From time to time, The Keelhauler enjoys to test my patience by claiming to have a trust fund made up of money he earned as a child star. �I�m living like this to prove I can make it on my own,� he says confidently, causing me to think secretly that he might want to bust out that trust fund soon, if he expects me to stay around. Still, it�s amusing to play the Secret Child Star Money game, which involves naming objects we might buy, or places we would visit. Probably, if he really had a trust fund, he would have blown through it the second it was turned over to him, and be out robbing video stores with the rest of the ex-child stars.

Anyway, TK doesn�t really fit what I�d consider the child star profile, which is a shame in a way, because my father would like nothing more than to have a child star in the family. From the time that my brother and I could talk, our father instructed us that it was our duty to become rich and famous so that we could support him. Extremely narcissistic and spoiled, our father saw my brother E and me as his retirement plan. He planned to retire before age 35, I believe, so it was a great disappointment to him when E and I weren�t signed to our own television series when we each turned 7. (I gave the theatre a shot for a brief period, but every mistake I made resulted in a lecture on how I had embarrassed my father �to tears,� as he liked to put it, and eventually the lectures outweighed the applause, so I gave up acting. I�m a quitter. It�s true. Even the prospect of supporting my able-bodied, Ivy League-educated father just wasn�t enough of a reward to keep me on the path to stardom.)

Faced with our failure, our father�like many despondent alcoholic suburbanites�turned to community theatre, which allowed him to become a medium-sized fish in a tiny pond, and introduced him to many third-rate actresses with whom he could have affairs. When acting didn't bring him the instant fame he claimed to deserve, he turned to writing, turning out short stories featuring bitter men named James (like himself) who hated their wives (named Martha, like my mother) and wished to quit their jobs. He considered my failure at child stardom a serious debt, one that I could pay back by shopping his stories to publishers. I attribute my inability to sell stories like �Jim: Misunderstood� and his children�s book (�James the Germ�) to a complete lack of effort followed by a relocation of the manuscripts to the trash can. When lucrative contracts failed to appear in his mailbox, my father responded with his usual tack (morose phone calls to express disappointment in my ineptitude) but by then I had clued in that something was not right.

It�s probably not a huge surprise that I haven�t spoken to my father in ten years. I know it�s a long time, but when he started telling people that I�d died, I figured I was off the hook in terms of remembering Father�s Day. I don�t mind not talking to him, but the estrangement means that I sometimes have to miss important family events, like my grandmother�s funeral.

Grammy died last September, and I reluctantly stayed away from the services, counting on reports from various family members to fill in the details. No one mentioned James, so I figured that he must have caused a scene. That turned out to be the case, as E eventually told me. James and my grandmother hadn�t spoken in eight years, and so he used the occasion of her funeral to �make amends,� as he put it, via a rambling, incoherent eulogy, an off-key, a capella solo, and entreaties to the congregation to make peace with him. He really knows how to steal the show, even at someone else's funeral.

Following the service, James approached E and introduced him to his guest. Ordinarily, one doesn�t bring a guest to a funeral, but this person apparently warranted the honor. �E,� said my father, dramatically, �I want you to meet� little Jimmy.� E told me Jimmy�s full name, which I recognized from an ad I�d seen somewhere cheesy like People magazine�Jimmy is a country-western singer, about 12 years old, who performs at malls and on the Jerry Lewis Telethon and whatnot. His presence at my grandmother�s funeral was not easily explained, likewise his attire�cowboy boots and mini Stetson. James explained that he was Jimmy�s tutor, teaching him French, and mathematics, and sign language. �You may have noticed,� he added grandly, �we were signing to each other during the service.� My brother hadn�t noticed the sign language, of course�he was, like everyone else in the room, thinking about our grandmother. Had he noticed, I�m sure he would have written it off as another instance of our father�s lunacy.

E and I laughed about it, but nervously, uncomfortable with the bizarre drama in which we, having failed, had been discarded and replaced with the thing our father wanted all along--his very own child star.

Star of the day. . .Annette Funicello