I’m kinda fond of Hooters. As chain restaurants go, it is a fine establishment with a specific culinary point of view. Food-wise it never tries to be anything it isn’t. The food is deeply fried and tastes like shame, but the bathrooms are always very clean. The domestic beer is served in a frosty cold mug.

The service is spectacular, and I’m not making a dumb joke about boobs here. I’ve had waitresses scare me up cigarettes after casually mentioning that I’d love a smoke, I’ve had waitresses offer to watch my computer while I go have a cigarette or make a run to one of the pristine bathrooms, I’ve even gotten the rare corporate beer buy-back. But mostly, the service is attentive and friendly without being overbearing and obnoxious, which is sort of an amazing feat considering the dress code.

And speaking of the dress code, while those tank tops can be kind of awe-inspiring, the Hooters ensemble, as a whole, is a turn-off. It looks like it was developed by a colorblind exercise fetishist in 1983. It’s a hard look for most earth women to pull off successfully.

Hooters is an asexual place for me. I don’t go there to get my blood pumping; I go there to feel my blood clogging as I watch the Phillies and get some work done. I don’t go to Hooters for a pseudo-sexual performance in the same way I don’t go to the strip club for the buffet (that’s for hardcore perverts).

So I didn’t think it would be weird to take the kid to Hooters.

I had never taken either of my kids to Hooters before, especially not at night when random bikini or lingerie contests occasionally break out, because I’m not sure my daughter needs to be exposed to that kind of awkward chaos just yet. But in the daylight hours, Hooters not only has fried pickles, but it also has high chairs, and a kids’ menu, although I might argue that it’s all a kids’ menu. (And now might argue that the kids’ menu is an affront.)

After all, I’ve taken my daughter to much seedier establishments around Philadelphia in pursuit of sandwiches. Why not try a clean corporate world with a weird dress code? Outside a sandwich shop in South Philly a man with an unintentionally exposed handgun in his waistband once tickled my daughter’s chin to make her laugh and told me what a lucky guy I was. Nice fella.

My daughter has also seen women (occasionally working) in much skimpier outfits, and the fabric of our family has not been torn asunder as a result. In fact, when I met my daughter’s mother, she was working behind a bar in a place that served wings and she was wearing a top that was nearly, if not equally, form fitting as those found at Hooters. I thought it might even be a good lesson for my daughter to see that we don’t judge or treat people differently because of the way they’re dressed, and that people are not the sum total of their apparel; for instance, I am not a hobo, even though I dress like one.

I expected to walk into Hooters at 11 a.m. and have a bunch of bored waitresses fawning all over my daughter. We’d get attention and good laughs, maybe even a comped order of mozzarella sticks, and my daughter would see how casually and normally Daddy interacts with women in tight tank tops.

Instead we walked in at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday and found a smattering of guys sitting by themselves or in pairs at the bar already drinking hard and vying for attention from waitresses who looked seriously thrown off their rhythm by the arrival of a 2-year-old.

It was in that moment that I realized that beyond all the debate about exhibitionism and objectification, Hooters is a bar, and forcing your kid on a group of adults who want to get drunk is a dick move, especially guys who want to get drunk at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday … at a Hooters. That type of guy is looking for something a little more extreme to go with his problems than what the corner bar has to offer.

But more important, my daughter’s presence obviously affected the way the waitresses could deal with those guys. The kid’s presence was disrupting the ever-shifting balance of power between client and patron in a sexually charged alcohol-fueled situation. I had upended the delicate Hooters ecosphere.

The guys who had just been joking with the bartenders looked at me like they would like to strangle me with a pair of flesh-toned leggings. The waitresses were cold; instead of the usual big, “Welcome to Hooters!” I got a clipped, “Can I help you with something?” Instead of being shown to our table we were hemmed in by a stony-faced phalanx of orange-and-white-clad servers who silently established a perimeter around us preventing entrance into the main dining room or access to a table by the bar, a well-endowed Praetorian Guard, protecting the sanctity of their establishment from the sticky-fingered cuteness of my 2-year-old. They were all cold eyes, and concerned looks, whereas normally it’s all about smiles and calisthenics. They looked at me like I was stupid for bringing my daughter to Hooters. Me! Stupid?! I had never had icy service at Hooters, but as the greeter had a muffled conversation with one of the other perimeter guards and pointed at me and my daughter I made the command decision to get our fried pickles to go.

