Today I was assigned to the AFLCIO Labor Day picnic in Magna. If I had been Ben, this would have been one of several places to be, but my role was confined to that one event.
When I first sighted the booth I was filled with excitement. There was a line leading to it at least a hundred feet long filled with families eager for the front. "Wow!" I thought, Ben's popularity in Magna is huge!
Then, when I got to the booth itself, I found two large spinning tubs filled with pink gosamer thread, orange shirted volunteers spinning as fast as the tubs, and a huge sign reading "FREE COTTON CANDY."
When the volunteers caught sight of me their unanimous expression was "Help!"
Never in my life had I made cotton candy. This moment had the feel of joining a circus fifteen minutes into a show and being told, "You're the clown."
Under the best of circumstances the creation of cotton candy is not a neat affair. When you have no idea what you're doing, soon you resemble a giant sized version of the very thing you're handing out. By the time my shift was over the incredible hulk could have picked me up, placed me against a wall, and I would have stuck there.
Never the less, everyone should do it at least once. Only Santa Claus gets to make this many kids happy in such a short period of time. And there's the additional advantage of watching a candidate, wrapped up like a fly in a web of pink sugar, trying to convince people they should vote for him.
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