Like a Groundhog Loves its Slop...
I was in the second grade in the early seventies, a military brat who attended school at Parkway/Davis Hill Elementary in Fort Lewis, Washington. Every now and then, our teacher Mrs. Moore--a faintly Mediterranean-looking woman who provided an early crush source for a lot of us prepubescent boys--would relinquish control of her class to the school librarian for an hour. This typically plump and slightly stern-faced Baroness of the Books usually whiled away that hour reading kid-friendly selections to us (Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators come immediately to mind). But one day, as a special project, we received an art project (or at least the closest equivalent possible for a bunch of second graders) from her. We were handed a picture of The Lollipop Dragon, a crudely-drawn cartoon firebreather who served as a sort of Barney/Smokey the Bear in classroom filmstrips (Christ, I'm old enough to remember filmstrips). The plump, stern-faced librarian asked us to color it. Most ...