February in Minnesota is not merely cold. It is a form of hostile weather engineered to test the limits of human endurance. Around here, a “heat wave” is anything above zero; it’s a place where your mittens have mittens. Just walking from your car to the front door constitutes a minor expedition, with frost forming on every exposed inch of skin. Not only can you see your breath, you could, if you were so inclined, snap it over your knee and use it to chill a Mountain Dew for several hours.
So naturally, this was the month I decided to stand on the roof of the school in nothing but a diaper and a red cape.
Yes. A diaper. And a red cape. In sub-zero weather. Let that sink in.
It was just after sunrise, the pale, unforgiving light spilling across the parking lot as the first yellow buses rumbled in, their engines doing little to combat the cold. There I stood — your mostly exposed janitor — awaiting hundreds of little scholars, ready to pour inside with brains full of knowledge and no idea what horrors awaited them on the roof.
Because February is “I Love to Read Month,” and what better way to kick things off than by becoming a half-naked superhero I barely even knew anything about — except that he almost certainly did not live in Minnesota.
I was Captain Underpants: Frostbite Edition.
February is also every elementary school custodian’s least favorite month. Salt stains in the hallways, snow tracked in like we were hosting the Winter Olympics, boilers wheezing like an elderly donkey with an asthma condition, and a calendar bursting with “I Love to Read” events.
Someone — I blame the Media Center Specialist — thought it would be a good idea to kick things off with a bang. She was probably thinking: Hmm … who could we get to stand on the roof, at 10 below, almost naked, and get our students excited about “I Love to Read Month”? Who has no sense of self-preservation and will probably do anything if we sneak chocolate chip cookies into the deal? Ah, yes … I know just the man. This will be wild, for sure, cutting-edge, perhaps. Brilliant? Absolutely. This has Mr Glende written all over it.
So there I was, atop the roof, in a giant homemade diaper and red cape, playing none other than the great literary hero Captain Underpants.
Keep in mind, this was before adult diapers were a thing. If you wanted to fashion a size-XXL undergarment, one had to become an amateur engineer, a seamstress, and, I suspect, a minor sorcerer. I raided the custodial supply closet in ways Mr. Whipple would never have approved of.
At the time, it seemed like a brilliant plan to get kids excited about reading. Looking back, would I do it again? The jury is still out. The kids howled. The teachers laughed. The principal gave me two thumbs up. The district office … not so much. Apparently, having an adult male with more than his guy thighs exposed, waving at children from a rooftop in a diaper and cape is frowned upon. Who knew?
And then the local paper got wind of it. Soon enough, my Captain Underpants body was splashed across the front page, framed as if I were either a folk hero or a public menace. I might as well have tacked my photograph on the post office wall next to the “Most Wanted” posters.
But the kids loved it. Years later, when I run into former students, it’s never, “Hey, Mr. Glende, remember when I puked in Science class, and you had to clean it up?” No. It’s always, “Remember when you were Captain Underpants on the roof?”
Sometimes, custodians are more than a mop and a ring of keys. Like Captain Underpants, who drank Extra-Strength Super Power Juice to gain his powers, I got mine from a pre-dawn chug of Mountain Dew. For one glorious, frostbitten morning, I wasn’t just the guy who fixed leaky sinks, shoveled snow and whispered to the boilers.
By the time the last bus had dropped off its precious cargo, my diaper was crunchy, my cape frozen into something resembling a roofing shingle, and I couldn’t feel my tongue. I was asking myself, “Do school custodians do this in Florida? Where’s the fun in that?”
But to the kids, I wasn’t just a janitor. I was Captain Underpants: Frostbite Edition — a frozen, slightly ridiculous, but wholly heroic figure in the cruel, magnificent theater of February.
Mark Glende, Rosemount, is an elementary school custodian. “I write about real-life stories with a slight twist of humor,” he says. “I’m not smart enough to make this stuff up.”
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