If you run into my 3-year-old daughter and she starts happily chatting with you about a guy named Chuck who wears an Emperor Zurg costume, please just nod your head and roll with it.
What I’m really asking you to do is to uphold a lie I told Lucy last Saturday morning to ease her fears about one of the bad guys in Toy Story 2. She woke up that day asking first-thing in the morning for us to make it movie night. Lucy made her usual request for Toy Story, and because she always wants to watch Toy Story, my husband made the radical suggestion that we watch Toy Story 2 instead. That’s when Lucy freaked out because that’s the movie with the frightening Buzz Lightyear nemesis, Emperor Zurg.
We’ve assured her countless times before that the purple space dictator is not real, that neither he nor Jabba the Hut are in the house trying to get her. But she’s a little kid and her fears are sometimes bigger than our nonchalant reassurances.
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And so I lied. It didn’t calm her down when I told her for the bajillionth time that the characters in the Toy Story movies are cartoons and not real live people. So when that failed, I made up a story about a guy named Chuck. Half-awake and uncaffeinated, I told her that there is no Emperor Zurg, only a guy named Chuck who wears the Emperor Zurg costumes for the movies. I went on to tell her that Chuck is a kind of schlubby guy with a mustache and brown curly hair who wears cut-off denim shorts and white tube socks pulled up to his knees. I rounded out the story by saying that the mythical Chuck supports a wife, two kids and a dog with his job as Zurg. (Your guess as to how I came up with all these details so early in the morning is as good as mine.) I said he was a nice guy, just a nice guy wearing a costume so she shouldn’t worry about it.
Amazingly, my fib worked. We were able to get on with our morning without incident. She spent the rest of the day talking about Chuck, the mustachioed costume-wearing guy. I feel a little bit bad lying to her, and even guiltier for the way the lie rolled so effortlessly off my tongue. Of course I’ve been playing the Santa card with her since about two days after , so I guess placating her with stories about hirsute men in costumes comes naturally to me.
