As tonight’s show begins, Mother is dotingly plucking at my tufty blue hair. "Zackie, this is a big night for you," she says. "Tonight I reveal your song."

"I’m not singing ****."

"Don’t say that, sweetheart. It’s the song I sang to you when you were a baby."

From a speaker behind a jar of red carnations on the TV trolley comes a raspish honking: "You’ll need to get the whole **** Britney Spears vocal production team if you want Zacko to do his own singing." It’s my brother D’Alice, in the whirlpool out on the patio.

"Ignore him," Mother tells me. "He’s jealous, poor ****."

Last summer, Mother had D’Alice and four neighborhood boys rehearsing with boa constrictors, Twisted Sister wigs, and a calisthenics video in our basement. But after the other boys’ parents heard Mother had sent tapes to DreamWorks and Lou Pearlman, having so many managers took the fun out of being in a band, and the boys dispersed. D’Alice has been sardonic and aimless ever since.

And now, ever since Mother heard Sharon Osbourne had got her co-star, break-out showbiz client, and younger daughter, Kelly, to record "Papa Don’t Preach," (the old Madonna number) for an album of the Osbourne family’s musical favorites, choosing my first single has become one of our family’s front-burner storylines.

"Sharon is a **** genius!" Mother testifies again tonight, quickly recapping our recent episodes for new viewers. "But why drag that old **** out of the trash?"

My sister Flowie (camera six), busy at the microwave preparing the cream cheeses, calls from the kitchen: "That Catholic slut routine is so Midwestern-grand-daddy’s **** fantasy. Some MTV chick gets herself knocked up? Like she’s not going to keep the baby? It’s probably some Hollywood **** producer’s kid. How is her papa not happy as ****? That song has never made sense to me."

Flowie’s astute cynicism is new. For years, she was the favorite, but lately, Mother has shifted her hopes onto me. She hasn’t taken Flowie to a fan mob at the mall since last Spring Break. Just the other day, when Eminem was signing autographs at the Virgin store over in Blooming Grove Shoppers Common, though Flowie had wheedled and blackmailed for weeks, Mother went alone.

"Besides," D’Alice shoves in. "Sharon and Ozzy and their overstuffed pups are –"

"D’Alice Mel Cooper!" Mother screams. She is saving to have her tummy roll removed, and the thought of the surgery so terrifies her no one is allowed even inadvertently to hint at it.

Now D’Alice hoists himself out of the tub (monitor four) and lumbers dripping naked and braying across the living room (monitor two) until he is bulging with rage in Mother’s face. "All I was going to say, my dear Lady Fanny of Couchmoor, is that the Osbournes are British. And in Britain the expression ‘I’m in trouble deep’ doesn’t mean pregnant. A little British slag would say, ‘Diddy, ‘mafraid one of the lads has gone and tossed a chip up me bloomin’ duff!’ That’s all I was going to say, by your **** leave, Your Highness."

"Put your **** microphone back on, you hefty-sack of puke. Are you trying to give me a haematoma?" Mother rages back.

"If you ask me," through the hidden speaker and the patio doors comes the Darth Vader voice of our older sister Kimber Lee, who during the webcast wears a voice-altering box and a veil made out of a Survivor buff, "Sharon is using Kelly and Madonna to send a message to her own father. She is saying, ‘Daddy, I kept my baby,’ meaning, ‘I kept Ozzy, my life with him, my commitment to him and our family, and I’ve done very well and I’m very happy. So there. **** you and your hierarchies of power.’"

Despite her own enormous pre-pubescent promise as a gymnast, Kimber Lee will not believe Mother was ever a sacredly coveted groupie, enjoyed ritualistically in occultish hotel-room-trashing orgies by the princes of Halloween-costume rock. ("Whenever Judas Priest came through town, my name was high on their list of backstage demands," Mother still likes to say, both on and off the Net.) But ask Kimber Lee who paid all our Ivy League tuitions and she has no answer.

"Get your ugly **** the **** out of camera three!" Mother shrieks. And "Why don’t you go check your e-mail, superstar," Flowie hollers. D’Alice collapses in the chair and grunts a defeated "****."

"In other news, now," says Mother, suddenly fresh and unflappable, "Thank you, Sharon, for the gift again this morning. But why no fancy wrapping, no ribbons and bows? You were always the classy one."

"OH-hh, puh-LEEZE, MUH-ther," wheeze-growls Kimber Lee. "That is not Sharon Osbourne’s **** in the driveway. That is Nando’s ****. Prince Zacko runs him up and down the driveway until he dumps one, and then puts him back in the garage to chew at his abscesses all day. That wretched dog has never had a proper walk in his whole miserable life."

"Come in here where I can slap you! Don’t tell me I don’t know ****. You be glad you haven’t got a desperate delusional showbiz-**** of a mother zombie-pimp-sucking the life out of you."

Now Kimber Lee is in the living room slowly baton-twirling the barbecue fork: "If you’ve got crack, woman, and you’re holding out on us, you will be one sorry **** when I find it."

Diva.

Mother turns from her, to camera seven, her medium shot. She strokes my head, which has been lying in her lap, my neck under her forearm, all this time. "You’re going to do a song that will do your father proud. And when he calls for us to come to his land, we’ll take Flowie with us, we’ll be a real family and have a real show, and we’ll leave these two ungrateful **** to hack pieces off each other and eat them.

"Maybe I could write a song," I offer. (Secretly I have already written four.)

"I’ll bet you could, baby. Your father was always writing songs. You also have his slender agility and his handsome nose. But your first single will be a sly interpretation of a pop classic, a cutting, winking comment on the throw-away existential flukiness of your new-found celebrity. And if the single flops you can say it was **** that should have flopped in the first place, you were just killing it for the pleasure of finally watching it die the way it should have died years ago.

I see a nerve. It is my moment. I strike.

"Is it KISS, Mother? Is it ‘(I Wanna) Rock and Roll All Nite?’"

A direct hit! Mother panic-slaps my head, as if it is a half-eaten cat D’Al has thrown in her lap.

"Get off me, you parasitic Oedipal **** fuzz-mold! You’re going to do "Billie Jean," and you’re going to do it till you own it if I have to rip your **** off." I roll off the couch coughing with laughter and kidney punches just as Flowie comes in screaming, "Get your horny **** troll feet off the coffee table!"

Kevin Baker writes humor and fiction in Edmonton, Canada.