For years, I've heard how bad the media is today and how much better television and music and the movies were in the "good old days".  In the "good old days" everything was far less violent and much less vile.  I have bought into this, assuming somehow that everything produced prior to 1980 must be the moral equivalent of the Andy Griffith show.  So, yesterday morning when Gracie turned the television on and it was turned to the Turner Classic Movie channel, I assumed that whatever was on was probably okay for Gracie to watch - I mean, come on, it was 7:15 in the morning.....When she hollered, "Look, Mama, it's the people from Egypt just like in my Bible!", I glanced at the screen and realized it was a pretty old black and white film.  "Can I watch it?"  she asked.  To her credit, she knows to ask if something is okay before she watches it and she knows that if Sponge Bob comes on, if I'm not in the room, she needs to turn the channel or let me know.  So, I told her sure, we'd watch the movie  for a few minutes before swimming lessons.  Well, it took me a few minutes to realize that the movie was Sinbad.  A few minutes later, I walked to the kitchen to get the girls some juice and Gracie said, "Hey!  Why's that lady pulling all those scarves off of herself?"  Yikes!  I almost dropped the juice thinking the harem woman was probably stripping.  I hurried back to the living room and was relieved to see that said harem girl still had on a good deal more clothing than a lot of the teenagers we see at the water park.  She was dressed, quite beautifully actually, in a white bikini-looking top, a long twirly white skirt and still had some scarves at her wrists.  It was a pretty tasteful scene,  but nonetheless,  I decided that Sinbad probably wasn't a particuarly good movie for my four-year-old to be watching first thing in the morning.  So we shut the TV off and headed to swimming lessons.  I promptly forgot about the whole thing.  Apparently, Gracie did not.

Later that afternoon, Abigail was napping and I was doing a little bit of work on the computer.  Gracie came into the room and said, "Mama, can I have my white skirt?"  I got it down out of the closet for her and went back to work.  A few minutes later, I heard her close the door to my bedroom but I didn't think anything of it.  A few minutes later she came back into the computer room, wearing the white skirt and the sari wrap from my honeymoon bathing suit and opened the closet door and pulled out two ponytail rubber bands.  At this point I was more than a little confused.  Then, she put one rubber band on each wrist and went back to the living room.  Now, I was really curious, so I followed her out there.  She went to the diaper wipe box, opened it up, pulled two out, and stuck one in each of the rubber bands on her wrists.  Then, she started to sway her hips and I instantly realized what she was doing.  She looked exactly like a pint-sized version of the harem girl.  I was torn between wanted to burst out laughing at the site of her trying to mimic the dance moves and wanting to burst with pride at her creativity.  Laughter won out - it was just too funny!   I'm thinking that I'm going to have to be a little more vigilant with her television viewing though or she'll be building props in the backyard. 

So, here she is, hoping to land a role in the remake of Sinbad: