{"id":496,"date":"2008-08-29T12:33:25","date_gmt":"2008-08-29T12:33:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2008\/08\/29\/heroes-and-villains\/"},"modified":"2008-08-29T12:33:25","modified_gmt":"2008-08-29T12:33:25","slug":"heroes-and-villains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2008\/08\/29\/heroes-and-villains\/","title":{"rendered":"Heroes and Villains"},"content":{"rendered":"

The birthday party last weekend <\/a>had a superhero theme. The whole thing had been designed around the concept that the kids were heroes. There were hero games and a mystery for the heroes to solve. Occasionally, adults turned evil – at which point the heroes caught them and administered silly string. The whole idea was that the kids were heroes on the look out for bad guys.<\/p>\n

So when one of the kids showed up dressed as Venom, I didn’t know what to do. Venom, for those not into comic books, is an evil Spiderman. His costume looks like Spiderman’s, but is black and white instead of red and blue.<\/p>\n

I wrote Spiderman on his hero badge and bent down to hand it to him. “Here you go spidey!”<\/p>\n

“No, I’m not Spidey. I’m Venom!”<\/p>\n

“Well, today you’re a hero. Everyone’s a hero.”<\/p>\n

“No! I’m a bad guy! I’m Venom!”<\/p>\n

I looked at the badge, thinking fast. I’m all for giving kids their freedom to imagine whatever they want, and Venom certainly has a high “cool” factor, but the party just wouldn’t work if one of the kids was actively playing a bad guy.<\/p>\n

“Are you sure? Everyone else is a hero. It’s going to be tough if you’re the only bad guy. They’ll catch you pretty quick.”<\/p>\n

He looked around at all the heroes running around: Supermans, Spidermans, Batmans, loads of originals that kids had just dreamed up. “Nah,” he said. “I’m not worried.”<\/p>\n

I straightened up and crossed my arms. I was, of course, in costume: superhero shirt with the logo peeking out from behind a black vest, Zorro-style mask, black fedora, black pants. “I’m a hero, too.” I said, looking down at him.<\/p>\n

His eyes widened. He licked his lips. He looked around uncomfortably. I bent down, smiling, and clipped his badge to his costume. “Here’s your badge, spidey.”<\/p>\n

He laughed out a relieved “Okay!” and then ran off to play.<\/p>\n

I checked on him discreetly during the party, just to make sure he was having a good time. He had a great time, and always gave me a high five when I walked past.<\/p>\n

Of course, he may have been too scared to do anything else.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The birthday party last weekend had a superhero theme. The whole thing had been designed around the concept that the kids were heroes. There were hero games and a mystery for the heroes to solve. Occasionally, adults turned evil – at which point the heroes caught them and administered silly string. The whole idea was that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[123,120,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-cute","category-daddytales-embarassing","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-80","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}