I saw something up close and personal on Friday that I have never seen before. I saw our elementary school principal, Ken Parry, get slimed. There should be a photo of the event somewhere in this paper, since that is why I was there in the first place.

Earlier this semester he offered to be slimed if PBES students met a challenge to read for 40,000 minutes. The kids met the challenge and good sport that he is, Mr. Parry paid his debt. As janitorial staff member Ann Jones poured green slime over him from head to toe, the students screamed and laughed and all the adults grinned in enjoyment.

I guess I am just not living right, but I really have never seen anyone get slimed. I will admit that I was one of the grinning adults. Actually, watching him get slimed was a great deal more pleasant than watching him kiss a squealing baby pig after the students won the reading challenge last year.

However, there is one thing about events like this that always leave me totally baffled — how do people like Jones know how to make green slime in the first place? I know it is not in the janitor’s manual because I was a janitor at the bank for 30 years and that memo never got clipped to my broom handle!

She had a couple of five-gallon buckets of the stuff that Parry had to wear home before he could get cleaned up. How do you think she knew what to pull together to make that brew? Or do you just go to the Green Slime Store and order up a couple of buckets? I expect one can get on the Internet in this day and age and find out how to make it, but I bet someone somewhere had to create a recipe way back at the beginning of slimming people for fun and laughter!

Maybe the next local club or church group to put together a recipe book as a fundraiser could include some of the following: How do you make enough mud for a mud-volleyball tournament? How do you clean up after cow-patty bingo? What are the five most aerodynamic foods to grab when someone yells “food fight” and should you always have them on hand? And how in the world do you make slime — green or otherwise?

I suppose there simply are people who know this stuff, but I am never sure how they got that knowledge. I think it might be kind of cool to go to sleep every night knowing that if you ever needed a bucket of slime, you could make one.

— SUSAN MARSHALL