I’ve never had a better acting class than parenting a small child. Be in the moment? Yeah, you’d better be. Your fellow actor is big ole divo hell-bent on harming himself and his co-stars (me, dada, the cats). He’s also drunk and doesn’t know his lines. But the show must go on!

If you are an actor (bless yer heart) you have probably heard of Sanford Meisner. This feller was an acting teacher who chain-smoked, survived a larygectomy and being hit by a car (or was is a bus?). He was a tough old bird. In his later years, he frolicked on an island with his life partner in the Caribbean. He was also the originator of the repetition exercise, which is a fundamental of the Meisner Technique.

The purpose of the repetition exercise is to get actors to respond to their partner’s behavior instead of the text. Actors repeat and repeat and repeat a simple observation until something makes them change. My son is becoming a master of the repetition exercise. “No” and “Mine” are on repeat as is “Baby Shark?” but perhaps the most insidious phrase is “Nonni come back?”

Every morning, we hear “Nonni come back?” about 25 times. I haven’t actually counted, but 25 feels right. Ballpark 23-28 times. Nonni is my son’s best friend and grandmother, so he wants to know when she will be arriving next, even though he doesn’t understand time. Who does, really? Is it a construct? Is it linnear? A spiral? What is space-time? Can it bend?

But I digress. Nonni is awesome because she actually knows how to parent a small child. We don’t, really. I mean, we’re learning, but Nonni has had 3 children and has 5 grandchildren, so she’s got mad skills. And she brings her iPad. Nonni is the Fonzi of grandparents. Comparatively, Dada and I are Potsie or Al.

“Nonni come back?” loses its meaning after about the 10th time, resulting in a phenomenon called “semantic satiation”. Semantic satiation is when you repeat a word until it just becomes sounds without meaning. Fully sated with “Nonni come back?”, we begin to lose our patience and react in the moment instead of dwelling on the text: kind of what Meisner intended.

My lines are “She’s coming back Monday” and I can only respond to him honestly, which after the 100th repetition is with boredom and frustration. But I roll with it, because he is responsive and filled with emotional truth. He is also a comedic genius, so there’s a lot to like there.