One of my former students came up to me after church and he put his arm around me and he said, “I have to tell you that every time I see you, regardless of what the situation is, all I can think of is ‘hot dog.’” And I started to laugh and I said, “That’s okay, because when I see you, I think of hot dogs.” And we both sat there and laughed and other people were walking around us thinking, “What in the heck are they laughing about?” But this is what we were laughing about.
His commercial was — he was the hot dog and the product was Metchup, a combination of ketchup and mustard for all your picnic needs. He dressed up as a hot dog and he laid on the floor and another kid poured ketchup and mustard and — coming out of one bottle, so it was this kind of orangey pukey looking stuff. Okay, so the kid’s dressed in a red stocking cap for the end of the hot dog that sticks out of the bun. He’s made a brown paper bun, he has on red clothes and he’s wrapped in Saran wrapping and he has goggles on because he knows he’s gonna get covered with this Metchup stuff. The — he has one of those giant bottles of Heinz ketchup and he has taken out some of it and has put in mustard, so what comes out looks yech.
Anyway, so they do the whole speaking part, and at the end, of course, he’s supposed to be — the other kid is supposed to pour the Metchup on him. Well, the lid was not screwed well on — on well. And when that kid turned the bottle upside down and kinda pushed it, all of the Metchup went all over my classroom, went all over the kid, went all over everything. We had laid garbage bags down on the floor because we knew there was gonna be some on the floor. That wasn’t the problem. We could have mopped that up. It went all over, it splurted, and it went over the walls, it went — some of it was running down the chalkboard, it was just, like, everywhere. So we all cleaned up, everybody helped, we all cleaned up, but we knew we didn’t get it all, we went to lunch thinking, “There’s ketchup still everywhere.” I came back from lunch and I could still see it. ‘Til the day I retired about five years later, the day I retired it was, oh, it was still — sometimes you’d walk around the room doing something or walking, you’d see it.