I've got your crowd control... Right Here.

I felt a sharp, twanging stripe of pain in my leading shoulder, but punched through the ghoul's glowing face anyway.  It stumbled backward.  It thrashed around in like a silent movie comedian.  Then it fell off the stage into the mosh pit.  Down it went, between the skinheads.

With a fierce grimace, I lifted my knee as high as possible and pulled the strap on my knee brace as tight as I could.  I was feeling a little shaky.  Both of my fists were throbbing.  The bass from the nearby speaker bank pounded like hammers, beating the bruises on my ribs and legs.  Behind me, Drummer Boy was flailing his way through the finale of the drum solo.  Maybe I was still in good enough shape to hold through the end of this number.
 
Then flashing lights and leaping flames showed a woman in red silk pajamas, crowd surfing toward me on her back.  I leaned heavily on my microphone stand.  I checked to make sure the mic was off, then detached it.  The band might have to get by without my vocal harmonies in the next verse.  We'd have to see.  

The red pajamas didn't hide the woman's athletic build, and I could see the strain on the skinheads faces, as they lifted her over the footlights.  Tough crowd.  She landed on her feet on the edge of the stage, catlike. 

I kicked upward with the foot I'd stuck under the legs of the microphone stand, sending the one and a half meter steel shaft into a tumbling arc at her and lunged forward.  I tried to hit her chin or throat with the hard end of the microphone, but she leaned sideways out of my thrust, and she caught the mic stand one handed.  Just exactly like it was an afterthought.

Stretched out like I was, there weren't many options open to me that looked any d*** good. 

With a raspy growl that I felt but couldn't hear, I took a very straining second giant step, turning my lunge into a sort of limping run.  My midriff collided with the woman's torso somewhere with some padding, thankfully, and we both tipped outward over the footlights and fell toward the facially tattooed surface of the pit.  I realized that I might not be back for an encore.

My first child looked like an alien.

When my first child, Stephen, was born he weighed only 4 lbs and 12 ounces. The "happy event" was the end of a long series of frightening moments, risks and dangers that I fretted through but didn't really understand.  The nurses shepherded me out of the operating room.  They took me away from my wife, Ellen, and led me to the newborn intensive care unit.  In a clear plastic box there I was shown something that looked like the live version of a puppet to represent a red-skinned alien in a B-grade sci-fi movie.  Fortunately we discovered that looks are not everything. 

We had more children and discovered that all of them were "Aliens from Planet Mom", even though they didn't start out with the obvious outward signs.

That is why I call myself RAD (my initials) Alien Dad.

RADAlienDad.