Come to find out, teachers at some schools celebrate milestone birthdays like nerds at Intel celebrate returns from sabbatical, by sprucing the honoree's space in the most obnoxiously creative way possible. My teacher friend Jen turned 30 on Thanksgiving, which meant that my Monday before Thanksgiving was spent with 400 sheets of vibrant tissue paper and a bottle of Trader Joe's finest $5 merlot in giddy preparation.
Decoration ideas previously tossed around were:
~ cover everything in post it notes
~ wrap everything in tin foil
~ and (my personal favorite) fill her room with turkeys. Not real ones, just all the foul varieties that are available this time of year. Sadly, that project would have required an extra month of planning and six more jugs-o-merlot, resources that I did not have available to me.
We settled on making poofs/pom poms/tissue flowers for her ceiling with the theme, "Poof...You're 30!" The adorable crew of laborers I brought in off the street folded, cut and fluffed their hearts out to prep the room for her Wednesday morning arrival.
Wait, just listen. Before you accuse me of going too cutesy and not enough obnoxious on this project, let me fill you in a little more about the birthday girl. Yes, she is a petite, perky elementary school teacher, but mixed in with that bag of sunshine is a Boston street girl, full of snark, who is the only person I know that has personally keyed a car. She knows that her theoretical ballz are so huge that two Halloweens ago when she dressed up as a male flasher scientist, she made me sew on not one, but three beef whistles. (No joke. I'll send you a picture if you ask.) Add into the mix her recent puke-a-thon sickness and that she had visitors arriving on Thursday.
Nope, not a chance. I wasn't going to be the one to wrap her comfy teacher chair in tin. Fun, festive and easy clean-up won out. For my own safety.
Our poof instruction came from SupaFlowaPowa on YouTube. Her tutelage is exceptional...in a video that makes you want to stick your face through the screen and tell her friends to, "Shut the hell up."
We even arranged the desks in celebration, a detail that went unnoticed due to that petiteness I mentioned earlier.
I penciled out a quick sign and the youngsters helping added in the color, followed by a barrage of verbal spelling wisecracks. Smart little bastards. We left it, and no one even brought it up the next day at school.
When I gave it to her she said, "Aww cute! Where is the rest of the pan?" I had them in my car at the time, but forgot to give them to her. This morning I woke up in a cold sweat, gasping for air from the nightmarish image of her standing on the hood of my car. Her shiny car key twinkling in her right hand and the freshly carved middle finger sketch gleaming next to the "Birtday This!" scraped by her feet.
She isn't savage like that in real life, only if you mess with her family and friends. Or her dogs. Or that one time earlier this year when a bartender cut her off, not believing that she was really over 21.
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