A is relaxing in a field. B enters and sits down next to A.
B: What’s up?
A: Do you know what pomme de terre means?
B: Um…A scary poem?
A: What? No. It means potato in French. It comes from, “apple of the earth”.
B: Okay. So?
A: I was just thinking about why. Potatoes aren’t really like apples.
B: They have a kinda blob-like shape. It kind of makes sense.
A: No more than any other fruit, though. I think that ugli fruit look more like potatoes.
B: I’m pretty sure that they don’t have ugli fruit in France.
A: They didn’t have potatoes in France until Columbus came back, either.
B: Well, that’s probably why they had a weird name for it.
A: Why wouldn’t they just use the Indian name, though?
B: France has this crazy naming system. They don’t let the language evolve; they have this bureau of government that does nothing but names things to keep other languages from polluting theirs.
A: Does it work?
B: Not really. You know the word for cheerleader is, “Le pompom girl”?
An apple the size of a house rolls by.
B: What was that?
A: You know my class with Cassandra?
B: Yeah?
A: She told the class to take a poem and expand.
B: Ah. I can see how that could be ambiguous.
Silence. After a short while, a giant potato rolls by.
B: Wait, there’s more than one of them.
A: Yeah. The whole class made the same joke.
B: The whole class knows French?
A: No, just a little. Enough to get by.
Silence. A giant apple rolls by.
B: What did Cassandra think about it?
A: She thought it was funny at first. But then we had like 2 hours of class to do nothing, so she kind of panicked. She gave us a prompt and we had to write in class.
B: Aw, that sucks.
A: I did conference work instead.
B: I love laptops.
A: Yeah. As long as you’re facing the teacher, you could be doing anything on it.
B: Have you ever played a left-brained game during a lecture?
A: Left-brained?
B: Yeah. You know, a game like Tetris? That you don’t have to think about creatively.
A: Yeah?
B: You absorb like twice as much of the lecture.
A: How does that work?
B: I dunno. It just becomes impossible to space out.
A: I’ll try that.
B: You should.
Silence. The potato rolls by again. As it get out of sight, screaming is heard.
B: Oh! That’s why you were talking about potatoes!
A: Yeah.
B: Oh! That makes sense…
A: Yep.
B: Were you the one who expanded the potato?
A: No, I made one of the apples.
B: How do you even get it that big?
A: You know those Grow Monsters?
B: No.
A: Those, like, dinosaur toys that you put in water and they get bigger.
B: Oh! I remember those!
A: Yeah. They’re made out of this plastic that absorbs water really well. If you melt down the plastic and inject it into, like, anything, it’ll just keep soaking up water. There’s a limit, but it’s really big.
B: And everyone in your class knew about it?
A: Well, I found it on Yahoo Answers and sent the link to everyone.
Two women run across the scene being chased by the potato and screaming.
B: So this is your fault?
A: Yeah, kind of. I didn’t really think about how hilly Sarah Lawrence is.
B: Well, none of your classmates did either.
A: It was worth it anyway.
B: Definitely worth the pun.
Fade to BLACKOUT.
