My dad: the ice cream champion of the whole wide world
In my childhood local ice cream shop, they offered a challenge to The Brave. From billboards to newspapers to local television news, the offer was the same: eat an entire ‘pig’s platter’ and win free ice cream for life. What morbidly obese Midwesterner could resist that?

Eat one small scoop of each of the 100 flavours of ice cream. That is all a person had to do, and they had only two hours to finish it. Many tried and failed. Big men, small women – we’d gather around and cheer them on as they faced failure’s square jaw and sicked up all down their tits. Defeated, every last one of them walked away ruing that delicious dairy concoction.

A rumour rushed through my hometown that an Amish man finished the contest, but a sign went up in this ice cream parlour saying that, no, he threw up and therefore was disqualified. We were on tenderhooks. Most of a summer had passed and the town did not yet know its true success. Soon the light would begin to fade and the leaves to turn, and we didn’t have a victor to turn to. The city was at its last nerve – when was a real man going to step up to that ice cream plate?

My dad woke up one morning and declared that it would be ‘his day’. A light lunch followed a small breakfast, then the cheering troops were called. We gathered around a large table with my father installed as ice cream king. The process began.

18 years later, a large photograph of him still hangs behind the ice cream counter. Sure, he’s dribbling lumpy foam in triumph and appears to have eaten his own skin, regurgitated it and sewn it back to his flesh. And he went home and vomited 6 gallons of curdled sugar into the toilet. But that’s my dad, the master eater, my hero.

The town rejoiced. Since then, a handful of others have managed such a feat, but that’s my dad there. Right there, up on the wall, appearing as if he’s just filled his trousers with dairy product. He was the first.

We never ate ice cream again. Would you? (Also, dad’s now an insulin dependent diabetic. I can’t help but imagine a short, sharp ice cream shock to the pancreas is what did it.)
(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Mon 29 Nov 2010, 14:48, 2 replies)

yes,
This has to have been one of the best worded stories I have ever read on here.
I commend you sire.
(MessFX, Tue 30 Nov 2010, 14:07, closed)

It's ma'am to you.

(TheSnark oh, c'mon, like you didn't see me coming, Wed 1 Dec 2010, 15:06, closed)