A STICKY SITUATION

(This is a letter I sent to author, teacher and storyteller extraordinaire, Matt Dicks, after he said he could not blow bubbles. We have a bet: he thinks he can’t learn. I think I can teach him.)

Dear Matt,

So I can’t imagine being a kid and NOT blowing bubbles. I was a grand champ of East Meadow, being able to chew FIVE packs of Bazooka Bubble Gum at once and blow bubbles the size of beachballs. My mean little friend, Mary O’Leary (whose family was lace-curtain Irish) once popped a bubble I was blowing. It covered not just my face, but my bangs and the top of my head. Mary’s mother, who had the most Brooklynese accent you could imagine, thought of me as a bad influence for her daughter. This was probably because whenever I stayed for dinner, I would do something to cause Mary and her little brother Sean, to spit their milk out their noses. Once, it was by jiggling Jello on my spoon and then accidentally flipping it airborne and having it land on my nose. So when Mary burst my bubble all over my face, we dared not tell her mother. Instead, Mary tried to rub it off with a Kleenex. (Have you ever seen a “Wooly Bear” caterpillar?) The gum was so thick that when I breathed TWO bubbles came out where my nostrils should have been. Finally, her mother came in, screamed and grabbed me in a head-hold. She got the scratchiest wash cloth ever and proceeded to try to rub the gum off. I lost my eyebrows, most of my eyelashes and all of my dignity.

I tried rectifying this kind of problem by inventing bubble gum-remover on a hot plate in my “play house.” My dad, who was not meant to be a carpenter, had built me this playhouse out of 4’x8’ sheets of plywood. Why he didn’t cut the sheets down to make it kid-size, I don’t know. The play-house was more like a toll booth or an out-house, as it was 8’ tall and 4’ wide. He installed, (for whatever reason I can’t imagine) an electrical outlet in the wall. So I used to use a hot plate and an old pot in which I would concoct “medicine” and bubble-gum remover. I remember finding all kinds of interesting drugs in my folk’s medicine cabinet; things like iodine, peroxide, cough medicine, rubbing alcohol, hemmhroid cream and mineral oil, which I would “liberate” in the interest of science when my parents were out of the house. I often caught the pot on fire, but, luckily, never managed to immolate myself. The bubble-gum remover I invented seemed to work somewhat, but in the interest of aesthetics, I decided to add blue food coloring to make it more appealing to customers. After trying it on myself, I walked around the neighborhood like a miniature Pictish warrior missing my eyebrows and eyelashes but having a marvelously blue face.

What do you mean you can’t blow bubbles, Matt? You just chew up a wad of bubble gum and, in the words of Lauren Bacall, “Put your lips together and blow.”

All the Best,

Bobbie