One summer my roommates and I had this great idea (we had lots of great ideas).
See, we lived in this particularly boring non-social apartment complex – and we were going crazy. So we decided that we wanted to throw some sort of crazy party that might help us get some of our quiet not so social neighbors out of their apartments.
The Logan Institute had just held its annual Green Jell-o slide on the quad, and we were discussing how cool it would be if we could do that INSIDE our apartment. The problem was that when jell-o isn’t cold. Its liquid. We didn’t want to ruin our apartment, so staining the walls and carpets wasn’t really an option. The gears in our crazy heads got a turning and we realized that pudding might be a reasonable alternative to jell-o.
So we began planning. . .
- We went to Home Depot and purchased a 100′ roll of 6 mil. painters plastic to line the floor and lower walls of our living room and kitchen.
- We went to Wal-Mart and bought 2 plastic kiddie swimming pools. And a couple of squirt guns.
- We went to the church cannery and purchased 100 lbs. of chocolate pudding.
- We arranged to borrow my dad’s drill w/ attached paint stirrer (to mix the pudding in the pools)
- We collected a few cinder blocks (to hold down the plastic that lined the floor)
- And we made and printed 500 of these fliers:
We were ready! We figured that since we lived in an apartment with a balcony when all was said and done we would use a plastic shovel to remove the majority of the pudding, then carefully remove the remaining pudding-coated plastic and throw it away. We figured we would have minimal mess on the walls of our apartment that we would have to scrub, and that we could simply hose down the balcony. The clean-up would be a bit rough. But worth it.
By the way. There were 6 girls living in that apartment. Everyone was in on it, and it was going to cost us $20 each to make it happen.
So we started distributing fliers.
The night they were printed we got 150 of them out (all to apartments on the south end of town). We figured we’d hit all the big near-campus apartment complexes the next night when everyone was home.
One of my roommates worked at Al’s Sporting Goods that summer, and she took a handful of the fliers to work with her to give to some friends. As luck would have it, the OWNER of our apartment complex was shopping at Al’s and happened to see the flier. He contacted our managers, who then came knocking at our door.
We were told that if we held the event on their property we would all be evicted.
Looking at our contract, I don’t think that they could have legally done that. Worst case, we would have lost our deposit – and that’s only if we damaged anything in the process. However, most of my roommates didn’t want to risk it.
Crushed that our Pudding Pow-wow was no longer going to happen, we began returning things. We returned the plastic to Home Depot, and the pools and squirt guns to Wal-Mart. But there was one problem – The cannery wouldn’t let us return the pudding! Not that I can really blame them, it came in 25lb brown paper sacks – but what were we going to do with 100lbs of chocolate pudding mix?? The thought of eating it all made us want to vomit, and having a pudding-eating party just didn’t have the same level of excitement associated with it. We had a dilemma.
Meanwhile, the day of the pudding pow-wow was here, and we had already hung 150 fliers.
Not wanting to explain our sad story over and over again to countless strangers, we hung a sign on our door announcing that “due to circumstances beyond our control” the party was canceled. Then we left. We locked our apartment, and we all went to dinner to laugh at ourselves. We came back around 9:30 (and hour after the pow-wow should have started. Only 4 people came knocking after that (we also left the sign on the door).
Alas! We still had 100lbs. of chocolate pudding in sacks leaning against our kitchen wall.
At ward prayer the following Sunday we were discussing the details of our sad story with a couple of friends, when it suddenly occurred to us that there must be something a large group of young single adults could do with that much pudding. It didn’t take long for us to convince the activities committee that we needed to have a pudding party. Our bishop graciously donated his backyard for the event.
It wasn’t nearly as cool as it would have been inside our apartment, but we still had a great time.
Here is a video of the pudding party as it turned out (note: I cut it down from 16 min to about 5, but its a bit long (may take a few minutes to load), you may not want to watch all of it):
