Member-only story
Paste and Glue
One sucks, the other works
Elementary school art
In the third grade in elementary school, I loved art class. We made collages and little ashtrays out of clay
Our art teacher was lovely. She was about 25 years old with long, straight, brown hair — her name was Mrs. Jones and she was a little peculiar.
In the art closet, Mrs. Jones had both paste and glue — but she insisted we always start with paste despite the fact that it was usually dried up and didn’t work well as an adherent (It did work well as a food group for poor little Ernie who ate it like ice cream.)
We would all grudgingly start off with the paste but by the end of the project, we all had switched to Elmer’s glue, which worked.
One class, when it was clear the project was going to involve gluing, we proactively asked Mrs. Jones if we could just start out with the glue and she got upset.
No glue for you
She said we always start out with the paste.
I shouted back, “The paste never works.”
On one particularly cranky day, I told Mrs. Jones that we hated paste…and she audibly gasped.
She explained glue was expensive and paste was cheap and I said paste was cheap because it didn’t work.
