Label Maker

This coming Friday, we in Randomville will be experiencing The Clash of Random County, which is a hyped up way of saying that the Randomville football team will be taking on the Mecca High (so-called because we at RHS are often made to feel as though we should pray to them six times a day) Cardinals.

Last week, an art student came into my class and said, "Ms. Flower, Mrs. F [the art teacher] has to make a t-shirt for the game and we were wondering if you could come up with a slogan or something for us to write across the bottom."

Oh, could I.

"You mean right now?" I asked.

"Um ... yeah," she answered.

"Tell you what," I replied. "Give me until the end of the period and I'll see what I can come up with." And off she went.

My class was working on their vocabulary at the time, so I took a few minutes to brainstorm.

RHS Wildcats--------------------MHS Cardinals

I wrote at the top of a blank sheet of paper. From there, I just went crazy with ideas. They were not all good (as you'll see), but here is my final list:

Deck the Cards
I envisioned this with a poker hand, somehow incorporating the mascot pictures into the card design, like instead of a club there would be a Wildcat head, and it would show a royal flush or something. I'm not really a poker champion, so I don't know what I'm talking about. Also, I'm not sure the school would want to show anything that might encourage gambling, even though our kids probably go home and watch the Celebrity Poker Finals, or whatever that thing is, every night.

... stopping the Cardinals' song
I wasn't really happy with this one. I knew what I MEANT, but not how to say it. At any rate, I had a picture in mind of a birdcage with a cardinal inside (which ... doesn't happen, since the cardinal is a wild bird, but whatever) and then a Wildcat's paw reaching in to grab it, sort of in the vein of Sylvester reaching in to grab Tweety. This made me think that "I tawt I taw a putty-tat" would be a great slogan for a Cardinals' shirt, which in turn made me think of something else and by the way I'm definitely going to make a conscious effort to use the phrase, "Sufferin' Succotash!" at least once a day.

Clip their wings!
I couldn't really think of how to depict this one. A bird with its wing in a cast? Or maybe a bird that was all banged up and a cast on BOTH its wing and its leg, and it's leaning on crutches and maybe has a bandage around its head, and instead of eyes is has x (like in a cartoon), and it has a thermometer in its mouth. I guess I do know how to depict it.

Cardinal Red = Cardinals Dead
I didn't like this one very much at all, because it doesn't make any sense. Still, people tend to overlook logic when there's a rhyme involved.

Randomville High School: No Fly Zone
I think this is my favorite, because the message is simple and really all you need for a picture is a Cardinal head inside a circle that has a slash through it. If there had to be a Wildcat in the picture, it should be wearing camouflage, I think.

I tried to think of stuff involving birds, or cards, or wildcats, or cardinals, but the ideas were not exactly flowing. I did try for something that incorporated hunting. Maybe a picture of a cardinal, like, innocently sitting in a tree minding its own business, and there would be a graphic over it that looks like what you see when you look into the sight of a gun and somewhere on the shirt it says Bird Hunting. But I thought maybe people would not be so crazy about the implication that we would like to shoot some folks.

I kind of wish that wildcats, in general, lived in more exotic places, because then I could say Welcome to the Jungle and have some sort of Tarzan-y stuff going on. (Welcome to the Forest doesn't carry quite the same threat.)

Although I did think of another one for the Cardinals, which is Give 'em the Bird! and there would be a picture of a Cardinal with a saucy look in his eye and an outstretched wing that has his middle ... er ... feather extended. That would, of course, be wildly inappropriate for a school-sponsored t-shirt, but there wouldn't be anything to stop me from getting it done for my own self.

At any rate, I neatly printed up my (better) ideas and sent them off to the art teacher. The next day, I saw a mock-up of the t-shirt. Here's the slogan they chose:

WILDCATS GOT BIRD!

Me: ...

THAT DOES NOT EVEN MEAN ANYTHING.

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addendum
Friday the principal announced that he would like to encourage [read: Do it! Or ELSE!] every school club to make a giant poster to show at the game. So my ideas might not go to waste after all.