Pumpkin Prison deserves votes

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/10/2019 (2366 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What with being a standard guy of my gender, I have always dreamed about living the lifestyle of a self-indulgent rock ’n’ roll star.

You know, the kind of lifestyle wherein you have employees whose sole purpose in life is to feed you M&Ms candies by hand and mop the river of sweat pouring from your fevered brow.

They didn’t feed me M&Ms, but I got a tiny taste of that lifestyle Friday morning when I put my sweat glands and artistic talents on the line to compete in Carving for a Cause, Kildonan Place Shopping Centre’s annual celebrity pumpkin-carving contest.

Prepare to be impressed, because this marked the 11th straight year I have taken up the butcher knife and done battle in the mall’s gourd throwdown, wherein 13 teams of media personalities are given an hour to whip up state-of-the-art jack-o’-lanterns in support of their favourite charities.

And for the second straight year — you are going to think I am lying, but I’m not — the mall’s charming general manager, Sandra Hagenaars, agreed to spend the entire hour mopping my sweaty brow with a blue “Shop Happy” bandana.

If you had been there, you would have seen me working myself into a lather, carving in support of the Winnipeg Humane Society, while Sandra bravely wiped away beads of sweat that were making my butcher knife slippery.

What with being old, out of shape and a one-man carving team, by the time I have scooped the guts out of my gourd, I have produced so much perspiration that it threatens to drown innocent shoppers in low-lying areas of the mall.

“It’s not part of my job description, but it’s a pleasure to assist a creative genius in his artistic process,” is what Sandra gushed when I asked how it felt for an executive to spend an hour dabbing away at a sweaty newspaper columnist.

“You might have been a little less sweaty this year, because your pumpkin was so well-planned. You were less stressed. What impresses me about your pumpkin is that it captures the true sense of Halloween.”

I hate to brag, but she couldn’t have been more correct. Normally, what with carving for the Humane Society, I make a pumpkin that resembles one of my dogs, which is probably why the only award I have ever won in this contest was for (this is true) perspiring more heavily than the other carvers.

What I did Friday was create a terrifying masterpiece, Doug’s Pumpkin Prison, which featured a $9.99 plastic skeleton dangling his legs out of prison bars made from wooden shish-kebab skewers that my wife had painted silver.

As a backdrop behind the skeleton prisoner, I draped some of that stretchy cobweb material, dangling from which were three miniature skeletons. The outside of the gourd was festooned with (why not?) plastic human bones.

We all got $100 for our charities just for competing, but the mall also handed out $100 prizes in three categories, namely:

1. Cutest pumpkin — won by Pamela Roz and Aj Leite from HOT 100.5 FM for a pumpkin featuring the silhouette of a puppy and a kitty that raised cash for Penny’s All-Breed Animal Rescue.

2. Most creative pumpkin — won by Tyler Carr and Sarah Nick from Energy 106 for their “Transcona & Proud” pumpkin, which featured a pink flamingo and a gourd whose face resembled the logo of the shopping mall. “What inspired this was the Facebook group Transcona Proud,” Tyler said. “There’s, like, 15,000 members and they’re always talking about how much they love Transcona.”

3. Scariest pumpkin — won by Jordan Knight and Garth Hilderman from NCI FM for what was easily the most grisly gourd I have ever seen, one that featured a jack-o’-lantern with a gaping mouth full of razor-sharp teeth devouring a huge eyeball that, thanks to a small aquarium pump, was constantly bathed in a stream of artificial blood, while a bloody brain and a jar of eyeballs rested nearby.

“It’s unofficially called ‘Sorry About Your Floor Because We Got Blood Everywhere,’” Jordan told me, laughing. “We just wanted to do something gory this year because we normally do something cute.”

If you have been paying attention, you will have noticed that, once again, Uncle Doug was shut out of the specialty prizes, even though people seemed to find my “Pumpkin Prison” quite disturbing.

“I love it!” the mall’s affable marketing manager, Corey Quintaine, gushed when I demanded a review of my bone-intensive masterpiece. “This year, you outdid yourself. It’s all about good lighting and you have some amazing lighting.”

The good news is that I still have a slim chance of being crowned the Pumpkin King, but that depends on you, the social-media-loving public. “What you want is that the voting public sees the genius in your pumpkin and goes to our Facebook page and votes,” mall GM Sandra told me.

The important thing is the mall posted photos of our jack-o’-lanterns on its Facebook page (facebook.com/kildonanplace) and the gourd that gets the most likes by 10 p.m. Halloween night earns another $500 for its creator’s charity.

The second-highest vote-getter receives an extra $300 donation, while third-highest gets another $200. The mall also kicks in 10 cents for every “like” our pumpkins get on Facebook. The mall even allowed shoppers to vote in person on Saturday, National Pumpkin Day.

So, yes, I would very much like to win this (bad word) contest for the first time and become the champion carver. But if I don’t, it’s no sweat off my nose… and I mean that quite literally.

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca