Ma Romdey & Bom-Bom

It's highly entertaining how public figures get nicknamed and enter personal lexicons.

About a week before the presidential election, my 4th grade daughter asked her teacher if they could have a mock election in their class. Undaunted by the response that in 5th grade they would study elections and do so then, my daughter parried by saying Obama and Romney would not be candidates next year. So it was that she embarked on a three-day project in which she donned a suit jacket and wrote a short speech (informed by the Voter's Pamphlet) to introduce herself as the Republican candidate Mitt Romney while her friend dressed in an over-sized dress shirt and tie and wrote a short speech to represent Barack Obama, encouraged everyone to think about who they would like to vote for vs. who they thought their parents were voting for, and conducted their own anonymous class vote on election day.

It was a three day process, initiated of their own volition, and other than producing the Voter's Pamphlet, finding a suit jacket in my closet and covering a shoebox in red paper and cutting ballot slips, I let the action unfold at its own pace. It occurred to me I ought to highlight the additional parties and candidates, but I was holding fast that the learning experience sometimes need to be guided by personal motivation more than it needs to be, well, a learning lesson. Judging by the ballots that were cast, not a single classmate had an inkling there were other candidates running for office either.

A week later I have emptied the ballot box. It was a write-in affair. I was aware that the fourth graders elected Obama by a landslide, incurring votes for "Bom-Bom," "Broca Obama," and "Barak." Romney had a token vote too: one for Mittens Ma Romdey. I have no idea if there is a back story on that moniker or if it's the haphazard byproduct of a ten-year-old's cognition. Either way, it seems to me that on their names alone Ma Romdey & Bom-Bom could get some fair mileage on a line-up if they wanted to reinvent themselves on a performance circuit.

Correction: A newspaper would be compelled to report an error for the following discovery; I need to report a new perspective. My daughter came along and read aloud the ballots. "Ma Romdey" was "Md Romdey" they way she recognized the handwriting. I think she was right. It steals the thunder right out of my inspiration, but not without exacting the new quandary of education. Md. Mitt. Ah.