the quest for beauty is ageless

Years ago, while completing my student teaching in a first grade classroom, I was privileged enough to get the classroom that had a bathroom connected to it. With a built in bathroom, I was excused from the task of having to round up twenty-some first graders and venture out into the hallway in order for them to relieve their little bladders.

Of course, bathrooms in the classroom also created problems, which I discovered one day when water began seeping out from underneath the bathroom door because one of the students decided to see what would occur when a pencil was flushed down the toilet.

One afternoon I noticed an odd trend developing. It appeared that the bathroom had become the 'hip' spot to be, and every little girl in the class, one right after the other, needed to use that bathroom. No sooner would one walk out than another little hand would fly into the air and the next little girl would head inside. Even when considering the miniscule size of these tiny, first grader sized bladders...which rarely holds more than dixie cup full of liquid...my suspicions were aroused.

The fifth consecutive girl had been inside the bathroom for close to five minutes...which was an eternity by six year old standards...so I walked over, gave a knock, and opened the door to find a little first grader named Rachel sitting in the sink.

She was staring into the mirror, and holding a tiny little pink Mike & Ike candy which she was ever so carefully applying onto her lips, leaving a sugary pink hue behind. Upon looking out over the classroom, I realized that every single little girl had the same shade of sugary pink color upon their lips...all in partial disrepair at this point, because the temptation to sit and lick off sugary pink lipstick is, apparently, very great indeed...which meant that every few minutes a trip to the bathroom was needed to reapply.

Needless to say, bathroom trips were restricted the rest of the day to bladder bursting emergencies only. And candy make-up was hereby banned during classroom time. Non-educational reasons aside, candy make-up is simply too impractical.

Besides, isn't this why cherry flavored Chapstick was invented?