Sunday, September 2, 2012

YEAR ONE



Please try to ignore the glasses.


So, apparently I have a very bad memory about how this all started.  But the main components were this:  My grandmother (whom we call Gram) was visiting.   Mom was cooking dinner and made the mistake of leaving a pink plastic cook spoon too close to the electric hotplate.  This resulted in the spoon warping and bending.  So now the spoon looked kinda like a snake. And was now terrible for any kind of practical use.

I started to use the spoon as a puppet, bobbing up and down along the side of the table.  This was apparently comic gold, as we all laughed harder, particularly Gram.  "It's Norma, the Spitting Cobra!"

Now Gram (whose real name IS Norma) is laughing so hard she can't breathe.  I vaguely recall feeling the same way.  It was stupid, but amazingly funny - a phrase that accurately describes many, many things in my family.

After that night, I decided that I wanted to relive that experience.  So I created two eyes and a tongue out of paper and pasted them in the spoon.  I wrapped it up and waited until Christmas morning after all of the rest of the presents had been opened.  Then I gave it to Gram.

Success.  The hysterical laughter started all over again.  This was the first time I'd ever pulled off a multiple-month-long joke and it worked perfectly.



One year later.

Look, it was funny, but not so funny that I thought about it all the time.  I'd long since forgotten about that joke.  I was more interested in turning sixteen, girls, music, girls and girls.  So when Gram gave me a special box at Christmas that year, I thought nothing of it.....

Until I saw that she had given me back the spoon, only she had painted it gold.

Score one for Gram.

And so began the Annual Snake Spoon Contest.

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