Shop till she drops ... you

THE DOG HAS THE hiccups. The wife has a cold. Let’s get out of the house.

“Anybody wanna go shopping?” I ask, and a couple of the kids actually leap on my shoulders and board me like a bus.

“Let’s go!” says the little guy.

“Let’s go!” says the lovely and patient older daughter.

“Where are you all going?” asks a pretty woman with a little red nose and a ginormous box of Kleenex.

“Kansas,” I say.

On the way, we stop in Pasadena, which is sort of the Kansas of the West Coast. What I like about Pasadena is that you inevitably see a woman with hair like Tricia Nixon, which is not a bad thing at all. Of all the Nixon girls, she was undoubtedly the hottest. Next, of course, was Checkers.

“Dad, this way,” says the older daughter.

“Where?”

“Over here,” she says.

I am, evidently, in good hands. My daughter knows the best place to park near the Macy’s on Lake. Or, at Paseo Colorado, she knows the easiest way to get in and out of that ghastly parking garage. Seriously, she’s like the Tchaikovsky of shopping.

“What are all these people doing here?” I ask as we enter the store.

“Quit joking, Dad,” she says.

Who’s joking? The place is packed. It is packed with unhappy-looking middle-aged women who don’t appear to be enjoying the holidays much at all, the obligations pressing down upon them like a harsher form of gravity.

“Where are the purses?” my older daughter asks a nice lady who is about 4 feet tall.

“Downstairs,” the nice lady grunts.

Downstairs, people are moving herky-jerky in no discernible pattern. We have wandered into one of those ‘60s holiday specials, where everything is done in Claymation. I can find no order to it, no rules of the road. Usually, in a foreign country like this, you can adjust pretty quickly.

“Over here, Dad,” says the older daughter.

“Catch me,” says the little guy, pinballing down an aisle.

I love shopping. I do it once or twice a year with such passion that I have to go home afterward to lie down for a few days.

Tonight, we are out shopping for a birthday gift for their mother (Dec. 12, same as Sinatra). She wants a purse. A place to put all her money.

“Our friends only like us because we’re rich,” I joked the other night at dinner, drawing perhaps the biggest laugh of the year. I swear the boy almost swallowed his tongue.

So I find it doubly ironic that my wife wants a purse for her birthday. I guess it’ll be a good place to keep all the “past due” notices we get.

“I wonder where the lingerie is?” I say.

“Dad, that’s just sick,” she says.

“Not for me, silly,” I explain. “For your mother.”

I tell her how my buddy Paul came up with this idea that sporting goods stores should have lingerie sections. That way, most men would never have to shop at more than one place. Ideally, the lingerie would come in NFL colors. Steelers. Dolphins. Bears. Talk about hot. I swear, if I ever run across a woman with Tricia Nixon hair, wearing a Chicago Bears negligee ...

“That’s the stupidest idea ever,” my daughter says.

“Oh, you haven’t heard Paul’s other ideas,” I say.

We look -- no kidding -- at about 50 purses; such is the trade-off of bringing your older daughter along to help shop.

“This one?” I say.

“Too many buckles,” my daughter says.

“This?” asks the little guy.

“That,” says his big sister, “is a toaster.”

Soon, we are at the counter, where the clerk swoons over the little guy, with his big brown eyes and Redford-colored hair. This happens everywhere we go. It’s really starting to annoy me. Ever since he played a morose, sullen Joseph in the preschool Christmas play, he’s been insufferable. The critics just raved.

“That’s a nice purse,” the clerk tells him.

“For my Mommy,” he explains.

“It’s her birthday,” I say.

“Well, happy birthday!” the clerk tells my daughter who is 23 and doesn’t really fancy being mistaken for my wife.

To her, it means one of two things: She looks older than she really is. Or, she looks like the sort of woman who would marry an older guy like me for money. A guy who still wears Topsiders and rugby shirts. Strangely, neither thought appeals to her.

“You should be flattered,” I tell her as we leave.

“Dad,” she says, “the woman actually thought we were married.”

And that, I believe, is the last time the two of us will ever be seen together.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com. His MySpace address is myspace.com/chriserskine.