The Kid is in School Podcast · The Kid is in School Podcast

Shake Your Groove Thing! 💃🏾🪩🕺🏽

February 27, 2024·42 min·4 clips

A comedian questions the value of Zoom shows after learning an audience member disliked his performance, realizing the medium doesn't showcase his true craft.

A disco lyric starts it. Their daughter wants to dance, hears "groove thing," and treats the phrase like proof that adults are mostly winging it. The answer does not exactly hold together. "It's your booty" sounds less like a definition and more like an admission that some phrases get passed around without anyone checking them too closely. That's the fun of the episode. A kid asks a plain question, and suddenly ordinary language looks a little suspicious. The conversation keeps swerving and correcting itself. One parent jokes that the kid sounds like a therapist, asking not only what something means but why anyone says it in the first place. Then school slips in. A snow day puts their six year old back in front of a computer, and they catch themselves sounding like the people they used to side-eye. Pandemic parenting gets a second look. Raising an infant into toddlerhood during quarantine now seems almost manageable compared with getting a school age kid through remote class. Zoom becomes the problem again. They remember remote everything, where the tool made every event feel a little flatter. Church did not come through untouched. Comedy on Zoom sounds even rougher, with one host saying some performers seemed to bring everything except their best set. By the end, money anxiety barges in. A dream about winning an audition but not having cash turns into a neat little split between career hope and bank account panic. Even soda pop machines get dragged into it. The episode lands in familiar territory: domestic chaos, tired parents, and one more joke before the kid gets home.

As heard by us

A child asking what a disco lyric means opens into a warm, slightly frazzled look at language and memory.

A child asking what a disco lyric means opens into a warm, slightly frazzled look at language and memory. The hosts keep circling uncertainty in real time: what a groove thing might be, why adults repeat phrases they only half understand, and how family talk runs on borrowed…

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Why you'd press play

You want a kid's question to turn into a long back-and-forth at home.

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