Confederacy

Summers spent in Philadelphia with my father were usually bizarre. When I was ten, we flat-out wasted the limited time we had together with our attempts to get a particularly dedicated employee at a living history museum to break character. My father enjoyed the challenge, and it's not like he had anything better to do. Meanwhile, I had somehow deluded myself into thinking that I actually had a shot with the Confederate prisoner we were trying to break.

If you asked a museum employee for directions to the gift shop, they would play dumb about the existence of said gift shop unless you first asked them to remove their hat (or bonnet). All of the employees would happily remove their magical hat when asked...except one. The sole Confederate prisoner was the most dedicated of all the actors and the most beautiful man I had ever seen. He looked like a young Johnny Depp, and he was not interested in playing the museum's little hat games. When it became apparent that he wasn't going to break character, every annoying pre-teen boy tried to yank the hat off his head. None would succeed. He was either very passionate about preserving the magic, or he had suffered brain damage and actually thought it was 1863.

This would have been a perfect situation for the museum since a brain-damaged actor wouldn't be asking for a paycheck.

He could have been anyone under that hat, and the mystery made him even hotter. Luckily for me, I would be seeing a lot of him that summer. In my 10-year-old mind, it kind of did start to feel like we were dating.

Our multiple visits helped us learn his routine pretty well. He spent all day hanging out alone in prison where he would do the following things in no particular order:

• Complain about how bored he was
• Reminisce about his idyllic childhood in the Old South
• Have PTSD episodes 
• Make us tell him whether or not we supported the Confederacy - We were in Pennsylvania, so everyone would look around and slowly admit to him that we supported the Union. Then he would yell at us for a while about states' rights. It would sometimes become pretty heated. While everyone else was yelling about history, race, and American ideals, I was busy naming our future hypothetical children.

Dadegy: My Dad's Strategy

My dad's plan was to befriend him first and then ask him to take off the hat. My dad is missing some body parts so he acted like he lost them in the war. They bonded over the noble Confederacy.

?uestlove: My Strategy

At first I tried to trip him up by asking him "difficult" questions about his fake backstory. I was ten so I didn't really come up with anything that good. I asked him about about his love life and if he had ever killed anyone. I shouldn't have underestimated his dedication. Obviously he had already crafted an elaborate backstory.

?uestlove 2: My Similar Strategy

I hoped that if I started asking him questions about modern life that I would stumble upon a topic he couldn't resist. I asked him about the Summer Olympics and Bush/Gore. I asked whether he had seen X-Men or The Nutty Professor 2. Okay, I'm definitely lying about that since I hadn't seen either of them. I probably asked him about The In Crowd but does anyone else even remember that movie? I think I also asked him if the only reason he was wearing the hat was because his head was freakishly deformed.

A head deformity would be the next best thing to brain damage from the museum's perspective. They wouldn't ever have to worry about losing their best employee. How many acting jobs can someone with a misshapen head land?

I made the mistake of thinking that he liked me when actually he just liked my dad. More than ever, I felt that I needed to learn the truth about the man behind the hat.

That crazy soldier really brought the whole family together. My mom picked up my sister and I but we wanted to visit the museum once more. I remember being somewhat wary since the last time my parents had spent an extended amount of time together my dad had spit in my mom's face and jumped out of a moving car. Everyone got along that day, though. My dad even introduced the soldier to his ex-wife. I think both of us had given up on breaking him that summer. As we were leaving, my dad asked if anyone had ever told him that he looked like Johnny Depp. Apparently that was all it took because the soldier finally relented. He walked out of the prison and took off his hat.

They then proceeded to have a bro-fest where presumably they bonded over divorce and not having real jobs. I was dumbfounded. I couldn't believe that he actually took off his hat! His true identity was revealed, and the barriers between us were broken. Surprisingly, I wasn't thinking about how he was just a modern man...a struggling Yankee actor/divorcé who didn't even care that much about states' rights. The only thing I could think during that moment was