Fun With Paper Mache

A s a kid, I made a couple papier-mché piñatas in the shapes of dogs and cats. The process entailed ripping up the sports section of the newspaper, mixing a few handfuls of flour with water, dipping the newspaper in the flour mixture, and draping it over a balloon or two. After a few days, the paper would be dry, the balloon too shriveled up to make much of a noise when popped with a straight pin, and the haphazard creature ready to saw a trapdoor in and stuff with Tootsie Rolls.

I largely abandoned any efforts to make anything else of the sort until the sixth grade, when Preston Hall Middle School hosted an egg drop at the end of the year. The contraptions that my classmates designed were, to say the least, inventive - one consisted of a balled-up pair of slippers, another incorporated a deflated soccer ball into the design. One of the more successful designs was a small cottage-cheese container in which the egg was nestled, with three grocery-bag parachutes on top. When hurled from the third floor, it promptly straightened out and drifted peacefully to the ground. My own contraption was somewhat more elaborate. I started off by filling a tall Tupperware container with strawberry Jell-O. I then cut an six-inch-deep, Xshaped slit into the top, into which the raw egg was to be inserted. The container, meanwhile, was lodged in a Folgers coffee can whose interior was padded generously with tinfoil and filled with packing peanuts. The exterior, meanwhile, was covered with yet more tinfoil, with the idea that this would crumple on impact and thus reduce the jolt to the egg. On the day of the event, the lid would be ducttaped on. A spring would be secured to the bottom and a Whoopee cushion to the top. And to make sure that the landing wasn't terribly hard, I made a papier-mché parachute with the idea that it wouldn't waste time "activating" like a flexible one would. I used an old exercise ball in our garage as a form.

The morning of the event, I couldn't pry my parachute off the ball.

I ended up just tying some grocery bags to the lid of the coffee can and hoping for the best. But the bags failed to activate at all, the can landed on its side, and the tinfoil wasn't sufficient to keep the jolt of impact from ejecting the Tupperware container clear out of the coffee can despite the duct tape. (The egg survived, though.) But I really haven't done much with papier-mché since.

Last week, though, I found out that our cumulative project for first-period Asian History would entail a presentation on Japanese theater. We could choose one of the four classical schools (I chose Noh), then we had to write a presentation on it with two visual aids - one of which had to be either a replica theater or a mask.

I ended up buying a mask form from Jo-Ann's. Remembering the exercise ball, I greased it liberally with Vaseline before covering it with several layers of newspaper strips. Where I needed to accentuate features or add more flesh, I dipped several strips in adhesive, ripped them up until a chunky pulp of sorts resulted, and used them like clay .

Today, I pried the mask off the form. It's just about ready for painting. Its features - even covered with baseball statistics as they are - are enthrallingly human. There's a little bit of magic in the making of a mask, especially with a time-consuming process like papiermché. It looks wonderful. I have every high hope for a decent grade.

Which just goes to show that the techniques you learned in preschool art class may come in quite handy down the road.