Giant Crackers in the Sea

I met Shawn through the good offices of Tami and Steven.  Now Shawn is crazy.  Not crazy in the he needs to be medicated sort of way, but rather crazy in the he grew up in a small town (Mineral Wells) without proper parental supervision kind of way.  Oh yeah, and he thinks he is immortal.  He is also one of the funniest guys I have the pleasure of knowing.  All of this adds up to I would not trust Shawn with my pet rattlesnake, let alone a child.  Of course this means Shawn is a single father.

Alyssa, Shawn’s daughter, is 100% her father’s child.  Beyond being a stick (Did I mention that Shawn is in the neighborhood of six feet tall and cannot weigh more than 175 pounds?) she is also a very funny and a little crazy.  To be honest I feel sorry for the boys when she gets a little older because she is going to be WAY smarter than them, and a handful to boot.  Shawn dotes on Alyssa without spoiling her and is perhaps one of the best fathers I have ever seen in action.  He always has a new story for us about Alyssa’s latest exploit, and even though the Pickle Jar Opening Extravaganza and the Raw Spam Smorgasboard stories rank up there, to this day the funniest story about Alyssa is the Giant Crackers in the Sea story.

One day Shawn got a call from one of Alyssa’s teachers asking him to come in for a conference because she was very worried about some things Alyssa had said in class the other day.  Being concerned about Alyssa, Shawn of course went in to have a conference with the teacher.  At this conference the teacher proceeded to tell Shawn that Alyssa had been telling a story to the other kids that disturbed her (the teacher.)  Apparently Alyssa was telling the kids about something where there was a giant cracker in the sea that was attacking a girl and someone threw snake heads at it until it was destroyed.  The teacher really focused on Alyssa’s use of the word destroyed, and she kept coming back to this throughout the conference, feeling that it was somehow inappropriate for a girl Alyssa’s age (she was around 6 or 7 at the time).  Shawn’s feeling on it was, “So what?  Alyssa is a smart kid with an above-average vocabulary for her age.  No big deal.”  As soon as he figured out this is what the teacher was worried about he tuned her out and tried to figure out where Alyssa had come up with this story.

Giant cracker in the sea?  Nope, nothing there.  Snake heads?  Again, nothing.  I am not sure when it occurred to Shawn, but eventually he had the realization that Alyssa was describing the climax to Clash of the Titans.  You know, where the kraken is menacing Princess Andromeda and Perseus saves her by using the head of Medusa to turn the kraken into stone?  Apparently they had watched Clash of the Titans with some friends recently and Alyssa was telling her classmates about the film.