CAPE CRUSADERS!

If there’s anything more satisfying than embarrassing one’s own children in public, it just might be embarrassing someone else’s. One of my favorite moments in the first regard happened just a little less than a year ago when I pulled up in front of my youngest daughter’s high school—at the start of her senior year, no less—in my new eye-catching black Volvo S60 . . . sporting a Batman license plate: with a crowd of about 40 classmates hanging around the entrance of the school, my daughter was absolutely mortified to be picked up by her Dad . . . driving The Batmobile. Perfect! Then a few nights later I doubled the satisfaction when I picked up my middle daughter in the traffic circle in front of her college dorm. A cool freshman, she pretended not to notice the license plate. But as she closed the car door and buckled herself, she turned to me and spoke one word straight from her heart to mine . . . like a stiletto: “Loser.”

So . . . yesterday’s embarrassing moment involved not my children but two of the three children of Irish retro rock ’n’ roller Rocky De Valera. We had just brunched with them and their father (traveling incognito under the unlikely name of Ferdia Mac Anna) in Chatham on Cape Cod and they needed a ride back to their summer home on the outskirts of town. So we piled into The Batmobile (though without the front plate—I too sometimes travel incognito) and pulled onto crowded Main Street . . . but not before I rolled down all the windows and opened the sun roof and cranked up the volume on “Baby, Don’t You Worry ’Bout a Thing,” the current hit single of Rocky De Valera and the Gravediggers. Were Rocky’s kids embarrassed to have their old Dad’s vocals blaring out into one of the major thoroughfares on the Cape in the height of tourist season? You betcha!

Afterwards, I realized how (in)appropriate it would have been to play the longlost-but-recently-found recording of a tune titled “Batman and Superman,” cut by Rocky De Valera and the Rhythm Kings way back in 1982-83 when his kids were just a twinkle in his eye. Next time!

In the meantime, I’m sure that my kids are relieved that they weren’t along for the ride: they would have been utterly “scarlah” (Dublin slang: red-faced) over the coincidence that Rocky and I were wearing matching Polo golf shirts and khaki shorts . . .