DeAnna Woolston

Calling all my friends who eat like shit. The more processed the better. I need your help. Over the next few weeks I need you to step up your game and eat your weight in Hamburger Helper, throw a Totino’s frozen pizza party for the office and squirt down huge quantities of Go-gurt like your training for a Yogurt Triathlon. If you have a cinnamon bun craving—for God’s sake man please make it the Pillsbury kind that explodes open when you tap it. (Kind of like a horror movie in a wrapper—you never know when it is going to burst open and scare the bejezus out of you.)

It’s Box Tops for Education time and my little girl needs to hand in more than four of those babies this year. That’s what we had last year—four of those pink little cardboard cutouts. That equals 40 cents for her school. It might have bought them an eraser.

This will be the third fundraiser for her school this year. First will be the Payback book that is appropriately named—since it seems to pay me back until the sales forms are due. You’ve probably seen similar coupon books for your area. Ninety-nine percent of the time I forget I have the book (which I have been dragging around like a brick in my purse for months) and the other one percent when I remember it—the local business I’m are visiting won’t have a coupon or I didn’t buy 50 dinners required to get my one lousy dinner 50 percent off.

By the time it expires—I will have used one or two of the 200 pages of stuff I don’t need. For now I have to ignore any misgivings I may have about the book o’coupons and hock them to friends and families. Please, I beg of you, spend $24 for coupons you’ll forget to use.

The second fundraiser involves my kid literally walking around in circles. It is a walk-a-thon around her school building since there isn’t a track. And we are supposed to get friends and family to give her money to do laps around her school. This is a harder sell to my friends and family, because they don’t even get a crappy coupon book. The school is too broke to come up with a better idea and passing a school levy in our county is as easy as brushing an alligator’s teeth wearing a meat dress.

Really school these days is more about teaching multi-level marketing sales skills to our children than anything else. There are the awkward sales pitches to family and friends. Rejection. Selling a shoddy product that is overpriced. Let’s just be honest and have our shoddy, underfunded schools sign up for Amway. They can spend the time that otherwise would have been dedicated to art, PE and music (if they had the funding) on teaching kids:

• Sales pitches: No means maybe!
• How to host an Amway House Party while serving Totino’s Pizza and cutting boxtops.
• Friends=potential distributors!
• Deny it’s a pyramid scheme even though we are trying to get more sales people under us and more people under them, etc.

It will be a great solution to the problem of the school lacking a playground. Kids can spend their recess walking… door to door with their pyramid visual aids and product catalogues. It will be great practice and really help the community to be a safer place. With our little door-to-door sales team, everyone will be locking their doors and parking their cars in the garage so we won’t know they are home.

In my day, which makes it sounds like I’m at least 102-years-old, we only did fundraisers for extra-curricular activities. In girl scouts we sold cookies—which was easy—because though they are overpriced, they are delicious. They sell themselves. I could have loaded the cookies on a wagon rolled it down the hill in my neighborhood. By the time I made it down the hill, it would be filled with cash and crumbs and me (because who wouldn’t pay for a wagon ride and unlimited cookies?). I’m not exactly sure what that wad o’ cash we scouts earned was spent on—but it wasn’t used for the basic running of my school. Our schoolrooms weren’t busting with kids, frazzled teachers and few opportunities for activity and enrichment.

So community here’s the bloody deal: it’s either you cough up some cojones and dough and pass levies to fund our schools, or I’m taking this Amway show on the road. We will be pyramiding and pirouetting our way up and down Main Street and right to your door. It will be just like Halloween; except instead of candy, pumpkins, cute costumes and the smell of cinnamon in the air, you’ll be greeted by little salespeople reeking of sweat and desperation who won’t take no for an answer.