Thursday, August 18, 2005

Like a Candle in the Wind, or A Shocking Disclosure

My pod-mate and co-worker-in-crime Garth Johnson has a wonderfully edgy blog call Extreme Craft. (Just visit it and you'll see what I mean.) A little while ago he turns to me and says, "Check out Extreme Craft," with a bit of devilment in his voice, if you know what I mean. So I stop my very important work for the day and pull up his website, only to find a story on, ah-hem, tampon art. But rather than register shock and pass out in my Aeron chair, I proceeded to tell him that I was doing tampon art 'way before now.

Picture this: small Christian college in Tennessee, late 60s-early 70s, not much to do but figure out ways to disgust each other, broke (financially, I mean), desperate for candles. To alleviate the candle-drought, my suite-mates and I used to turn out the most creative little tapers using cardboard tampon tubes, strings, and shaved crayons or candle-dregs. We did (I do hope) rinse out the tubes, place the string in, then melt the crayons/dregs in a metal spoon and pour into the tubes. Let them harden, peel off the cardboard tube, and - voila! - a whole mess o' 5-6" candles. If you made them with red wax, they looked kinda like used tampons (this is where the disgusting part comes in, and that's all I'm going to say about that).

The scary thing is that making tampon-candles was problably the least vile thing we did. Shoot, I had to transfer to the much-larger University of Alabama to keep from falling to the very bottom of the disgusting-sin-pit. And when I had a daughter of my own, she was strictly forbidden to go to any small Christian college. Who knew tampon art would make it into the extreme mainstream in 2005?

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