The next 10 minutes were some of the longest of my life. As we waited for our order, the only sound was the replay telecast of Duke vs. the University of Eastern Irkutsk — or whatever the hell ballgame is playing on Tuesday at 11 a.m. on ESPN2. My daughter was understandably mesmerized by the bright orange shorts and the ladies with hair extensions. She made entreaties to be noticed by some of the waitresses and she was rebuffed with extreme prejudice. Then she headed over to start gabbing at some of the guys at the bar, who did not seem to offer the smiles she is so used to receiving. I picked her up and held her until our pickles finally arrived. As the door closed behind us, I could hear the 11 a.m. Hooters fiesta begin again.

Perhaps it would have been different if we were there for the lunch rush when the place was packed, but I’m not willing to take the chance again. Hooters touches the holy trinity of guydom with booze, sports and women’s sexuality. And it’s not fair to anyone to slap a kid in the middle of it. Not to the people who work there and have to worry about the kid’s safety and boundaries, and not to the kid, who wonders why everyone is acting so weird.

In five years of fatherhood, here is the one tangible lesson I can pass along: Don’t take your daughter to Hooters. Or the racetrack. Or the bar. (Brooklyn, I’m talking to you.) As cool and comfortable as I want my kids to be in a wide variety of situations, there are some joints that are a little too spicy for the young’uns (if you know what I mean). Like me, you may want to be a cool and casual relaxed parent with cool, casual and relaxed kids, but how relaxed are your kids going to be when their earliest memories are strangers recoiling from them in shame and fear and annoyance? Part of what I want for my kids will come from trying to avoid weird and uncomfortable situations before they’re ready. That means being a little more thoughtful about their feelings and other people’s feelings. That means being thoughtful and considerate — two things that were not a big part of my emotional vocabulary before I had children. It doesn’t come naturally, but it’s coming.

Spending time with your kids is one of the most important parts of being a parent. Figuring out how to act like a grown-up and still have fun during that time may be equally important. Here’s what I learned: Get the fried pickles to go.

A year later my mother was pregnant with me. In a weird way, I owe my life to an abortion. Not that I ever saw it that way, or gave it much thought at all. Strangely, the idea only occurred to me as I watched last year’s Super Bowl, as Tim Tebow appeared in a pro-life ad to talk about how he owed his life to his mother not having an abortion. I thought: I am the Bizarro World Tim Tebow.

I grew up in idyllic ’80s and ’90s suburban Philadelphia, not giving a single thought to issues of women’s health or reproductive rights, aside from the occasional unwelcome intrusion from my older sister (she’s sorta into that kinda stuff). I spent a good deal of my high school thinking about females, but again, not very much of that thought had anything to do with actual reproduction. And because I was insecure, and handsy, and immature, I spent my high school years listening to my sexually active guy friends discussing their conquests and telling the occasional joke about how they had to go get “the swab” at the clinic. I was left to self-medicate with copious amounts of booze and ganja, both of which I would have gladly traded for the opportunity to need “the swab.”

At 18, toward the end of my first year in college, my outlook changed dramatically. My girlfriend was a close friend, a few years older than me, and we started a physical relationship after I graduated high school. She was kind, and sensitive, and caring. I was self-involved, self-loathing and self-destructive, and while there wasn’t a lot of room for much else in my life, I loved her with all the space that was available to me at the time.

She had battled health issues for most of her life, and growing up she had spent a great deal of time in the company of doctors. From an early age those doctors made it clear she would be unable to have children. So we were careless and stupid, although, truth be told, we probably would have been careless and stupid anyway. I got her pregnant, or she got pregnant, or we got her pregnant.

She was in her senior year at a college in a different city and she couldn’t get ahold of me. I wasn’t great about checking messages. It seems amazing that I once lived in a world where you could reasonably expect not to get ahold of someone for more than a week.

When she finally tracked me down she told me she had been pregnant and had gotten an abortion all in the same breath. The conversation was amazingly short. I reacted with all the petulance and anger of the messed-up child I was. I suddenly had a perfect excuse to remove whatever room I had made for anyone else in my life and make my self-absorption complete. This culminated in my dropping out of school and retreating to the safety of my sister’s apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y., where I spent the following year hiding out.

With some distance, I see that how I responded to the news was Exhibit A for why I wasn’t even close to being ready to take on the responsibility of a child. Exhibit B, C and D were that I was stoned and drunk out of my head all the time in those days. I was a wreck before the abortion, and I was wreck after she broke the news.

