When I was 9 years old, the fine folks at Virginia Road Elementary School experimented on us kids. You see we had lost the brick building that housed our cafeteria to the big Sylmar Quake in February of 1971 and so we now got bag lunches instead of yummy cafeteria food. For some reason they decided to pack French dressing in those little plastic packets we are all now familiar with. Of course it was horrible. Nobody wanted to eat it. So some kids had a great idea, let's use it for fighting.
We would collect the packets at lunch time and hide them in the cloak room until after school. Then, out on the sidewalk, we would place them on the ground and stomp them with flying orange results. The splatter was fantastic, and we transformed new clean clothes into wonderous patterns of stains of the sort all of the Tide commercials promised they could remove. Of course we were encouraged to stop by the administration, but their problem was twofold.
This kind of battle is absolutely irresistable to 9 and 10 year old boys. It is impossible to convince us that this was anything but the most hilarious fun that could be had. Nasty smelly orange French dressing that nobody liked could serve no better purpose than marking nons, hooks, punks and poohbutts in after-school wars. We kings of the school had our obligations. But not only that, they kept supplying us with the goop. What are we supposed to do, just throw away food?
The experiment lasted a week, but I still remember.
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