Tony Rizzo: Warning — Lovable 9-year-old has hijacked potentially witty column

This is an actual conversation between a 9-year-old Kansas City girl and her newspaper reporter/columnist father:

Girl: What are you going to write about?

Father: I don’t know.

Girl: Write about me. Me. Me. Me. It’s all about me.

Can you tell she is the youngest child in the family?

And like she does most of the time, she will get her way. That’s what youngest children do.

Which is a pity for the regular readers of this column, because I had been working on a couple of interesting ideas based on current world events and how they impact all of our lives.

Like many of you I’m sure, I have been concerned about our country’s current political situation and the parallels that can be drawn with the travails experienced by the Assyrian Empire during the reign of Puzur-Ashur I.

Sorry if I’m stating the obvious.

I also had considered weighing in on the whole child abuse/discipline debate sparked by the case involving a professional football player.

But since everybody else with a license to opine has already jumped on that bandwagon to reminisce about how they were smacked around as kids and by golly they turned out OK, I figured I didn’t have a whole lot to add.

Besides, with the time lag between when I write these things and when they appear in print, there are likely to be a couple of dozen more stories about wayward professional athletes who have discovered more insidious ways to sully their reputations and provide fodder for op-ed pages everywhere.

One other possibility I had been mulling is at the risk of sounding like an old fogey: When, oh when, is this whole sagging pants fad going to be played out?

I mean fashion trends come and go, come back, and go again, sometimes in a matter of months. But it seems like young men walking (in a funny penguin sort of way) with pants halfway down their thighs have been a constant sight for decades.

I get the idea of being edgy to “shock the squares” and all, but it seems to me that sagging pants ceased to be shocking to anybody about the same time that face piercing did sometime last century.

Even to an old fogey.

Anyway, I apologize that this time shameless paternal pandering will just have to trump the typical display of wit and insight you have become accustomed to when reading this column.

So, out of the mouths of babes, so they say, is the column about that 9-year-old girl as dictated by her:

I’m awesome at soccer. My team is in first place. My team is awesome. I like to read.

Writer: Anything else?

Girl: I’m your favorite, right?

If any of my other children see this, please don’t read beyond point.

You sure are, baby. How could such a sweet, funny girl not be my favorite?

This story was originally published October 7, 2014 at 3:04 PM with the headline "Tony Rizzo: Warning — Lovable 9-year-old has hijacked potentially witty column."