Kablammo, you are well!
When I was in third grade, the Superintendent of Schools for my school district apparently had suffered a heart attack and was hospitalized. As a result, our teacher made us — the slave child labor, create a big get well card for a man we had never met. The whole thing was set up on the floor in the back, about 3 feet wide and 5 feet long. Don’t ask me why this man required such a large card, because I wouldn’t be able to tell you — but by virtue of having such a large card, there was a lot of space to fill up and very little creative sentiment with which to fill it.When you’re eight it’s pretty hard to come up with words of encouragement for an old man you don’t even know, but we were forced to do it anyway.
So all the kids crowded around the large paper canvas and went to work, covering it with words of encouragement. “Get Well Soon” was a popular notion. From what I can remember, various incarnations of “Get Well” or “Get Well Soon” were the only notion. This was boring.
So I drew the big bomb cartoon-like lit-fuse spherical bomb. That was my contribution. Thinking that the superintendent would be a man of discerning character such as myself that could see through the emotional fakery of my peers, buckle down with a nice cigar, swish the brandy around in the snifter and truly appreciate a classic bomb drawing from a master of the crayon-drawn floor-card art form, I drew a big bomb. A really big bomb.
Unfortunately for the Superintendent, he was never able to see my masterpiece because, upon its completion, I was told to sit in my seat while it was promptly overwritten by a heavy layer of crayon by my third grade teacher (Who by the way, looked exactly like Dee Snyder, only female and with dark hair)
To me, I was just drawing a bomb, but I guess other people could have interpreted some sort of “symbolism” in scrawling a “graphic representation of weapon of mass destruction” onto a large oversized novelty greeting card for a presumably dying man.
What-ever.
I even tried to justify the bomb in various ways that would make it suitable for its placement. “Here’s to an EXPLOSIVE recovery” and “KABLAMMO - YOU ARE WELL!” were two of my ideas. They were all for naught, my artwork was destroyed and I was disallowed from participating in group art projects along the same lines as this one for the remainder of the year.
