I’ve been trying to convince the drama teacher at my daughter’s school of this irrefutable equation for two years now, with no success. One need only point to Woody Allen’s “Sleeper” for evidence of its veracity, with the giant banana peel and the aggressive instant pudding. Maybe she’s been swayed by the wave of recent articles about American obesity, and pictures of gargantuan hamburgers that people actually try and eat.
A few years ago at another school, I worked on props for a version of “Jack and the Beanstalk”, which included a lot of material about eating. (The kids thought that material was hilarious, BTW. You can always trust kids to laugh at food, poop and any combination thereof.) For that play, I made chicken legs out of 2-liter bottles and papier mache, hams out of detergent bottles, and bowls of spaghetti out of clothesline, paint and brown styrofoam balls. The giant cheeseburger has had a place of importance in our TV room ever since.
For Liesel’s play this year (which will be held this weekend at the fabulous Portage Theater in Portage Park), I only had one food prop to make, but thankfully it was to be a little larger than life. A character had to get in trouble with the police for smuggling cheese into Russia, so I needed to create a wheel of cheese that was big enough to see but not so big that a grade schooler couldn’t wave it around.
I started with a plastic tray for under flower pots. I cut a pie-shaped slice out of it, filled it with newspaper, and sealed it all up with a couple pieces of cardboard. Then, we covered it with a few layers of papier mache. When you apply papier mache as thickly as we do around here, it’s going to dry very tightly and cause the object to buckle and crease a little bit. Thankfully, cheese is not always a symmetrical delicacy.
Then a base of white paint, which makes it look like brie, a food funny in some situations but much too runny to be believable in our scenario:
Then some yellow paint, and a few holes drawn on:
And Wooola! It’s not very large. In fact, it’s actually life-sized. But I take any assignments I can get these days.
Bonus Prop: Here’s my version of an iPad that I created for the play. These are available now, so you don’t have to wait for Apple to enjoy their little masochistic waiting period. Pencil not included.
