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Get gooey with pumpkin innards focus group

Burt's Eye View

Editor’s note: Cole is on vacation yet again. This pumpkin goop of a Cole Classic originally ran in 1996.

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All I wanted was some practical, fulfilling uses for that gooey, squishy stuff you scoop from inside pumpkins.

So I put the question to a bunch of otherwise reasonably intelligent adults.

They formed a focus group. The Pumpkin Goo Committee met over cider and apples to generate ideas, brainstorm proposals, and facilitate strategies and the like.

Already, things weren’t going well.

Focus groups and committees are fine when you can’t figure out what else to do at a major corporation. But when you want to actually accomplish something … They’re just no good when you need to figure out what to do with the gob of goo oozing between your fingers and down your arm.

My fears were confirmed when Marilyn suggested baking the gunk. Friends of hers insisted the stuff should be splattered onto a cookie sheet, salted and baked until crispy. They claimed it was wholesome and nutritious.

We kicked Marilyn out of the focus group and ordered in more caramel-covered popcorn balls.

Someone else suggested cheapskate balding men could slop the stringy gunk atop their heads as a toupee.

Now we were getting somewhere.

Daryl remembered chasing his kid sister around the house with handfuls of the stuff.

Progress. What else did anyone do with the stuff?

The group grew silent.

Finally, Larry said, “Well, no, we didn’t do anything with the pumpkin innards, but we did kill a black snake once. We got some fishing line and hooked it to the snake…”

Focus groups also aren’t very good at maintaining an actual focus. A useful idea for goo involving the focus group occurred to me, but there were no pumpkin guts handy. I was forced to slump back and listen to the unfocused tale.

“…and we hid in our garage across the street. So every time a car came by, we yanked the snake across the road. Cars would careen everywhere. A lot of drivers opened their car doors, took aim and threw their cars in reverse to hit him again! We had to yank the snake into the garage to preserve it.”

“Cool! Great idea!” one focus group member. He wasn’t doing a very good job of conveying the message that we all needed to talk about pumpkin goo. “But the snake must have got scuffed up with road friction burns.”

“Oh, he did,” Larry said. “But we had a can of black paint in the garage. When he looked to be getting wore out, we just dipped him in. We painted him three times.

“Then one lady who drove by our house twice that day knocked on the door and said, ‘I saw two black snakes go into your garage.’ We said, ‘Thank you. We’ll go hunt them out after a bit.”

The group fell into fits of unexplained laughter, then split up looking for kite string and dead snakes.

“But what do I do about my pumpkin goo?” I called out.

“Grab some globs and throw the gunk at the kids,” Daryl yelled over his shoulder. “Watch what they do with it, then do the same.”

This year, I think I’ll just tape some construction paper pumpkins to the window. Any idea what I should do with the paper clippings? We could form a focus… Wait, never mind.

— Throw gobs of pumpkin goo at Cole burtseyeview@tribtoday.com or at the Burton W. Cole page on Facebook.

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