Pat Mills | Babysitting Andy / 2007

is andy still crazy?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Pat Mills (screenwriter and director) Babysitting Andy / 2007 [11 minutes]

 

Andy (Tatum Knight) is a precocious nine year old, more of a tomboy than a girly princess who bedevils her proper parents with questions like, as we first encounter her at the breakfast table, “what does ‘fellatio’ mean?” Her father (Stephen Bogaert) insists she is not old enough to be told, while her mother (Linda Kash), although obedient to her husband’s decision, suggests they just tell her and get it over with. But he recalls the “rim job” incident, which evidently created quite a stir previously within family life. Certainly, Andy knows what that means. The young girl is also a sugar addict.

     Finally, the mother determines to tell her daughter, but almost as soon as she begins she cannot find the proper words to explain it, and the child again is at a loss of what this word must mean that no adult is willing to share with her.

      But also at that very same moment, the mothers goes into labor, immediately calling her brother Paul (Thomas Michael) and his lover Nelson (Ryan Kelly) to come babysit Andy while she rushes off to the hospital.

     At first, after their last experience with Andy, Paul refuses at even this momentous moment. But obviously he and Nelson cannot let his sister down no matter what kind of monster Andy is.

    The two show up, but unbeknownst to us, we perceive that both are physically challenged, wheel-chair bound men. Paul’s first question: “Is Andy still crazy?” says it all. And yes, the nine-year-old kid is still crazy.

   What we also have never before seen is the house itself, made up of numerous open, rail less, stairways, the worst possible house on earth for well-chair bound people. Andy greets them in her fort, which she insists they cannot touch, with a supersoaker gun filled with, as we later discover, cat pee.

      While they are trapped, she sits on the steps, sniffing her magic marker pen, taking out a cigarette to smoke, and eating a full bowl of the sugar her mother has refused her. Paul gladly accepts the cigarette, which when Nelson comments that he thought he long-ago quit, he answers he still smokes on special occasions, such as when being harassed by a nine-year-old.

      Her big question remains: what does ‘fellatio’ mean?”

      When Paul once more refuses to answer her question, she runs off back up the multiple staircase, up to something, as Paul suggests, either eating sugar or smelling her marking pen. From on high she now drops an egg on Paul’s head. Paul, wheels over and grabs her cardboard fort, demanding she put down the eggs. Threatened with her fort’s destruction. Finally, Nelson picks

up the supersoaker gun, and demands she put down the eggs and that his lover put down the fort. Do you promise to put down the eggs if I tell you what “fellatio” means? he asks her.

     Nelson, on discovering what he has in the gun, is now himself disgusted. Why can’t you just tell me what it means. I’m going to find out when I get older, why can’t you just tell me now, Andy reasons.

      But when he begins to explain it, Paul again objects, and Nelson picks up the gun again and forces them both to empty their hands, Andy of the eggs, Paul of the fort he holds over his head.

      Nelson begins the difficult task of explaining that fellatio is when a man puts his penis in someone’s mouth…and almost immediately, Andy shouts out, “Oh my god, a blow job?” totally disappointed that such a mysterious word is simply another name for what she already well comprehends. Why didn’t you all just tell me that?

      Nelson, a bit startled, asks “You know what a blowjob is?”

      She looks directly at him and responds; “Hello. Haven’t you ever heard of the internet?”

     Of course, if she’s that smart she might just as easily have looked it up for herself. And frankly, I don’t believe the whole story. Who with an iota of intelligence would ask two wheel-bound gay men to care for a monster of a child in a completely inaccessible space? And if her parents had already comprehended that she knew what a “rim-job” was, how could they not suspect that she would quickly be able to assimilate the word fellatio?

     We now see her bringing down a mattress from upstairs, and destroying her cardboard fort just so that she might create a ramp to bring them upstairs, have evidently determined that her uncle and his lover are, after all, real friends. And she tells them that she is now determined to become a lesbian, because she finds the whole idea of fellatio to be really gross, no offense.

       In short: cute yes; believable no.

 

Los Angeles, August 21, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).