The Towering Inferno of Ooze

Another school year another round of school birthday celebrations. Every year the sweets that parents send in is mind boggling. These days some kids even have birthday pizzas which are shared with their class. But that’s another story. 

What happened to the days when you came to school on your birthday and you got to wear the class birthday crown all day and feel special? Nowadays it’s almost a contest in some classrooms of who can put together the best bag of treats or build the biggest cupcake to feed the class of sweet starved children. And not only do the students in that class get the benefits, our teachers are always willing to have the birthday child take around the “leftovers” to the office staff. Thanks to their generosity my stomach and thighs are due for a nip and tuck or at least more running through the halls. I didn’t realize that sugar could be such a job hazard. The amount of food I’ve received on “birthdays” (not my own) would feed a sugar starved army. Cookies are becoming the standard fare, but cupcakes are still in the running, while bags of chips WITH a juice pouch or can of soda are starting to hedge in.

So anyway, the office door opened the other day and in wobbled two kindergarteners, their faces stained red in crude Bozo the Clown type makeup. Horrified, I thought they were coming in for first aid, until I saw the poster sized cardboard they carried between them. On it were perched the last of what apparently had been a life-size portrait of the birthday child done in brilliantly colored iced cupcakes at least that’s what the icing outline left on the cardboard looked like. 

Apparently, the cupcake artist was used to do paintings in plaster or something because the thickness of the icing on each cupcake could have been used to slow down fifty skiers in a downhill slalom race, it rose a good three inches above any cake matter inside the paper cup. At each step the students took the last of these three inch cupcakes were skirting back and forth across the cardboard coming dangerously close to the unguarded edge of the board and threatening to glop anything in their path with garish colors of sweet creamy glue. They made their way in through the door, sideswiping a teacher seated on a chair. She jumped back to avoid “cream-a-tion” with a particularly bright blue confection. After a quick conferral, the two students asked if she wanted to partake of their concoction. She smiled and shook her head no and they were off toward my desk. 

“Hi, Mrs. Simmons, do you want a cupcake?” (No, not really...) “Well, sure, whose birthday is it?” I asked reaching under a mass of red icing as I began extracting one cupcake. “It’s Joseph’s” the lesser smeared face said of the other. I looked at Joseph, I guess it was Joseph, with the icing all over his face it was hard to tell. “Happy Birthday, Joseph!” I smiled as something wet and gooey dropped on my hand. A lump of red colored icing looking something like the towering inferno tilted dangerously over my hand as I grasped for anything solid under the mass of sweetness. Finally feeling something paper-like I pulled gently. It wouldn’t budge. The last of the cupcakes were so fused together with icing that pulling them apart would take a blow torch. I smiled trying to make more birthday conversation with Bozo, I mean Joseph and friend, as I carefully jerked the bottom of the cupcake and came away with just... the cake in the paper cup, no icing! Hoorah! 

“Oh, you didn’t get any icing!” Joseph exclaimed. “No problem, I like it like this!” I hurriedly reassured him as he began to pull icing globs off the cardboard offering to top my cake. I pulled away my cupcake and said thank you. “Why don’t you offer the principal one?” I smiled sweetly and saw my boss give me a disparaging look as I turned away and smothered a laugh. Have Fun!