Hydroplanes and hyperactivity
I haven't been to the Seafair hydro races since I worked for Rainier Brewing Co.'s PR department. Every year we'd sponsor the Rainier Cup, and every year the Miss Budweiser would win it. The Miss Bud was the Yankees of Lake Washington: an entity fueled by millions of corporate dollars for the purpose of dominating and thereby ruining what used to be a people's sport.
The local brewery's PR money could definitely have been better spent. The joke at the time was that the only thing worth placing bets on at the Rainier Cup was on how many times the Miss Bud would lap the Miss Rock, the local hydro sponsored by KISW.
One afternoon I ran a cotton-candy machine in the Rainier Pavilion near the hydro pits. A cotton-candy machine is similar to a top-loading washer -- a drum with a rapidly rotating center spindle. The spindle on a cotton-candy machine is hollow, covered with tiny pinprick holes, and possessed of a powerful heating element.
You pour colored sugar into the top of the spindle; the heat liquifies it. Colored sugar threads start shooting from the holes as the spindle spins. You lower a paper cone into the drum, grasping it at the narrow end, and revolve the cone around the spindle. The threads build up around the cone. You feel like a spider wrapping its prey.
The deal with the Rainier Pavilion was that it was twenty bucks a head to get in. After you were in, you could drink all the beer you wanted and your kids could eat all the cotton candy they wanted.
I wasn't allowed to let kids operate the machine, technically. Liquified sugar is like sweet napalm. But not only did I let them operate it, I let them use their hands instead of paper cones so they were walking around with wads of sugar wrapped around their fists. I tested this idea myself first, wrapped my hand in cotton candy, to make sure no one was going to sear their skin off. As long as you kept your hand toward the perimeter of the drum initially, it didn't hurt that much when the first threads hit. After that your hand was wrapped in protective candy floss. Totally OSHA compliant.
I was extremely popular with children that afternoon. I knew I couldn't step away from that machine for five seconds after letting them treat it as a toy, but not taking a break for six hours was a small price to pay for generating that much happiness.
One kid asked if she could have purple cotton candy, and I said she could if she knew which colors I could use to make purple. She got it right, so I poured pink and blue sugar into the spindle. When those purple threads started shooting out, she went bananas. And it was a Teachable Moment when all the other color requests immediately started up. "Isabel wants me to make green. Who knows why I can't make green?"
Now that I'm grown up, I'm friends with enough parents to realize that I was very probably making life more difficult for a lot of parents that day. I'm still not sorry. That's what you get when you're at the all-you-can-drink bar and you tell Caitlin and Hunter to go play.