Not until years later, when I had dried out a little and grown up a lot, did I ever consider how difficult it must have been for her, or how terrible she must have felt about her own life and where she was; to give up what, to the best of her knowledge, could have been her only opportunity to have a child. It must have crushed her. It did crush her, I think, for a time. I would see her sporadically over the next several years, and from afar she seemed to be mirroring my path of self-punishment.

When I called her for permission to write this story, we had another short and difficult conversation, one that was 15 years in the making. She gave me her blessing and made two requests; the first was not to identify her, the second was that I make it clear that nothing about this choice was easy, or done without hurt, but that ultimately she still believes she made the right choice. Then she told me something that I hadn’t given her the time to tell me 15 years ago; she had asked to see the sonogram before she had the abortion.

“I could see all the options in front of me and I knew where they would end, I couldn’t bear to be pregnant one more day, it hurt too much.”

Fifteen years later and half our conversation still consisted of trying to apologize to one another.

None of these choices are made easily, or without hurt.

Until recently, my family never knew any of this. I repressed it, even when I heard about my mother’s abortion. I didn’t want her to know I understood something about what she was talking about. So when I see my guy friends — who are more than happy to wax philosophically for hours about the “conditions on the ground” in Libya and Bahrain (admittedly important), but who make nary a mention of issues that might directly and immediately impact them — I wonder if their careful avoidance isn’t born of a similar kind of embarrassment. I think this may be one of the reasons so many men have trouble talking about this issue. For me, it represents my low point as a human being and as a man: I was a failure, I couldn’t take care of myself let alone a child, I couldn’t provide for myself, or a wife, or family. My weakness and carelessness resulted in people hurting. I was not a man, I was something so much less than that. Why would anyone ever want to talk about something like that? I recognize that not every man out there has found himself in my situation specifically. I’ve been told a lot of pro-choice guys don’t talk about “women’s issues” for fear of saying the wrong thing. All I know is: We’re not talking — as if it doesn’t have to do with us, as if it’s “their” problem, not ours.

Half a country away and a few years earlier than the story of my college girlfriend, my wife was 18. She had been with her college boyfriend for about a year when she went to Planned Parenthood for her first gynecological exam. She had decided that she was about to start having sex. She had decided that she did not feel comfortable going to her parents with her decision (which I imagine is not an uncommon feeling among most humans. I wonder how many of us who don’t live in an ’80s sitcom have heart-to-hearts with our parents before we lose our virginity). But she felt she was ready for a physical relationship and she wanted to be as responsible about sex as possible.

Planned Parenthood gave her the ability to take personal responsibility for her body and her future. It also helped keep her safe and healthy at a point in most people’s lives when those concerns are not yet a priority. That first visit to Planned Parenthood gave my wife a foundation of responsibility for her sexual health on which she ultimately built a future that included a husband (me) and two amazing children.

I owe Planned Parenthood an unqualified debt of gratitude.

I’ve quietly watched the debate around reproductive rights and women’s health for most of my adult life and, frankly, most of it seems very foreign to me. It is spoken about in such simplistic ways. I don’t understand how people can throw around the word “murder” and talk about taking lives. By the same token, I don’t understand how some people can be so unconflicted about being pro-choice. Having experienced the second guessing, the what ifs, the sense of failure and the guilt, I don’t find anything simple or unconflicted about it.

But mostly, I don’t understand how these issues are still simply referred to as “women’s issues.” The destinies of men and women are intertwined by sex, and pregnancy, and childbirth. It is time for more men to sack up and start taking responsibility for their end of the conversation.

These “women’s issues” have shaped my life: my birth, my adulthood and the children for which I am forever grateful. So yes, I support women’s health programs and a woman’s right to choose.

Even though I know that none of these choices are made easily or without hurt. 

I spent most of my 20s working with at-risk and incarcerated teens in Philadelphia, and while I wouldn’t dare to call myself a teacher, I can only describe what I did as “teaching art.” My job was relatively easy, since the expectations for my dropouts, reintegration cases and felons were so low that any meager accomplishments made in my classroom were met with resounding approval from funders and city officials. I’m not trying to take away anything from my former students — some of whom accomplished amazing things in my classroom — I only mean to point out that it was never me who deserved the credit, and ultimately, whatever they did achieve didn’t matter in the face of a life sentence or the fact that they dropped out again before getting their GED. To say that I saw parallels between Danza and myself — moonlighting in a world that demands real commitment, easily frustrated by what you discover in that world, and eventually reaping undeserved credit for any achievements made by others — would be an understatement. All of which is a way of saying, I wanted to hate “Teach.”

