Bloomin' Blue Men

I don't really have anything to rant or talk about today and then someone on Tumblr asked me this:

scotchjolras:
Sorry for the random question but my memory is bad and the not knowing is bugging me. Was it you that hid little blue and orange people around your college campus or am I mixing you up with another youtuber? I don't even remember where I saw this; all I remember is that the story really tickled me. 

This person was remembering correctly. That was me. So I decided to share the story here in case it will amuse someone.

When I was a music major at the University of Florida, I (obviously) spent a lot of time in the music building.  As any student who has been in the building knows, the staircases are equipped with these rather odd round holes that don’t appear to have a purpose.  I was often bored in the music building waiting for something to happen, and my friend Jessica and I decided that those holes looked lonely and empty.  They needed company.  Companionship.  Men made out of Play-Doh.

Having spent many hours on the music building roof, I’d noticed that there were tons of little pebbles up there.  I stole some of them for the men’s heads.  We took my can of purple Play-Doh and made men similar to the one above and distributed them everywhere; mostly just in the aforementioned holes, but we got pretty creative once we ran out of holes.

We went into “the cage”--the place where the instruments were stored--and hid some of our men there.  Turned out that Chris, the guy who was in charge of the cage, was rather confused and amused by them.   Some were stolen. Others mysteriously disappeared.  

Our friend Ed helped us “populate” during the next semester.  We decided to use orange men this time.  We terrorized Chris even more this time, leaving him a note that read something like “Beware, Chris, we are watching you. —The men of the orange population.”  

Jessica defected to the College of Education, so the next semester it was up to me and Ed to populate the music building.  We chose the holy Blue Men.  They invaded the elevator, the walls, the lockers, and, of course, the cage.  This time a blue man was impaled with a thumbtack on Chris’s board, with a note that said “We’re new, we’re blue, and we’re AFTER YOU.”  Another blue man was posed holding the pen.  Another was posed threateningly on the lockers facing the cage.  Chris commented to me:  “I keep seeing these bloomin’ blue men everywhere.”   Chris was very corny.  

Spring Break 2000, my friend Fred and I revisited the music building and populated with white Play-Doh men.  They really got around!  They were in the elevator, in the cage, in the bathrooms, guarding water fountains . . . it seems they are unstoppable.

It would have been funny if I could close this with an anecdote about the Play-Doh men tradition being handed down to the next generation of music students, but unfortunately it died when I left the city. Too bad.