Miss Katherine to the Rescue

When the kids made all those scarecrows at the Orca Harvest Festival in October and posed them jauntily all around the garden, we were delighted to see a little color livening up the dreary brick-and-chain-link landscape. (Yes, yes, it's going to look totally different once the plants have grown in -- right now you gotta admit it's pretty bleak.)

But several weeks of rain and gravity have taken their toll on these figures, which are now sagging against the fences, crucified on the brick walls, sprawled with their legs sticking out of the bushes. If you're in a ghoulish frame of mind, it's easy to imagine that some sort of straw massacre has taken place here:


That sodden figure lying face down in the stream bed is bad, but this one really takes the cake:


I mean, nothing says "Welcome to our Children's Garden" like a juvenile Superman strung up by the neck from the rafters with its crooked little red cape fluttering dismally in the breeze.

In fact in the Most Unintentionally Ghastly Installation Department, this might rival this WPA mural, which our friend Alex Joseph recently pointed out might not have been his first choice for the Tampa Airport:


We were a little stunned, but also delighted, to find that mere minutes after we gleefully showed Miss Katherine our pictures, she had climbed up on a chair and cut the dangling baby superhero down. "Superman is free," she announced when we ran into her later in the busline.

We'd like to formally salute our heroic science teacher and her refreshing ability to take decisive, corrective action when faced with something so ludicrously wrong, instead of standing around uselessly snapping pictures and pondering life's ironies. Miss Katherine, we bow down.