I didn’t want to see complicated issues that led to my painfully smart students dropping out reduced to the insipid platitudes of “Dangerous Minds” and “Freedom Writers.” I didn’t want to see Tony Danza portrayed as the great white hope encouraging his students to rage against the dying of the light or some nonsense like that. I didn’t want to see Tony Danza portrayed as a hero for showing up briefly and impersonating a teacher while the real teachers and administrators, who have dedicated their adult lives to bailing out the sinking ship of urban education, get portrayed as a lazy greedy horde by politicians and talking heads who know that because of systemic failures on state, local and federal levels (and yes, within the teachers unions themselves) teachers are left as the punching bags for a restless and frustrated population. Most teaching experiences don’t end with a perfect graduation rate like that of Jaime Escalante in “Stand and Deliver” or with your classroom breaking into song, and I didn’t want to see another program that tricked people into thinking it was the other way around.

That wasn’t what I saw. Apparently I was suffering from the soft bigotry of low expectations for Tony Danza.

In “Teach,” Danza often looks far from heroic. He bursts into tears after his teaching coach ever so gently busts his balls — for breaking into tears. He’s so culturally tone-deaf that he jokes about living in Malibu, expecting the Northeast High School football team to actually get what “living in Malibu” implies (I don’t even get what that implies). His students rip on him for sweating too much and suggest that he should wear a double layer of undershirts. Actually, the kids rip on Danza about a lot of things, from his grasp of the material to his classroom management, to his crying. Danza comes off as socially awkward around the other teachers and the students. He insists on singing a birthday song of his own creation instead of just singing “Happy Birthday.” It’s weird.

But these gaffes feel surprisingly honest. Another less scrupulous reality show could have edited out these moments, or manipulated them to make Danza seem in control or valiantly struggling. Instead “Teach” lets it all hang out there like a desperate squirrel on a broken branch on a windy day. Danza looks neither valiant nor in control. He looks kind of silly and awkward. And as anyone who has ever stepped in front of a classroom of students for the first time knows, looking silly and feeling awkward are job requirements. Even Danza’s insistence on performing his way through classes trying to keep the kids entertained rather than educated is a cringe-inducingly accurate portrayal of a common trap for young teachers.

It’s oddly endearing, because for all of Tony Danza’s classroom and social failings, I don’t doubt his sincerity in wanting to do a good job. I also get the sense that he showed up every day ready to work, which strikes me as unusual in the pantheon of celebrity do-gooder reality shows.

But “Teach” also has terrible drawbacks. While most reality TV shows deliver their message with the subtlety of a hammer to the head, “Teach” seems unsure of its message, as though the show still doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up.

Is it a call to service for baby boomers wondering what to do with their retirement? Maybe. Is it a show about the challenges facing first-year teachers? Probably. Is it a show about Tony Danza being a socially awkward weirdo and desperately trying to win over a skeptical group of 16-year-olds? Definitely.

Make no mistake that this is tangentially a show about teaching. But it’s primarily a fish-out-of-water show about a person who’s been given too much money, too much fame, too much attention, trying with all his might to do something good in the only way he knows how: with cameras, tap-dancing, overacting and catchphrases. As likable as Danza is, as central as his fame is to the premise, he is also the biggest roadblock to making a show with anything real to say.

If reality TV ever wanted to rise above being a mockery of its name, the students and the staff of teachers and administrators are the ones who would really be the stars of this show. They are beautiful and, in a bizarre twist, far more natural in front of the camera than Danza. They look and sound like actual humans. When Danza gets out of the way long enough, we catch glimpses of a big city high school and how it operates.

These don’t appear to be educators ready for the rubber room. They aren’t the greedy union horde. These people are professionals, real people who wake up every morning and try to help kids learn and grow, trying to nudge kids away from their comfort zones and into a world that doesn’t revolve around them. It would be great to get a glimpse at what they’re doing and the grace with which they are doing it, because it seems that a lot of Americans have forgotten what they look like. If only Tony Danza would just step aside.

