In My Time of Pieing

Over spring break, I will be an educational partner on an Alternative Spring Break trip to Washington, DC. The focus of my team's trip is the effects of poverty, and a group of 16 or so students and I will spend the week working in homeless shelters and soup kitchens. Most of the students who go describe it as a life-changing experience, and it gives our students the chance to give back and spend spring break in a meaningful, impactful way, rather than spending it getting hosed down in wet t-shirt contests or praying that their cruise ship doesn't break down or catch on fire. There is a fee for the students to go on the trip, but there are also multiple fundraising opportunities for the students to get the cost of their trip down. Since I don't pay, I volunteered to help with fundraising, which is how this happened:



Today, you see, was Pi Day, since the date is 3/14 and Pi = 3.14. Here at the university, we celebrated with a Pi(e) Day fundraiser, in which I:



and a number of other campus volunteers:



allowed people to pay $3 per pie to hit us with pies.

And hit us they did:











Sometimes they pied us in lines:





but mostly in singles:









Some people were oddly apologetic, as if compelled to pie against their will, but most people surrendered to the fun of grinding a plate of whipped cream into a friend or total stranger's face.



If you've never been pied, I can say a few things about it. It stops being cold after the first one, I think because the whipped cream oozes into all of your pores whether you wipe it off or not. You'll want to close your eyes when the pie is coming, of course, but after the first pie what you're really going to want (and can't have) is to close your nose. Everything smells like dairy for a while, and now, hours later, I can't smell anything at all. I keep blowing my nose, but I've kind of given up. Whatever is in there is bonded to the walls of my sinus cavity for now.

But it was all for a good cause.

And I found out that people will stare at you hard and then immediately jerk their eyes away if you grin wildly at them while walking to your car, smeared with half dried whipped cream.