Cornbread and the Latex Festival:

My daughter was knocking around last weekend with, as usual, nothing to do. She recently had the latest serious tiff with her two friends living in our building. It must have been, maybe, tiff #22 at least. They happened on a regular bases and I can’t think of a full week that they could ever get through without one.

As she sat sprawled across the kitchen table and whined about her state of boredom, I threw out that she should think of something creative to do and stop getting on my last nerve. Eventually she wandered away then came bounding back about an hour later, bursting with plans. Plans for a festival the next day at 2 o’clock, my presence and her brother’s was mandatory. I acknowledged that this was a very creative thing to do and asked her what kind of festival she would be throwing. She obviously hadn’t thought that far ahead. She looked around the kitchen and triumphantly declared that it was a Latex Festival.
Ok then…..!
I’m in the process of painting the apartment and have cans of latex paint in a jumble on the kitchen floor. The place is a resounding mess. At least the paint cans inspired my daughter….
I decided to reward her creativity with cornbread. It’s the easiest thing in the world to make, at least the recipe I came up with from years ago for situations just like now: no time to spare in the midst of a project:

Get a box of Jiffy Cornbread Mix and an 8.5 oz. can of Creamed Corn. You can find both in any market be it super or the corner store.
Dump the mix in a bowl; add the creamed corn and one egg.
Mix it up to moisten the dry ingredients. You don’t need much more then that.
Bake in a 400 degree oven until toothpick inserted comes out clean.
The package says it will make 12 muffins but I don’t buy it. I think it could make 6 of a good size. I just use a buttered loaf pan and check it after 20 minutes or so.
A slice with butter and strawberry preserves slathered on is a snack that is hard to beat.

The day of the festival dawned to the smell of paint fumes and apartment chaos. I continued painting. By this time, two weeks into the job, I was numb. The idea of a certain Greek blue for the window frames, the door frames and the base boards that I envisioned for the place, while I sat at the kitchen table, had turned into a huge pain in the ass. I dreamed blue at night. Try getting straight lines of dark blue against white walls that have been painted so many times the junction at the trim looks like pie crust! The building was new in 1931 so you can imagine some of the issues. I call my apartment Sag Harbor: It ‘harbors’ the kids and I while all the floors ‘sag’ in the middle.
My son has to be pried awake at exactly five minuets to two. On the weekends I rarely see him conscious until three or four in the afternoon, but this was a special occasion. He waited, blurry eyed, with me at the bedroom door. As per instructions I knocked and when my daughter asked for the password from the other side I replied–no surprise here…–‘Latex’.

We crammed into the jumble of a room, with all the furniture scrunched into the middle and a narrow passage way around the heap. It too was strewn with obstacles in the way of paint splattered news paper piles, a huge mound of laundry on the radiator that shed its contents on the floor, rolled up area rugs and stacks of books.

The first game was called ‘Just Shoot Me’. Artie instructed us to back up while she crouched behind her bed. We moved back a far as we were able, about four and a half inches. We had each been given a small bag of old crayons. As Artemis held up her various Bratz dolls and naked Barbies her brother and I took crayon shots at them. The winner got an old lipstick A had snitched from my make-up bag.
The next, and the winner Hector and I both agreed, was ‘Hit the Samurai’. Artemis went by the window, with a lampshade on her head and my maroon kimono on, she dodged our wax missiles with a plastic sword.

There was ‘Take a Guess’ and ‘Pick a Bag’ and ‘Futurama’ to play as our fun time at the festival continued. H managed to do most of his game strategy while sprawled on my bed and since most all the prizes were pilfered jewelry and makeup items he passed them all to me and clutched the one prize he liked. He won it at the ‘Pick a Bag’ booth. It was a small lavender pig. The game was a synch: All you had to do was pick one of the black plastic grocery bags that were bunched on the pillows. Find a crayon and you got zilch, anything else was a prize to keep and when Booder found the card he got the pig.

In ‘Take a Guess’ Hector had to lift himself up on one elbow to see the items placed on the dresser that was now crammed up against the bed. We could look at the various items there and after we closed our eyes Artie took something away, we had to identify it by its absence. This took another eight minutes to play. By the end I had won back my entire make up bag, and then it was on to ‘Futurama’.

Artemis, now garbed in her fortune telling getup , gave us a bag with scrapes of paper that we picked one at a time. She would use her powers to tell us what our futures held. Mostly she guessed wrong. My two favorites were “You will marry a bad wife” and “You will live in a junkyard”.

We closed the festival (it lasted close to thirty eight minutes), with a Scavenger Hunt. I won this hands down. Even amidst all the mess I could find the many items Artie had stashed almost in plain sight. Hector never had a chance–he who stands at the open refrigerator door for many minutes staring into its interior looking for the milk that is entirely in front of his face! We all received a reward for this event; I got the gold, Boo the silver and Artie the copper of the key chains she had me pay for at the 99cent store.

We all claimed the affair a huge success and maneuvered our way into the kitchen for some warm cornbread and jam. Next years’ festival is already in the works and she’s going to add a food stand that I’m slated to stock.