As Danza frets and worries about his teaching method, his fellow teachers keep trying to tell him to stop making the classes all about him. He doesn’t need to constantly perform to keep the students’ attention. By taking a step back and ceding some responsibility to his class, the lessons he’s trying to teach will be more deeply understood. They are talking about the moments when you’ve given the students all the information and they begin to learn from each other, when they become teachers themselves, bringing the lessons into their own worlds. It is not a moment that saves anyone from prison, it is not a moment that inspires a classroom to break into song, it is not a moment that even guarantees graduation. But it’s those moments that make people want to teach, or understand that what’s great about teaching isn’t the Big Finish. Sadly, for Danza, his class and the television audience, he can’t get out of the way long enough to let that lesson sink in. 

“Where were we?” I asked.

I was surprised to discover that she had been keeping tabs on me over the last year as I carted my kids around the neighborhood and spent my mornings with them at the park. Through her silent observation she had come to understand that my wife was the one who worked and I was the one who was at home with the kids.

It was creepy and flattering. She was like a little old Corey Hart wearing her sunglasses at night, except her sunglasses had a special prescription for her cataracts so she had to wear them all the time.

She further surprised me by talking about how happy it made her to see men finally realizing all the wonders of being an involved parent. She liked seeing so many dads at the park now. She thought the economy might have something to do with the number of men she’d begun to notice like me, but she hoped that we were learning an important lesson about how rewarding our lives could be when we became more focused on our family and less focused on a paycheck.

Then she told me about what a shame it was that “the blacks have ruined the local high school.” Oh, dear.

I quickly excused myself by thanking her for her kind words (you know, the ones that weren’t racist) and explained that I had to go remove a peach cobbler I was baking from the oven … and replace it with my head. But I learned something valuable from Nana Gibson that day: While some prejudices harden into 90-year-old anger stones, while some social change is agonizing and takes decades, the old-fashioned vision of the man as breadwinner is surprisingly, almost shockingly, malleable.

I’ve spent the last three years as a stay-at-home dad in what I initially thought might be inhospitable territory. I don’t live in the liberal bastions of SAHDism like Brooklyn or the Bay Area. I live in Philly, specifically a working-class neighborhood in Philly. My neighborhood is not known for its socially progressive attitudes or its gender bending. It’s more like that movie “Copland.” It’s a place where police and firefighters settle down and have families. It’s a place where there are more contractors than there are houses. It’s a place where the churches are still filled on Sunday morning and the only place serving brunch afterward is the diner. And the waitresses don’t call it “brunch” at the diner.

Sarah Palin might describe it as the “real America” if it weren’t full of Reagan Democrats who still didn’t pull the lever for a McCain-Palin ticket.

Part of me expected that a stay-at-home-dad in this socially conservative hotbed of testosterone would experience a life of isolation and disrespect, that I would accumulate a litany of grievances toward my closed-minded neighbors. After all, a quick Google search for stay-at-home dads reveals a world of support groups and rage at semantic inefficiency when it comes to dads as primary care providers (or PCPs if you need a handy acronym) and white-hot consumer fury at Big Diaper for dismissing our role in the home. From the information available on the Internet, someone might get the sense that SAHDs are a marginalized minority group, because the rest of the country isn’t ready for our new style of manliness.

But that has not been my experience, nor has it been the experience of any of the other fathers I know who stay at home, or who play an equal or leading role in taking care of their kids. My neighbors have been just as encouraging and enthusiastic about this shift as my nonagenarian stalker from the park, luckily without the racism.

My neighborhood has seen the mills that used to support the entire community close and fall into disrepair (or get turned into condos). It’s struggled with underemployment, temporary layoffs, downsizing and closings since the ’70s, and everyone who lives here knows how easily unemployment can breed the double scourge of drugs and crime. So maybe people are just excited to see (relatively) young men who may not have jobs but still have direction. Perhaps they are rooting for us because they understand the alternatives. Perhaps they are rooting for us because they have found themselves in a similar situation.

But this acceptance goes far beyond the reaches of my neighborhood.

My wife’s family is from Texas, and not the hippie parts either. They are conservative, they are traditionalists, they are Republican (or possibly Tea Partiers, I haven’t checked recently), and they are avid fans of Fox News. Part of the reason I love them so much is that they broke every single one of my preconceived notions about what Fox News-loving potential Tea Party Texans are like by being so cool with how my wife and I raise our kids and structure our family. After reading an article about the different ways stay-at-home parents network, my mother-in-law bought me a set of business cards for my birthday. The cards read: “Aaron Traister — Stay at Home Father.”

