Hot Chicks and El Perro Fumando

While in college, I was extremely fortunate that my mother opted to keep some of the Easter festivities in practice despite the fact that I was 300 miles away and buried in research papers. No, she didn’t hire campus police to hide Easter eggs in the academic halls of William and Mary. But she did prepare a confectionary-fest of an Easter basket, whose candy and sweets were of great help when a sugar rush was needed to read more on Prague Spring or operations management. I retroactively thank you, Mom.

Coincidentally, so do my three roommates.

Most chocolate wouldn’t last long, but there was one Easter basket staple that was immediately determined it would be much for fun to play with our food than eat it.

Marshmallow Peeps.

I don’t know who came up with the idea to wax some crystallized sugar to a mound of marshmallow goo and attempt to shape it into springtime animals. In my opinion, the bunnies look like bunnies, but the chicks? Not so much. More like small replications of Jabba the Peep. Nonetheless, rather than digesting these little guys, we decided it would be much more fun to help Dave (who was the bio major of the group) and do some experiments. Which is just a fancy way of saying…

…Put ‘em in the microwave and see what happens.

Now anybody can put ONE peep in a microwave. But it takes the minds of four guys to line the up in three rows of 5 in full military formation to see if it takes more than an Army of One to stand the heat. The microwave attacked, and sure enough, the courage of these young Jabbas melted. Literally.

Actually, as they expanded, they kind of congealed into one massive yellow ball of goo. While incredibly intrigued, we didn’t want to see it convert into one massive yellow ball of fire, so we aborted mission and moved on.

But we didn’t forget.

The real victim in this was not an Easter icon at all. Even though we knew very well the wrath that the microwave could invoke, we converted into a dog house at some point when the stuffed Taco Bell dog was being bad. It was a South of the Border promotion back in 99 or so, where you cold get a stuffed Chihuahua for 2 bucks and if you squeezed its stomach, it would utter the most famous four words in Mexican food:

Yo quiero Taco Bell.

Now I can’t remember the circumstances surrounding this, but at some point our science experiment took an evil turn as we opted to flash-fry Fuego (it wasn’t his name then, but it became shortly thereafter.) Little happened to his appearance in that four second trial, but when the door was open, the smell said it all. We learned that putting a talking stuffed dog in a microwave was a good way to fry its voice box.

And Fuego learned how to fly, as he (and his unpleasant odor) was launched out the slider of our third-story window.

Let’s just be thankful there weren’t fifteen of him, too.