School Carnival Brings Out The Best
Excited kids, some wielding whistles and toy flutes, bounced around the little school gym like pinballs in sneakers.
Adults of a certain height had to be alert to avoid getting head-butted in the, um, waist by revelers not watching where they were going.
But you couldn’t really refer to Madison Elementary’s annual carnival as bedlam. The truth is, Saturday afternoon’s fund-raising festival was a marvel of organization.
Every inch of wall space was occupied by some sort of booth, from the ring toss and cork gun to face painting and giant dice. And if you didn’t want to try your hand at using a little bean bag to knock the head (a plastic milk jug) off a dummy, you could spend one of your 25-cent tickets at the putting green or at the booth where you lob a ping-pong ball onto a table of glass bowls and hope it drops into one with a card indicating that you won a goldfish.
And over at Batman’s Jail, where you could pay for the right to see someone temporarily incarcerated inside a high chain-link pen, a man with a public address system kept up a steady play-by-play. “Lisa Clark, you’re going to jail, hon.”
Balloons, streamers and posters seemed to be everywhere. People lugged around those big mortar-shell shaped soft-drink containers. And because this was Saturday in America, all ages had on an array of sports-team hats, shirts and jackets (37 different teams or colleges, by one count).
“Dante, where are you going?” a man called to a little boy who had gone from zero to 60 in .001 seconds.
Dante paused. He had no idea. But he was smiling.
The gym buzzed with a hundred weekend-happy conversations. “Everybody looks forward to the carnival,” said Jim Schibel of the Madison Elementary Parent/Teacher Organization. “For a lot of the kids, it’s the highlight of the school year.”
And for the PTO, it is a chance to help the little school at the northwest corner of Franklin Park afford some computer equipment or whatever. “We’re hoping to raise $3,000,” said Mari Haworth, a parent.
That’s a lot of raffle tickets, cotton candy and cake-walk admissions.
But every year the carnival accomplishes something even more amazing. It proves kids can get fired up about something that has nothing to do with video.
You just had to watch out for the boy moving through the crowd with the snapping porpoise-head on a stick. He should have done time in Batman’s Jail.