My wife is still making fun of me about those things.

Still, to find not simply acceptance but actual support for my newfangled role in an old-fashioned nuclear family spoke volumes to me about how expectations for men are changing.

And the larger world seems fairly on board with guys getting involved in childcare too. Ninety percent of the men’s rooms I visit have a changing table (the other 10 percent are usually in adult bookstores). No one has told me I can’t come to the park (at least when I’m sober). No one throws stuff at me or, I don’t know, tells me my kind has ruined the local high school.

And while I take no joy in being target-marketed, I should point out that a number of advertisers are jumping on the whole “dads are the new cool moms” thing. There is the Toyota minivan campaign that features an irritating bald nerdy dad, a Huggies commercial with a baby peeing all over a handsome dad, an Oreo commercial about a kid eating cookies with an Internet dad, and a heartwarming Nike spot featuring a professional golfer and a posthumous dad.

To be sure there are holdouts, angry and anonymous Internet dog-men howling at the cybermoon, and cynical advertisers making limp-dick commercials that prey on the insecurities that men in the middle of this culture shift (like me) are inevitably dealing with, like those totally depressing Super Bowl commercials, but for the most part those voices are irrelevant. They sound like dinosaurs speaking after extinction. In the real world most people realize that you do what you do to get by, and then you move on.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so surprised by this shift. Maybe I was just a spoiled prep school nimrod who was slow on the uptake. Maybe that’s why even as a stay-at-home dad I felt compelled to make jokes about Bill Clinton’s potential role as first gentlemen in 2008 while my “O’Reilly Factor”-loving father-in-law simply accepted Todd Palin for who he was.

We’ve read a lot of stories in the past few years about the crisis of men, like Hanna Rosin’s recent “End of Men” article in the Atlantic. And it’s true that the landscape of employment in this country has changed, probably forever. But I’m beginning to think that the recession isn’t repainting the American landscape so much as it is putting the finishing touches on a canvas that’s been in progress since before I was born. I was talking to my buddy Joe the other day, a man who votes by finding the Italian names on the ballot, a guy who has seen my neighborhood through good and bad. We were talking about my staying home with kids. “You guys have been around forever,” he deadpanned. “It’s just the world has changed, and people are more accepting of gays now.”

I have a 4-year-old and an 18-month-old back in Philadelphia, so I quietly mumbled something about no apologies being necessary. I was also pretty hammered. Rocking back and forth with my eyes closed I was willing the elevator to get me to my floor before I got sick or fell over — all I wanted to do was bite the head off the complimentary Chocolate Frog that the bellman had dropped off earlier and pass out in my big comfy hotel bed. Flump! — I felt Arnold the Pink Pygmy Puff bounce off my forehead. In the distance, I could hear the sound of the mother’s pleading, but all I could focus on was the sound coming from the little girl’s mouth, a peal of high-pitched laughter …

As for why this kid had gone loco — no explanation was needed.

Harry Potter; it was his fault.

Chapter 1: The Beginning

On June 16, I was flown on a junket to Orlando, Fla., to help shill the magic of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the new mini-theme park located inside Universal Orlando resort. This was a work trip, but in many ways, it felt more like a pilgrimage.

See, I love the Harry Potter series. I am slightly embarrassed to admit how much those seven books have meant to me as an adult.

The Potter books provided a much-needed dose of escapism when I started reading them in New York after September 2001. J.K. Rowling’s universe was a place to find joy and innocence at a time when those things seemed to vanish from my life and my city. Even Harry Potter’s tragedies were small and personal and — most important — fictional. You could stay up late thinking about those stories; they were not stories that kept you awake.

Later, when I took a job working with kids who were incarcerated for fairly gruesome crimes, I sought refuge in Hogwarts. I absorbed the crushing true stories from my work day and tried to counterbalance them with Rowling’s heroic adventures. In a real world that felt hopeless, and a future that I saw as increasingly bleak, I looked forward to each Potter book with as much earnestness and glee as any 7-year-old.

I guess you could say, for a good portion of my 20s, Harry Potter was my Prozac.

So, with a wand in my hand (actually they confiscated it at a security checkpoint) and a spell in my heart, I boarded a plane bound for Florida, or as I like to think of it: America’s witch’s tit. I was excited about going — especially the chance to meet J.K. Rowling — but ominous signs loomed over the trip from the beginning. As we taxied into the terminal in Orlando a fellow passenger announced that they had started finding oil in Pensacola. Florida’s grim reality began invading my fantasy. The spell I was under began breaking.

