I was blearily going through my Bloglines feed tonight, catching up with all of you fabulous, prolific people, when I came across this Monday Baby Blogging picture at Alas, a Blog:
The gleeful look - the empty pudding cup - it reminded me of a long-forgotten story.
It's a spring day and I'm in Grade One French Immersion. My incredibly mean and bitchy teacher Madame White gives each of us a big sheet of yellow construction paper and tells us it's fingerpainting time! We are excited until we see that there is only one colour of paint and it's brown. "It looks like dog doo!" whispers Bo Froberg, to general hilarity. That Bo, man - he knew comedy. Madame White brings the paint bucket around and spoons a big, wobbling, turd-like mass onto each of our papers. Then, as we all prepare to "paint", she breaks the news that the paint we are using is poisonous and could kill us. So we'd better be careful not to get any near our mouths because we'd die and "our parents probably wouldn't miss us because we were all such brats".
As if asking us to fingerpaint with dog shit paint that could kill us isn't enough, Madame White gives us each such a big dollop of paint that it's not really like fingerpainting anymore. It's more like paint PUSHING. So we're all pushing this smooth brown paint around on the yellow construction paper and I notice that the texture of this paint feels a little . . . funny. It's not gritty like tempura paint, it's slippery and . . . oddly familiar. So I wait until Madame is not looking and then I lean over my page. I sniff the paint.
The paint smells like chocolate.
I resume my paint pushing as Madame wanders my way, but the second her back is turned, I stick out my little tongue and take a taste of the poisonous brown paint. And that is when I start shouting "IT'S PUDDING!! IT'S PUDDING!! C'EST LE POUDING!! LE POUDING!!" I frantically lick pudding off my hands, then move on to tongue my entire sheet construction paper. Other kids around me start doing the same. There are gasps! There are cries of joy! Everywhere, kids are eating pudding!
Basically, I started a Grade One RIOT. Kids were lickin' the paper, lickin' each other - Cameron Musgrave and Chad Onyschuk found the original bucket of paint and started eating pudding by the handful and flinging it around - it was a pudding MASSACRE.
Afterward, I had a long, pudding-smeared wait in the principal's office. And thus, my career as a food outlaw began.
