Egg-stravaganza!

As I'm sure all are now well aware, yesterday was Easter and for some bizarre reason the fact that Jesus rising from the dead (I personally think he was sleeping off a good drunk) means we need to paint eggs in bright yet finger-staining colors. At our house, where we have our ever-competitive Roommate, this innocent tradition becomes a competition, and one that will surely leave bruises to boot.

Please note the Boy is decorating a beer can.

The Roommate's mother, who instigated the whole knockdown, was on hand to compete; she's actually been training all year for this event and takes it quite seriously. Here she is laboring over her patented finish that requires multiple colors layered and stripped, layered again, stripped again.

JoDee painstakingly applying several coats of color.

Each egg takes hours, well, maybe minutes, but the product is breath taking.

The Roommate, arranging the contestants.

Also attending the event are the Boy, Frankie and Jonathan. Now Jonathan grew up in Mexico so the whole concept is pretty much beyond him, because rightfully so, the entire tradition makes no sense, even to someone who grew up with it (mainly me) and Frankie comes from a family that preferred to decorate beer cans and hide them instead of eggs. This twist on an established tradition actually makes more sense to me as there's more incentive and the pay off is much better. Frankie's family gets two Suz thumbs up on their Easter hunt version.
After a few intensely creative hours of decorating, involving new applications and sources for finishes, we presented our line up of anxious hopefuls; 18 excited and nervous eggs, decked out beyond belief, were assembled on stage for all to admire. Spot lights were adjusted. Eggs were arranged and rearranged according to height and color, as to enhance each egg's appearance.

The Roommate's egg, Mr Guido, an early favorite.

And this being a beauty pageant and all, we pretty much silently, to ourselves, pick apart the competition. Hmmm, she's wearing THAT color with THAT stand? And that one, that finish is SO LAST YEAR. And missy thing on the end? Should have hit the gym before parading a shell like that. We assembled our judges, which also happened to be all the contestant's artists, and wrote our top choices on a paper and deposited them in the oh-so-appropriate chicken pitcher, taking the "secret ballot" route.

The original line up.

We were able to remove quite a few contestants the first elimination round and were down to 8 lucky eggs. The voting just got a little more difficult but our judges hung in there and made their next elimination list. We were down to 5 eggs.

Now egg judging is hard work, there are so many different aspects to decorating an egg, finish, theme, skill, creativity, and all our eggs had a lot of care go into them. But this is America, and we strive for perfection and weed out inferior specimens at will, and our judges know we were also tasked to uphold the American tradition of beauty and so ugly had to go, and anything less than fabulous would be voted off the island.

We voted again and we had our winners. A very impressive "Church Lady" deservedly was awarded the bronze position at 3rd place. An interesting combination of orange, pink and yellow, with a copper patina was given second, and the Roommates strong favorite, Mr. Guido, was the lucky 1st place winner, hands down. Just goes to show that a little pube hair in the right place and an overall attention to detail (only the Roommate would look at a "press on smile" and see a G-string) is appreciated by a discerning judicial committee. All our contestants really showed creativity, incredible skill and a sense of humor. In this judges eyes, every egg was a winner. And tasty, too.

So here's to a new tradition, competitive egg decorating. I hear it's soon to become an Olympic sport, and considering it's background, we'll get stiff competition from Poland, Germany and Eastern Block nations.