Chapter 2: The Stinky End of the Broomstick

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter is no silly little theme park addendum, no crappy moneymaking afterthought to the successful movies. This is the world of Harry Potter come to life. No Coca-Cola, no M&M’s, no earthly concessions are found within the walls of Wizarding World. Instead, we find Butterbeer, Chocolate Frogs, Pumpkin Juice (which I concede is pretty good), and attractions found in the books and visually inspired by the movies. Those films? I wasn’t much of a fan. But even I can’t deny what Disney expert Jim Hill had to say about the Mouse’s new competition. He dubbed it “the new gold standard when it comes to taking a fantasy film and its characters and then translating that into an immersive theme park environment.”

As I wandered through all the elaborate manufactured fantasy, however, I kept tripping into life’s suckitude.

I met a lovely mother named Kathy, who had journeyed to Orlando with her two adult daughters (one of whom wore a loud turquoise tank top with the words “Legalize Gay” emblazoned across it). That they made the same trip every three years since the girls were little seemed like a fine example of how Universal and Disney can become heartwarming family traditions.

Only Kathy had just been laid off. She found out she’d been let go only after she’d finalized her vacation plans. Not long before, her daughter had been laid off too, and they weren’t sure what they were going to do once they got home.

In fact, from the kindly security guard who got in trouble for letting me into the Wizarding World attraction at the wrong time, to the ex-Universal H.R. coordinator who had been laid off when the Universal Dubai project was suspended indefinitely (Jesus, did someone just bring up Dubai outside the gates of Hogwarts?), to the psychic who read my palm and then confessed that she was very concerned what the hurricane would bring ashore from the Gulf — everyone I met seemed to be getting the stinky end of life’s broomstick.

I left the premises for lunch to get a fresh perspective and — considering I ended up at Hooter’s — maybe to check out some boobs. The 23-year-old waitress and native Orlandoan, Britnie, told me that life in the orange short-shorts and tank top was a preferable way to make money than her old job “processing foreclosures at the local courthouse,” a job that apparently had tremendous security but got a little depressing when she came across paperwork for people she actually knew. She regretted her career change at times; the lunch crowd had disappeared over the last year or two, and she wasn’t making very good money; like a lot of people I met, she was pinning her hopes on Harry Potter to bring the customers back.

Deflated by her tale, I asked, “Is there a larger size of beer I should be drinking?”

“Yes,” she said. “Several.”

Tired, hot, thoroughly depressed and now slightly buzzed, I skipped the opening night celebration of Wizarding World, went back to my hotel and got for real drunk. I sat at a poolside bar drinking $2 Buds and watching 47-year-old Phillies pitcher Jamie Moyer pick apart a powerful Yankees lineup through eight innings — it was the first magical moment I had experienced since arriving in Florida.

I didn’t even flinch when I found out later that Rowling made an appearance at the opening to give the park her blessing. Just 24 hours before, I would’ve given my left snitch and both bludgers to meet that woman, but now all my frustration at the universe was directed toward anything that had to do with Harry Potter. My disillusionment was complete.

Chapter 3: Potter’s Army

“Can one boy wizard save Florida?” seemed to be the words on the lips of every media outlet, from the U.K. Sun to the local Fox news affiliate to Westwood One Radio’s statewide news broadcast on the day of the opening.

And it’s a legitimate question. With the state’s beaches and natural tourist attractions hanging in limbo waiting on the whims of ocean currents, hurricanes and just exactly how much fucking oil is floating beneath the surface in the Gulf of Mexico, Harry Potter could be a port of stability in a greasy oil-drenched storm.

It’s as if a giant, glittering, 50-foot Patronus were stalking back and forth along Cocoa Beach making sure it’s safe for throngs of British tourists to land and head immediately to Universal Resort (followed by a second stop at Disney).

“We think it’s going to be a terrific summer,” Universal Orlando president Bill Davis said in the Orlando Sentinel, though he added that “our hearts go out to people affected by the spill. We obviously expect [Wizarding World] to have a very, very nice effect on our attendance … Hopefully starting this weekend.”

Far from being angry at the boy with the scar on his head, I should have been on my hands and knees servicing his Firebolt for what he is about to do for the state of Florida.

