(Guest contributor Gabe Soria, whose son does not look much like him at all, continues his posting this week. Read more about Gabe here.)

A pearl of parenting wisdom, imparted upon yours truly in a Greenwich Village bar by (pardon the name drop) Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead: “Having a hangover makes all of your middle-class pretensions about your kids not watching television go out the window.” True. Dat.

I must admit, though, that I never had ANY middle-class pretensions about the boy growing up in a TV-free zone. Growing up in the television paradise that was Southern California, I learned early on that television could be rad. But it can also be radioactive, glowing crack. The slack-jaw machine. As such, I’ve always felt that the boy’s TV watching was something that had to be curated and, most importantly, palatable to me. If I was going to have to sit there and let him watch something, especially while I was nursing an orange juice and a headache in the early morning, it’d have to be something that I dug, too. Pingu’s nonsense, wordless slapstick got the thumbs-up. The Little Einsteins’ feel-good pedantry? Hell no. Know-it-all little creeps. Can’t stand ‘em.

So since his early years, the boy’s been the lone attendee of a long-running scattershot film series. One of our favorite recurring features? This bizarre gem that I first caught in the late-70s while watching Family Film Festival on KTLA 5, hosted by the mighty Tom Hatten. It never fails:

(Gabe Soria is joining DadWagon as a guest contributor this week, thereby breaking the delicate balance between Brooklynites and Manhattanites on this blog. Gabe is a Brooklynite; judge him accordingly. You can read more about him here.)

My son doesn’t look like me.

No, scratch that. He actually DOES look like me, but in subtle ways. His nose is pure Bingham, straight from Jackson, MS, and Bogalusa, LA. He carries himself like a miniature version of yours truly. He’s got brown eyes. But there’s one crucial difference between me and him – I’m dusky brown, a straight-up mixture of my Mexican dad and my Black mom. My boy? Not so much as a single kinky hair. The boy is WHITE. He tans well, though.

This is a downside to interracial parenting that you don’t often hear about. Oftentimes I get the feeling that… well, that we’re being watched. Most other mixed-race kids, you can just tell right off the bat that the dreadlocked brother is their dad. Their golden mocha complexion, that slightly nappy ‘fro… yep, that’s homeboy’s kid. That beatific little kind-of Asian girl walking around with the Nordic blonde? Her daughter, no doubt. My boy? Well, our relationship can be mysterious to the uninitiated, and since we spend so much time together, just the two of us, it sometimes leads to… awkward situations.

Case in point: A couple of weeks ago, the boy and I are riding the train back to Brooklyn from city, enjoying the slow creep of the Q as it makes its way over the Manhattan bridge. Near us there’s a slightly confused, maybe slightly crazy older white woman, trying to figure out how to travel back to the island. She’s twitchy, with a touch of an Eastern European accent. Naturally, she sits near us. And starts checking me and the boy out with interest. He eyes narrow.

“Are you babysitting?!”

I look at the boy, then back at the lady.

“Well, kind of. I’m his dad.”

“Very handsome boy.”

“Thank you.” (And it’s true. The boy’s pretty good-looking.)

She stares at us again, winding up, and finally…

“Your wife… is she white?!”

I glance around and can see other folks have heard the question. They’re either about to crack up or die of embarrassment. Sighing, I point at the boy and respond to the lady.

“What do YOU think?”