The first time I watched it happen, it was like diving into an unheated swimming pool. I knew the shock was coming, but it was a shock anyway.

When the moment was done, I squeezed my eyes shut, with the image bouncing around my brain. Then I shook my head, opened my eyes and decided I could live.

"Are you OK?" my mom asked.

"Sure!" I said bravely. Then I felt a pat on my shoulder, and looked around at my ex-wife's next-door neighbors, who were laughing at me.

The second time I watched, it was easier -- and even easier the third, the fourth, the fifth, sixth and onward.

Two nights later I watched again, and by the end I was admiring the way my beautiful, sweet, largely innocent 16-year-old daughter was curling her hand lovingly on the back of the boy's head as she kissed him. I was proud of how real it looked, which was, I must say, among the more bizarre moments of my life -- and is certainly testament to the ability of the human mind to adjust to the apparently unthinkable.

It may help that I had had lots of lead time to prepare. From the time my daughter's school announced that "Oklahoma!" would be the spring musical, I knew what was coming. My daughter is a full-blown theater geek, can sing and has been somehow blessed with the comedic-acting thing. She had Ado Annie written all over her.

For those who don't know the show, Ado Annie is a rather dim-witted and overly hormonal -- though essentially innocent -- Oklahoma farm girl who, in her signature song, notes that she "cain't say no" to the local cowboys when they "get flirty, and start to talk purty."

"Other girls play coy and hard to get, but other girls ain't havin' any fun," she sings. "Every time I lose a wrestlin' match, I have a funny feeling that I've won."

Yoy.

Now, it's all about getting kisses -- a proposed hotel overnight is taken as a proposal of marriage. But Annie notes that "kissin's my favorite food," and spends the play planting serial smooches on both a cowboy beau who wants to marry her and a Persian peddler who she only thinks wants to marry her.

At first I thought that perhaps, it being high school and all, they would do the turn-the-head-and-make-it-look-good-without-contact brand of stage kissing.

"No," she told me early on in rehearsals. "They're going to be real." The director had made that clear.

I noted that while the director did have a daughter, his daughter was still in the non-verbal diaper-wearing stage, and that he thus did not understand what he was doing to me. She laughed, somehow assuming I was joking.

As the weeks wore on, I kept asking her if they'd rehearsed the kissing scenes yet. "No," she kept saying. "Do you have to keep asking me that?"

Actually, darling, yes, I do.

"I'm not exactly looking forward to this, you know, and it doesn't help to have you asking all the time."

I acknowledged the reasonable nature of that statement, and did my best not to talk about it, and not to think about it too much. So when it actually started, I didn't even know for two days.

"It was really hard," she said -- but noted that the two boys, both theater veterans but neither with stage-kiss experience, were more nervous than she was.

"I told them this has to be a good show, and we're gonna have to do it, and we're gonna have to do it right," she said, giving me the oddest, most twisted twinge of pride I'd ever experienced.

It got easier as the weeks went by, she said, which is either good or bad -- I haven't figured out which. And it got easier for me to think about it, too.

Of course, seeing it proved to be rather more challenging than thinking about it was, and it did not help that her microphone sent every smack over the loudspeakers. Even so, I was congratulating myself on my maturity by the time the show ended. I even managed to congratulate her for that curling, embracing hand, drawing her beau to her as a young woman might in life.

"You made it look very real," I said.

"Who says it wasn't real?" she asked.

Huh?

"But you made it look like it was fun," I said.

She colored slightly. "It was fun."

"But you said …"

"I got used to it." She said once she got over the strangeness, sho got into character -- when she kissed, it was Ado Annie kissing Will Parker, and Ado Annie really liked kissing Will Parker.

Besides, she noted, the boy who played Will Parker was a really good kisser.

WHAT?!

She shrugged. "What can I say? He was."

As you all might imagine, I dropped the conversation there, after making a mental note to go out the next day for anti-anxiety meds and a shotgun.