And business already looks good: The hotels are filling up, and the tourists are arriving in droves. That’s a good sign for Britnie, the Hooters waitress. As I left the restaurant a family of four (and when did people start bringing their kids to Hooters, anyway?) sat down wearing Harry Potter T-shirts and fingering H.P. merchandise.

But even aside from the money being made, everyone but me seemed to be enjoying the spectacle. The superfans who run the Potter fan sites all loved it. I didn’t hear a single negative word out of their mouths all week. In fact, they often looked at me like I had crapped all over the lobby couch because I said I felt weirdly conflicted about the whole experience and that I’d been drinking since noon Wednesday — who is them to judges me?

Emma Sandrey, a blogger for the fan site Snitchseeker.com (incidentally, be careful when typing that — substituting an “A” for an “I” yields an extremely different kind of Google search), said about the opening of the park, “I actually cried it was so overwhelming.” It was not an uncommon sentiment.

Jeff Guillaume of the fan site HPANA.com simply said, “It was all I could have hoped for.” During the opening night celebration Ms. Rowling had said “Hi” to him.

“That was all I needed,” Jeff told me, taking a deep pull off his cigarette. I then bummed a cigarette from him.

But, most important, the kids loved it. From the little boy in an arm cast who sang about Honeydukes and did a bizarre candy dance when I asked him what his favorite part of the park was to the young at heart, like a couple I met in their late 20s unfamiliar with the books and movies but so mesmerized by an advertisement for Wizarding World that they planned their entire two-week vacation at Universal just hoping to get a sneak peek of the mini-park, everyone was partying like there was no 22-mile-long oil plume in the body of water directly to our right.

Crowds went wild over Forbidden Journey, a pseudo-roller coaster that depends less on movement (although you get belted in and it flips you upside down every now and then) and more directly on a giant screen that simulates the sense of moving through space. Also, there are puppets. Everybody kept asking me if it was the single greatest park ride I had ever been on, as though that were a rhetorical question. (Personally, I’m not a fan of green-screen rides. They’re kind of like when I was in high school and I’d get stoned and see that IMAX movie about Africa, except back then I didn’t have to wait in a two-hour line and the exits didn’t dump me out into a gift shop — although I often wished for a food court.)

That’s why I wasn’t surprised by the over-the-top enthusiasm of my whacked-out little buddy on the elevator throwing her Pygmy Puff and laughing like the dentist had made a terrible mistake with the nitrous. Even if I hadn’t been drinking since 5 a.m. I still wouldn’t have said anything to that demented little angel — good for her. She’s not worried about the oil spill, or her mom’s job, or a future of trying to wash the smell of fried out of her hair while she struggles to free herself from a pair of nude leggings. All she knows is that she was just in Hogsmeade — and if I can help keep it that way for even just the duration of an elevator ride then I’ll gladly take a fuzzy pink ball to the face every now and again.

Chapter 4: Meet the New Mouse, Same as the Old Mouse

So why was I still so depressed, why was I so blindly angry with Harry Potter, when half of everyone I met was loving life and the other half was praying for Harry’s arrival to make it better?

The truth is I felt betrayed. I recognize these books were always a commercial endeavor. But it is a far cry from investing $6.99 in a softcover and being able to totally disappear out of this world whenever you choose, to investing $116.09 at the gate for a one-day pass to enter a world where every door leads to a gift shop.

Harry Potter is no longer a character in an outrageously popular children’s book series or even an outrageously popular movie franchise. In the same way Mickey is no longer merely a lovable steamboat captain or sorcerer’s apprentice. He’s a global brand — people can talk about Harry in terms of job growth for local and state economies, and the diversified revenue streams he generates between books, film, merchandising, the theme park, food product tie-ins, etc., etc. People can talk about expansion ideas and new markets and immersion techniques and all that super-villainous-sounding jargon that not only turns my stomach but also scares the hell out of me.

Sitting in Harry Potter’s new kingdom of magic I have to acknowledge that every time he gets someone dizzy on one of his new rides and buys a broomstick that doesn’t fly for $300, or even a Sorting Hat that doesn’t rap for $29.95 — even though he’s generating money for Central Florida (and far, far beyond) — it feels sort of skuzzy and like everything that’s wrong with us instead of everything that was joyful, and wondrous, and innocent. The reason I drank so much this week, the reason I was so depressed, was because Harry Potter offers no escape for me from the real world anymore — for better or for worse, he is now the proud owner of it.