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Playing with guts and other family activities
Published: 10/25/2011 3:29 PM
Last Modified: 10/25/2011 3:29 PM


From left, Minnie Mouse, a haunted house and guitar-playing/broom-riding weotch, courtesy of Sylvia and her Fireman J.


This is my Grim R----- jack-o-lantern. See the sickle? The handle at the bottom is held in place via toothpick.

With all the gourds I've eaten throughout my life, I've never carved one.

But last night, I went to Lubbock's folks down in Mounds. I brought cheesecake, they ordered pizza, and we sat on the back porch carving jack-o-lanterns.

Lub's sister, Sylvia, and her boyfriend, Fireman J, had already tried their hands at it last week. She did a little owl and a silly face on a pumpkin; he did a witch flying a broom. Or playing a guitar, I forget.

Anyhoo, they had a little book o' jack-o-lantern templates, and I picked one of the Grim Reaper. Actually, it said "Grim Creeper" because, apparently, Grim Reaper has been trademarked.

So I tore out the page, taped the edges around a pumpkin and commenced to carving. First, though, I cut out the top, then scraped out the innards. If you've never done this, it's quite messy.

Nicole, our beloved food writer, recommended I save the pumpkin seeds and roast them, which sounded fabulous. Lub's mama, Shelly, even asked us to save the seeds, and we did. But after grabbing at stringy pumpkin viscera and slopping the orange mess all over the place, I kind of lost interest in eating anything from my gourd's guts. For a little while, I'm afraid, pumpkins will be to pigs what seeds are to chitlins. (Pardon the totally inappropriate non sequitur, but I just came up with an idea for a pop-up book: "Lady Chitterling's Lovers," a colorful tale about a randy group of pigs. I'll stop there.)

So I traced a tool that looks like a miniature garden edger over the template on one side of my pumpkin and, an hour later, had a Grim R----r creeping across it with a sickle. I kinda broke the lower sickle part midway through, and it ended up looking like a long-faced dog. But I was able to salvage the intended silhouette by using a strategically impaled toothpick. Voila! La Grande Faucheuse! (Perhaps if I say it in French, I won't get sued by Grim R----- Inc.

Whatever, we took our pumpkins to the front porch, dropped a lit votive inside and stood back to admire our work for a minute, snapping shots with our phones to show friends.

Now, I want to create another, perhaps a creepy hand popping out of graveyard dirt. I'll probably need five toothpicks for that one.

Peace, love and gourd guts ... XOXO


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Living Wright

While other kids were watching "The Smurfs," Scene Writer Jason Ashley Wright was tuned in to "Style with Elsa Klensch." By fourth grade, he knew he wanted to write, and spent almost three years publishing a weekly teen-oriented magazine, Teen-Zine -- circulation: 2. After earning a degree in journalism from the University of Southern Mississippi, he became the medical reporter and teen board coordinator for the Hattiesburg (Miss.) American, a Gannett newspaper. Eight months later, with visions of Elsa dancing in his head, he applied for the fashion writer position at the Tulsa World, where he began working on Aug. 3, 1998. He is now a general assignment reporter for Scene.

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