Of Frogs and Parents

There is nowhere you can go to get away from a Frog. Frogs have been in every borough of The City, in every suburb, and even in the outerlying exurbs of New Paltz. I'm talking about the Rolex of strollers, the Bugaboo Frog.

By "Rolex," I mean overpriced-and-ostentatious. After all, no one needs an $800 stroller that doesn't fold up any more than they need a $10,000 watch that doesn't release endorphins directly into the bloodstream. But Richie and Ricki Rich have been tootling around town with Junior in an extravagant perambulator ever since some Scandinavian genius realized that there was a market for a miniature, manual Mercedez.

The selling point of the Bugaboo series appears to be their complete uselessness for anything other than pushing. They hold almost nothing in the basket below the baby and they are heavy. They are huge when open, but when folded up, they seem to require even more space, necessitating a 1970s-era stationwagon for storage. I believe that most models are offered with a Dominican or Haitian babysitter, tho some parents deign to push the godforsaken things themselves.

I was on a crowded subway train when one such couple attempted to board with their wee one in a Frog. By "in" I mean that they had made no attempt to fold the nearly unfoldable stroller; they had simply made the decision that all of us should make way for their huge stroller and equally huge heads. Everyone looked at them with raised eyebrows, but only one of us knew just what to say. Donning my cape, I lowered my voice a half octave, pointed to my left and in my best Grey Poupon accent said, "The first-class car is at the front of the train. You can get off at the next stop and make a run for it before the subway starts again."