
January 13 is Rubber Duckie Day. Sure, you can buy a squeaker and give it to some random kid—“Merry Belated Christmas, Stewie”—or buy your own child yet another one…but what’s the fun in that? Rubber ducks are just another one of nature’s (okay, man’s) gifts to play with, deface, and use for art projects. Don’t believe me? Try one of these ideas.
Deface a duck. Go ahead—you know you want to do it! Cut it up with a knife and reassemble it in a funky way. Glue the parts on canvass as a trippy quacktastic collage.
Gather up all of the rubber ducks in your house and put them in the bathtub. Now splatter them with paint, glitter, whatever you’ve got to make a really wild new creation.
Dress up your ducks as wildly or as silly as possible. Does your child have doll clothes or action figure gear that a duck would look quite fetching in? How about some scrap fabric to make a hippie t-shirt, a wedding veil, or a baby bonnet for duckie? If you have some leather around, maybe Sir Duck would like to prance around like David Lee Roth…
Listen to Ernie’s “Rubber Duckie” song (from Sesame Street—you know, the one Tom Selleck “accidentally” plays in Three Men and a Little Lady, though you know he just wanted to get jiggy with some puppet tunes…) while you paint, collage, create, or just shower. Create something duckish after the song inspires you.
Play Duck, Duck, Goose at the office. Every time a person is caught, he or she has to quack and do the Duck Dance.
Buy a duck. If you have the room and the inclination for a beaked pet, why not? This is actually something I’ve always wanted to do, mostly because we used to play a game in school where one person would ask, “Do you want to buy a duck?” The next person asks, “A what?” The first person responds, “A duck.” The second person comes back with, “Does it quack?” And the first person finishes the round with, “Of course it quacks!” Then you just repeat it with different people. Yeah, pretty pointless, but you can get to laughing pretty hard.
Play “Do you want to buy a duck?” See above.
Recreate a duck feather out of any medium you have on hand. How realistic can you make it? How funky?
