As a board member for the Flagstaff Children’s Museum, it has been my pleasure for the past four years to help promote our annual All Ages Coloring Contest; with every passing year I am amazed anew at the wit and creativity displayed by our community’s adults and children alike in taking a simple line drawing and turning it into a piece of art. My involvement in this endeavor has been both an honor and a joy; inevitably, though, there always comes a point during the promotion of the coloring contest when someone will ask me the question I dread most: how are my children’s entries are coming along? At this point I am always forced to admit that, actually, I don’t allow crayons in my house. This confession is usually greeted with stony silence, soon followed by a quizzical look that clearly says: what kind of a parent doesn’t allow their children to have crayons?
What kind of a parent, indeed? It’s not like I’m one of those parents who has an all-white living room furnished in Swedish Modern (frankly I don’t even remember what color my living room is supposed to be, and the closest my house ever gets to Swedish Modern is when the Ikea catalog finds its way from the bathroom to the coffee table). Generally speaking, in fact, I have no problem with the filth and detritus of childhood–the cookie crumb-encrusted couch cushions; the layer of fast-food containers in the back seat of the car dating back to the Pleistocene era–but there is just something about crayons with which I cannot deal.
They haven’t always been my enemy: when my children were smaller I would buy them all sorts and sizes of crayons: fat ones, thin ones, glitter ones, neon ones; in quantities ranging from the tiny travel packs of the four primary colors all the way up to the jumbo sixty-four box (with its own sharpener). At some point, however, I came to the realization that, in the hands of my children at least, a crayon clearly qualified as a WMD.
It’s like the crayons are possessing them: I remember times back in the days when crayons were not yet verboten when I would walk past Clyde’s room and hear what sounded to me suspiciously like Clyde taking orders from the burnt sienna.
“You want me to draw what with you? Where? Oh no, I couldn’t…”
And then, the next thing I knew my freshly painted dining room would look like a cross between a prehistoric French cave and a high school bathroom. It was always the same: time and time again I would relent and allow more crayons into my house (usually after a trip to some restaurant where I would watch my children coloring beatifically within the lines on their placemats), only to find that, once through our own front door my children’s unplottable switch had somehow been flipped from “good” to “evil”, and I would soon be finding the evidence of Clyde’s “blue period” (or “red, yellow, and a little bit of green period”) on his bedroom walls.
Thankfully, of course, with the Children’s Museum coloring contest, the entries don’t have to be done in crayon at all: in fact, one of Clyde’s most inspired entries was his first, when he decorated it entirely in food stains and bodily fluids (he was five months old). Some of the other entries I have seen over the years have included poster paint, papier mache and even lint, so I suppose there is still hope for my children to get their crayon-less entries in on time. Although, come to think about it, I’m not too happy about finding any of those things on my walls, either.
(The Flagstaff Children’s Museum Fourth Annual All Ages Coloring Contest, with base drawing provided by local artist Tisha Cazel, will be accepting entries in food, plywood, and even crayon from now until March 10. Entry forms can be picked up and dropped off at any of the following: Brandy’s, New Frontiers Marketplace, and Pay-N-Take. All winning entries will be on display at the Coconino Center for the Arts following the public reception and awards ceremony also held at the CCA on Wednesday, March 15, from 5-7 pm.)