Lion Boy – Mane of Style

Lion Boy & Guggi

In which the fourth creature feature offspring is revealed – young son, twin to Monkey Buns Mini Boo – Lion Boy Torsten, Mane of Style. So he has this thing about his hair – it has to be of Lions mane length. Hmm could this be a new psychological condition called the Samson Complex? Other mere mortal students at Lion Boys high school also call it his Lion Mane whilst I’m sure all the teachers wish he’d ‘get a real haircut’. What they need to understand is that this is his snakeskin jacket – it represents a symbol of his individuality, and his belief in personal freedom. Lion Boy loathes anything banally mainstream and stands up for what he believes to be right and just.

In a recent enactment of the film 300 Lion Boy thought it well within his rights as a teenage rite of passage to hold a gathering of 300 Spartans (fellow teenagers) in his house (Occy & I were on the other seaboard). It was a successful evening so he smoked a victory cigar, cognac balloon in hand, at having pulled it off – but…. Nek Minnit…. The police were called by an irate neighbour, the gathering of 300 Spartans evicted. Lion Boy felt it prudent to argue the case with said police officers that it was grossly unjust that those departing weren’t even allowed time to collect their bags and that some of his friends should be allowed to sleepover. Said police officers weren’t impressed. Officer Natalie called me at 1:30am:

‘This is a courtesy call to let you know there’s been a MASSIVE party at your house tonight. We’ve had 10 police officers out here and a squad of sniffers dogs because some of the boys were being, shall we say, obnoxious? BUT… your kids are still alive, the house is still standing, it is trashed but we’re supervising them cleaning it up now’.

Wow, I was so impressed – I didn’t realise they provide supervisory services! And Lion Boy was in so much shit!

Anyways, apart from this teenage glitch, Lion Boy is a Mane of Style. He's bizarrely gifted as a stylist, paying attention to detail like texture and colour and quality that would escape most mortals. As an avid student of History and a keen observer of detail we’ve watched many a film in which the commentary runs something like this:

‘That’s not the correct rifle. The French used that weapon; this is supposed to be Italians.’

‘They haven’t reproduced the flektarn cloth on that German army uniform very well’.

‘That lieutenant has the wrong stripes on his uniform and his buttons aren’t right’.

I mean seriously, who notices that shit anyway?

As a keen explorer he’s planning his gap year with Colorado as the priority. Why? Because there are snow-capped peaks, amazing rock formations and in spring, fields and fields of wildflowers. I can’t actually think of too many 16 year old hankering for fields of wildflowers! He’d also like to do a wine & cheese tour of France (mainly for the cheese) and gorge himself on olives and fetta in Italy & Greece.

In the meantime he’s planning tuxedo gatherings with his friends, Cuban cigars and cognac balloons in hand (yes he actually bought a box of Cubans when we risked our lives in Havana to get them – see post Cuban Cigars?) He has an eclectic taste in music ranging from Metal to Arabic House to symphonic pieces from Lord of the Rings & Halo. At 3 he nearly drove us mad with his OCD obsession with The Wizard of Oz – in fact my mother was staying with us at the time and she declared that if she had to listen to that bloody 'Over the Rainbow' song one more time she would vomit! I suppose three times a day was a bit much… but I suppose it did cement a certain amount of musical awareness into his temporal lobes. As a whippersnapper (4-5) he only needed to hear a few bars of music and would know which movie and scene it was from. These days he's a bit OCD about potential Zombie apocolypses and thinks he'll become a 'prepper' (food storage, survival techniques etc) Lion Boy has a rather inquisitive existentialist intelligence and an avid interest in human evolution. I’m sure if he tied all his talents together he would make a brilliant Anthropologist Stylist with his own YouTube channel in which he can dispense interesting historical snippets along with style advice for Steampunks and other alternate existentialists with a hankering for history.