To be exact, I was "gifted and talented". It's true, you can ask my mom. She'll tell you. Actually don't ask her...at one point in my tender development she mistook my stubbornness for me being "slow". I was part of the GATE class - Gifted And Talented Eduction. It should serve as a hint that I attended a school system that capitalized the word "And" in order to have a clever acronym. I am convinced to this day that I made it into this illustrious program because I was smart enough to deduce that a muffler "muffles things". We did various Mensa like activities that included picture searches that were most likely lifted straight from the pages of Highlights, word searches, and one memorable dissection of a frog when we passed around the eyeball all while lounging in the old locker room on pieces of ramshackle carpeting. Perhaps we should have focused a little bit more on vocabulary considering I pronounced "specific" as "pacific" and "dilapidated" as "diplidated" for years.
In middle school we progressed to reading classics, depicting the mammals of the world in size order on long sheets of freezer paper whilst debating the need of all mammals to have human like rhino-logic anatomy, laughing like idiots when someone would inevitably sit on a protractor, hatching various deformed chicks due to the eggs being left out in a freeze prior to our incubating them, and in general sidetracking our GATE (which was then TARGET...Talented And R-something Gifted Education T-Something) teacher into talking about skiing. Heavens that woman loved to ski. I will forever remember how much she loved to ski.
The other fabulous project we participated in while in our tween years was the Invention Convention. I was reading a post over at i am baker and she had made some colored pancakes. If you happen to either be my mother or my best friend growing up, you know exactly where I'm going with this. The Invention Convention was held in the Big City and we all had to come up with a product or service (I think) and have a prototype as well as a poster board that explained our product. Now the first Invention Convention that I participated in I knew I had a winner of an idea. It involved books, Kool-Aid and fake glasses. How could I not win?!?! The idea was you attached this bookmark thing (it's still in the R&D phase) into a book and it connected to the glasses by tubes filled with powdered Kool-Aid. The sheer power of the Kool-Aid would transform the words in the book into energy and transport the book into your brain while you did something else. I even drew a kick-butt picture of the book floating above a person's head to symbolize the book having osmosified into the brain. Sadly the judges chose to ignore my brilliance and didn't even mention me in the awards ceremony.
I was determined to change that all the following year. There are few things I love in life more than breakfast. Specifically pancakes for breakfast. I didn't get Pop-Tarts or cereal or toast but pancakes, I thought, were the niche market that needed to be tapped. I envisioned frozen pancakes long before Eggo cornered the market. So I whipped up a batch and stared at them while trying to figure out how to make them stand out. I mean, they were PANCAKES. They didn't need glitz, glamor and glitter to stand out. Through much trial and error I landed on colored pancakes! Now what about syrup? Let's color that too! Who cares about red dye 40? I even theorized about selling them frozen and then popping them in the toaster in the morning. You could even include syrup packets, much like the Kellogg toaster strudel icing packs. I even went to the lengths of gluing pancakes to the poster board. Keep in mind I was a walker. I think every blessed pancake fell off that board between my house and the middle school. FYI, it is darn near impossible to reglue a pancake onto poster board. Suffice to say, while my pancakes did make it on the local news, it was not the Michelin 5 stars I was looking for. Casey, Fabio, Jenn and Dale, I feel your pain. If I'd had knives, I would've had to pack them.
Thank you, i am baker, for vindicating me these 20 long years later as I do not foresee an Invention Convention All Stars anytime soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment