Rob Fox
11-year-old Chicago 6th grader Spencer Cline was out sledding after a snowstorm with his friend, 12-year-old Cole Leeper, when, in one of those wonderful, curious and seemingly harmless until after the fact moments of boyhood that ultimately result in damage, destruction, and/or the deployment of emergency personnel, he decided to see if that famous scene from “A Christmas Story” was legit. Can you actually get your tongue stuck to a frozen pole?
Videos by Rare
Yeah Spencer, buddy. You super-duper can. “A Christmas Story” isn’t science fiction. It’s barely fiction, really. It’s more like an amalgam of biographies of every middle-class white boy who grew up in the 1950s. So Spencer approached the pole and, feeling both brave and skeptical, asked his friend if he thought his tongue would stick, like in the movie.
“I was just tempted to. I’ve seen the movie ‘A Christmas Story,’ which kind of inspired me.”
…
“Cole thought at first I was messing with him,” Spencer said. “I told him no, it’s really stuck, but he at first couldn’t understand what I was saying.”
Cole immediately ran to get help. He knocked on the door of the nearest house and asked the woman who lived there if she had any hot water. The woman, who is either a liar with a deep distrust of children or delinquent on her heating bill, said that she did not have any hot water. Cole then told her she needed to call an ambulance, which she did.
By the time the fire trucks and ambulances showed up, however, Spencer had already gotten himself unstuck.
“I was trying to get it off, but I wasn’t pulling,” Spencer said. “I was being gentle and freaking out. Some of my taste buds came off onto the pole.”
Spencer is expected to make a full recovery, though he said that the ordeal was pretty painful.
As far as the mischief of boys resulting in an emergency, this is about as innocuous as it gets. Better they play with ice than fire.
Editors Note: This post was originally published on December 3, 2018.
