article by travis acevedo

When I was a child, I made a lot of birthday mistakes. For instance, I invited Michael Jackson to my 6^th birthday party. At the time, I was heartbroken that he didn’t show, but in hindsight, thank God the King Of Pop didn’t drop by to give me the old Neverland special.

A year before, I made another terrible mistake in convincing my parents to throw me a Dick Tracy themed party. Other than the fact the Dick Tracy is a pretty terrible movie, there’s not much on the face of this that sounds too bad. But yes, terrible things happened because of my Dick Tracy party. The one that really hit home the hardest is too personal to go into here, but it involves a talking Tracy watch I received at the party, and the lessons that boys can be cruel and that girls can embrace you lovingly without feeling any actual emotion for you. That last lesson is the one that I still haven’t entirely comprehended yet, if my sex life has taught me anything.

But let’s skip over all that, because Dick Tracy gave me some lasting problems that were almost way worse.

For those of you who don’t remember, Dick Tracy hit theaters in 1990 and was pretty much the perfect movie for kids. It was full of bright colors, crime without any actual violence, sexy situations without any semblance of sex, and lots of funny makeup to cover up the fact that the movie itself is utterly retarded. Again, it was perfect movie for a kid like me, who was five at the time.

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Oh yes, and there were also songs! Lots of them, and they were sung almost entirely by Madonna. At the time, I had a huge crush on Madonna, because, well, how couldn’t you? She was all about sex but entirely unthreatening, funny without being clever enough to confuse a child, and tended to dress in outfits that I still find sexy in my mid-20s. Fuck that disco shit she’s done in the past decade and try to remember how hot Madonna could be back in 1990. You know, she just might have been my first celebrity crush…

So anyway, to me, Dick Tracy was basically a bunch of dudes in colorful outfits and weird masks fighting (without actually fighting) in between Madonna singing songs that made me tingle in my OshKoshs’. Awesome, right?

Well, no. Because I had a younger brother who was two at the time, which meant he was at the age where going to a movie theater scared the shit out of him. So he didn’t get to see Dick Tracy, but I was so into it that I described every aspect of the movie to him while we were in bed at night. The little fella loved my summaries, and so he wanted to hear all these Madonna songs that I kept telling him were amazing.

None of this was really a big deal until my cousin had to come stay with us while her parents were going through a nasty divorce. Providing her with an escape from the heartbreak of her home life, my mom took my cousin and I to see Dick Tracy seven times that summer, and all of us eventually learned all of those Madonna songs by heart. And so when I would come back to bed and describe the movie yet again to my brother and he would ask to hear the Madonna songs that had pulled my heartstrings, my cousin would want to perform them for him.

You probably see where this is going.

Yes, my mom, my cousin, and I sang and danced the entirety of “I Want More” for my applauding brother every night in our jammies for two weeks straight. There were complex dance moves, we divided harmonies, we learned the subtle intricacies of a Madonna song in Dick Tracy for the pure amusement of my toddler brother. And we got good at it. Damn good, in fact.

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In all honesty, I should be gay. At the very least, I should have some terrible sexual identity confusion from a fortnight spent performing a seductive femme fatale flapper routine.

And maybe it did affect me. To this day, I vastly prefer the company of women to bullshitting around with a room of guys. I love to dance, I am more willing to sing in public than any other man that I know, and a costume party is an utter delight to me. And while yes, all of that has led to me being much more successful with women than my awful ugliness should warrant, it also leaves lingering questions about who I am in the terms of masculinity.

It’s pretty proven that I’m not gay at this point, but attributes of my possible faggotry still remain. And they tend to terrify the girls that I date these days. They wonder why in times of crisis I only seek the council of women, why I am more up for a dance party than a few casual rounds at the usual bar, and, most troublingly to them, why I have an immaculate understanding of the early Madonna songbook. Especially that record she did as Breathless Mahoney.

For all intents and purposes, my immersion in Dick Tracy, a movie about a badass cop beating up a bunch of bad guys, made me less of a man. For better or worse, that movie shaped my childhood in such a way that to this day I find myself drawn more to dismissive conversations about footwear than I am towards discussions about, shit, whatever it is that regular dudes talk about. Honestly, I don’t even know what that is. And I have only Dick Tracy to blame for that.