Hustle Kid

Parents feels so much more enlightened these days. We can't help but invest all that evolved parenting know-how in orchestrating success for the kids. We pull in the guard rails, measure the stepping stones, and engineer downtime. Or not if we know what's really good for them. Sometimes you just gotta step out of the way and let them fall out of the tree, catch head-to-toe poison oak, endure a little bullying, or cold-cock the bully when the inertia breaks. (All of which our resident specimen kid has done.) My good friend Benji wrote about the pleasures of an untethered boyhood in The Last Kid Picked. Sorry Benji, but the marketing strategy for this book was all wrong; today's mothers of boys need this book even more than they need Sheridan, Hobart, or Murkhoff/Eisenberg/Hathaway. I laughed. I cried. I learned to better understand how men work by learning how they play (outside of the play-date or organized league sports) as boys, and if more women read this book, they'd relax more around their sons and give their lovers/partners/husbands a lot more slack.

And so it is with the number one son. When he pitches from one stepping stone to the next in his dream to work in the recording industry/music business, you wanna just lay it all out for him. "Look, kid, it's a dying, if not dead, industry. And there's a protocol to the way it works. And, no, you can't just email the station manager and get them to play your music." But he believes. So you go "Give it a shot." And you hold your breath and wince for the tree limb to break.

The rising star over our friend, Pete Walsh, an 18-year-old talent who was born with a guitar extended off one hand and a capo off the other, along with Neil Young-like vocal chords, has captured Malcolm's imagination in a way like nothing else related to music or his entrepreneurial bent. By recent accounts, on his way to his father's downtown office, where he spends many of his afternoons, Malcolm walked into 55 Hawthorne Lane, the home of several radio stations owned by Cumulus Broadcasting. He signed in, went upstairs to 107.7 "The Bone," and hit up the music director. Yep, post-9/11 world and all. He got in even though he didn’t have an appointment. He popped open his laptop and played a Pete Walsh mp3 for the guy, who apparently liked the song. Wrong audience, though, for Pete's fluid mystical tones. Malcolm walked away with the music director's business card and some bumper stickers.

The playgrounds of today may be safer, more stylish, and parent-approved, but the boys play the same when you get out of the way.