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By JAMES J. KILPATRICK
Universal Press
After the count passed 4,500, we kind of lost track. The thing got out ofhand.
By “thing” I mean the Great Simile Contest of 1993. The idea was to submit similes for “slender” and “exciting.” To my delight, readers rose to the challenge like tropical fish at feeding time. Across the nation a hundred school teachers spurred their charges on. It was a glorious affray.
By my final, more or less accurate count, 5,019 readers took part. Almost everyone had a go at both “slender” and “exciting,” and most contestants submitted four or five similes in each division. One gentlewoman in San Antonio set in 172 entries. My guess is that I looked at 20,000 similes, all told, and if I never again see “as slender as a blade of grass,” that will be too soon.
Let me end the awful suspense. The winner in the “slender” contest is Aubuma R. Bonnell of Mount Pleasant, Mich. She submitted 71 entries, among them a young woman “as slender as Cinderella’s ankle.” The simile struck the judges as just about perfect. It evoked a familiar image; it had a nice echo effect in “slender” and “Cinder,” and it was packed as tightly as the meat in a coconut.
These were the Honorable Mentions: __ i fr‘ 5 *■' * * ;.v : «
- Eve Martins, Youngstown, N.Y., for a youth “as slender as a' kayak on a river of scows. ”
- Sean Thomas, Tucson, Ariz., for an image of impatient school children, waiting in line “like a row of slender saplings on a windy day.”
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