In honor of Father's Day, a day when mothers across America buy cards for their husbands and then search all over the house for their children so that they can sign the card—they literally don't have to do anything but sign the card, look, here I already bought it—TIME magazine assembled a team of famous fathers to write open letters to their daughters. There were old dads and young dads and politician dads and musician dads and good dads and Bruce Jenner. Most of the letters were sweet, if a little dull.
One of them was a passive-agressive master class in embarrassment.
TOM. BROKAW.
Unlike most of the daughter letter recipients, NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw's three children are grown. He opens his note with standard fare about how privileged he is to be their dad, and encourages them to use the holiday to reach out to people who have lost their fathers.
Then he segues into a litany of complaints disguised as story time.
His beautiful daughter Andrea is careless with other people's belongings.
Andrea, did I yell when you left the keys to the family car on a back tire in the Bronx and it was promptly stolen? Maybe I would have been angrier had it not been just as promptly recovered.
His brilliant daughter Sarah hooks up with déclassé thieves.
Sarah, we’ll always have that New Year’s eve where I encountered your boyfriend walking through our house, drinking my precious magnum of Dom Perignon straight from the bottle.
Then he just starts talking about their menses.
The physical changes, the onset of menstruation, the attitude of adolescent boys, the hair, the cosmetics, the shoes (!)—and then, the greatest gift of all, pregnancy and birth.
Classic Brokaw dinner table fodder. Reminiscences about the onset of menstruation. A "hilarious" story about the time Andrea got the fucking car stolen in the Bronx. What ever happened to that boy Sarah used to date? The disrespectful one with a drinking problem. Oh, right, she married him. You girls sure are something. And look at those shoes. How much did those shoes cost me? Pass the scotch. Happy Thanksgiving.
Father's Day, whatever.
[TIME // Image via Getty]
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