Just kidding
While kids his age use their abundant spare time wishing they were vampires, Mike Perham singlehandedly circumnavigated the globe on his Open 50 sailing yacht. Spending nine months battling 50-foot waves, the teen from Hertfordshire, England started his 24,000-mile journey between Ushant, northern France, and Lizard Point, southern England in November last year; he celebrated his 17th birthday weaving and bobbing across the Southern Indian Ocean. The bouts of loneliness — and seasickness — were worth it as the people behind the Guinness World Records have officially recognized him as the youngest person ever to sail the planet solo, categorizing his impressive feat as “assisted.”
It’s been barely a month since Mike Perham’s adventure and already someone is breathing down his neck. Laura Dekker, a 13-year-old from the Netherlands, wants to sail alone around the world and break the Brit’s still-hot world record. The Times, however, reports that she may have to put her dream on hold as both Dutch and Kiwi authorities — she was born in New Zealand — “have already expressed similar reservations about allowing such a young person to make so demanding a journey.”
As a bizarre footnote, Jessica Watson, a 16-year-old from Australia, also wants to put her sea legs to the test by sailing around the world in a 34-foot modified yacht. “There’s just a million, billion little things that made me want to do this, but I mean the biggest thing would have to be a challenge,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in June. For most of us, The OC’s Seth Cohen was the first person we sort of knew who was crazy about taking to the sea. Seriously, what is up with these people?
Underage Overachievers
It appears that there’s a proliferation of underage overachievers in our pop culture sphere. Aside from setting new standards in sports, prodigious prodigies are hogging the headlines with expeditions in other fields.
David Fishman, a 12-year-old New Yorker, is taking one of the world’s culinary capitals by storm with his restaurant reviews. His mature palate and worthy insights have caught the attention of Paramount Pictures, who have since bought the rights to the newspaper story that catapulted him to fame.
And at an age when most junior high school kids are just venturing beyond burgers and fries, 14-year-old Greg Grossman has been dabbling in molecular gastronomy long enough — since he was 11, when he started catering gallery openings in East Hampton, New York — for the Chicago Tribune to call him a celebrity chef. What would El Bulli’s Ferran Adrià say?
Pint-Sized Pros
At 11, Dallas sixth-grader Dalton Sherman counts Oprah Winfrey and Ellen DeGeneres as fans. Aside from thousands of others, the two titans of daytime TV have been wowed by the pint-sized student’s gift for delivering speeches. (Viewing his YouTube clips, I saw and heard how he inspires others, but I also realized that the little boy with the big voice could just as easily come off as a pompous douche. Google him.)
That said, another tween has used his freakish talents to pen a how-to book on dating. How to Talk to Girls, a primer by nine-year-old Alec Greven, began as a handwritten, $3 pamphlet the Colorado fourth-grader sold at his school book fair. Published by Harper Collins, his 46-page tome is now available in bookstores across the US. In case you’re wondering, he defines dating as “going out to dinner without your parents,” which is for “kind of old people who are 15 or 16.” Again, whatever happened to normal pre-teen activities like playing video games, listening to sh*tty Miley Cyrus music or skipping school to go to the mall?
Collective Fascination
On the one hand, since the United Nations Population Fund states that nearly half of the world’s population — almost three billion people — is under the age of 25, there’s bound to be an early adolescent with a disturbingly deep learning curve somewhere in the mix. Producing increasingly evolved individuals is a great sign that society is moving forward and surpassing the accomplishments of previous generations.
On the other hand, the more skeptical among us would question our collective fascination with these wunderkinds. Seen through the prism of adulthood, the very thing that makes these curve-breakers special — their age — also makes them cheesy novelties. I’d hate to be a wet blanket but there’s such a thing as peaking too soon.
Child’s Play
In 2007, the documentary My Kid Could Paint That followed the career of then four-year-old Marla Olmstead, whose abstract paintings sold for over $300,000. Directed by Amir bar-Lev, the film questions whether the child prodigy really completed the paintings herself or did so with her father’s help. In October 2007, Robert Ebert said, “My own verdict as an outsider is, no, Marla didn’t paint those works, although she may have applied some of the paint. In the last analysis, I guess it all reduces to taste and instinct. Some paintings are good, says me, or says you, and some are bad. Some paintings could be painted by a child, some couldn’t be.”
In March this year, a gallery in Sydney, Australia purchased artwork by Aelita Andre; they were unaware that she was only 22 months old. I don’t know what’s more disturbing: the fact that these small wonders sometimes play with our emotions or that we allow them to do so.
* * *
Find me here: ginobambino.tumblr.com.
