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My Weekend

 The Five-Star British Swim School is the brainchild of one bright man, the Wizard of Oz, who never shows his face to parents.


I'm not sure why it's a "British" school, but I think the adjective just preys on a lazy American assumption that anything English is vaguely superior (e.g. Jane Austen novels, Benjamin Britten operas, Judi Dench).

The Wizard of Oz has hired a fleet of annoyed, bored children to teach the classes; the children are unsupervised and underpaid, and they sometimes speak openly about their job-related irritation. I try to manage this as if I were a Christoph Waltz character--worldly, unillusioned, in command of the situation--but I am not Christoph Waltz.

"Look," says the guard at the door. "Umm...you're not allowed to use the locker rooms? But the teacher should give you a little tent. Your kids will have a changing tent. If it's not there? Definitely contact me...."

There's no tent--and, in a rage, I strip nude.

"You're in public," says my spouse. "This is an all-gender pool. You're waving your bare ass at half of New Jersey...."

The teacher stumbles onto the scene, nursing a hangover. "The tent is, like, broken," he says quickly. "I'll see what I can do!"

I trail him, demanding a lesson plan. The Swim School says that basically all children die from drowning. The evidence that they may be drowning? They look perfectly normal. So if you see your child looking perfectly normal? You should panic.

"We're really focused on not crying," says the teacher. "That's the goal for the day. Could I get a selfie with your baby? I gotta text my mom. She said I would never, never work with kids!"

I comply, because it would be a fate worse than death to seem "mean." This exchange costs approximately one hundred dollars.
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