Remember That Time You Lit Yourself On Fire?

It happens around my birthday, and it’s protested by the on-campus Feminists: WooFest. When the freshmen and sophomore guys attempt to get the most votes through song and dance, I know I’ll be in for a hilarious evening. But I’ll never forget my first WooFest, which turned into trouble.

It was my freshman year at Vanguard, and my friend and I forced my roommate to dress up and go with us to NMC’s sanctuary for WooFest, where there were flowers and pretty lights and nicely-dressed escorts offering flowers to everyone. Oh, and something else: there were candles.

I really like candles, I honestly do, but I was very distracted, walking the pathway to the door with my escort and holding a flower. I would never intentionally destroy a candle, unless there was some sort of weird emergency or it smelled unbearably awful. But that night I was so distracted that I didn’t see the candles lighting our path until I stepped in one.

Wax dripped, hot and painful, on my leg and in my sandals, down to my feet.

“Aughhh!” I screamed and looked down. Candle residue, sloppy and smoky, was the only thing left in the path. The pathway looked like this: nice candle, nice candle, gross mess, nice candle, sanctuary door. I was terrified.

My escort, observing my hopping around and panicking, said “Be careful of the candles.” My friends, smiling from the other line, told me to watch out for those candles! No kidding.

I stumbled over to the door and then limped to my seat with my friends. I looked at my leg helplessly. It might as well have been on fire. Amidst my friends’ “how-did-that-even-happen” and “this-could-only-have-happened-to-you,” I looked for something with an edge to help me get the wax off, since it was still painful to the touch. All I had with me was the rose, given to every girl by her escort. I seized it firmly by the stem and used the end of the stem to scrape the wax off.

It didn’t work.

The wax was still not entirely dry. I scraped harder and only succeeded in breaking my poor rose. I again tried to remove the wax with my hands, burning my fingers.

By then, WooFest itself was getting ready to start. The lights were dimming and second floor was beginning their performance. After watching it, I turned back to my wax delimma with limited success.

I spent the rest of the evening, in between watching the different acts, picking wax off my leg and shoe. Some of it I couldn’t get off, and I later endured a painful shower to remove all the wax that dried and was firmly attached to my calf.

Other than that, it was quite a fun evening. Now I know what it feels like to be set on fire, only the whole thing happened because I often forget to look where I’m going.