evidenced in my ten year old crew members who sang Lady Gaga's (debauched) lyrics with the libertine conviction of an American Idol contestant. Rather, the singular distinctive factor for tax-payer adulthood is when you bring your own offspring to VBS- not your sister's, not your neighbor's, not your younger "surprise" brother.  No, rather,  resignation to the abyss of adulthood, where your identity is reduced to "Mrs. So and So"  is secured by the duel car seats in the back of my SUV, nestled between an itching-to-be-monogrammed, near- to- overflowing diaper bag.

There is no going back at this point.

So, rather than pretend to be something I forsook when I applied my first coat of Palmer's stretch-mark cream, I secured a name-tag, a canvass tote, my sister's two kids plus my own and sang with unabashed enthusiasm like the not-cool adult I am (growing) content to be.