Please know that I understood from the beginning that these children are very talented. The first time they sang “Hey Paula” I knew I was in the presence of something special, and if I’d had any doubt Paul Macon’s rendition of the Who classic “Love Reign O’er Me” would have put it to bed. I didn’t need to hear Paula Akron take Donna Summers’ “I Feel Love” and knock it out of the park, though I’m glad that I did hear it. By the time they sang the impossible “Emotional.jpg” it became almost too much of a good thing. No, I never had any doubt about their talent.

It was all the lovey-dovey stuff that bothered me. These kids are nine years old. Nine. Not nineteen or sixteen or even thirteen. Nine. So why do they have to do the whole romantic and flirty thing? Watching them make goo-goo eyes at each other and say things like “My girlfriend and me really like singing together” just made me cringe. I didn’t want to correct him to “my girlfriend and I” as much as to “my friend and me.” Kids that age are supposed to make cute grammatical errors; they are not supposed to have lovers.

Yes, I said lovers, because they don’t present themselves as kids with a cute crush, but as two yearning souls deeply in love with each other, and more than a hint that they might be making love. Whether it’s the songs they sing (“Islands in the Stream” and “Afternoon Delight” come to mind) or Paula coquettishly suggesting that “you show me yours if I show you mine” is “nothing new” to them, the faint and unpleasant scent of childhood sex is never far away.

Mind you, it is a faint scent, so faint that you’re never quite sure that you smelled it. There is never that revelation moment when one of them says “We have sex.” No, they say just enough that we adults wonder, “Did they mean what it sounds like they meant? Maybe they didn’t mean that; maybe I’m the one with the dirty mind.” They very carefully don’t tell us that they have sex, and they almost certainly do not, but they make us think about it and frankly, I don’t want to think about nine year olds having sex with each other.

Even the suggestive stuff could perhaps be excused on the grounds that humor often skirts the boundaries of good taste. Their humor skirts the boundaries rather than crossing them because they never actually say too much (“what were Mr. and Mrs. Galore thinking” while never actually saying “Pussy”). Everything sexual is either so subtle that it can be passed off as “they didn’t mean that” (and maybe they didn’t) or can be passed off as “just a joke.”

But the love stuff isn’t subtle, it isn’t a joke, and yes they do mean it. We are fully expected to believe, to accept that they are in love, like adults are in love. When Paul calls Paula his girlfriend he means it the same way I mean it when I call Nicole my girlfriend. Nicole and I have been living together for three years. These children don’t mean it to be funny or cute or ironic or allegorical; they mean that they are a full-on romantic couple.