After the 670 students of Falmouth Elementary School in Falmouth, Va., read 10,000 books in 1988, Robert Burke smeared his body with Vaseline and sat for 30 minutes in a kiddie pool filled with 36 gallons of orange Jell-O.

He tried various flavors and liquors and settled on orange Jell-O and vodka.

Penn and Teller meet Abstract Expressionism, you could say, although the sadism of the undertaking is tempered by having the hapless volunteer eventually emerge, smiling triumphantly and none the worse for the shellacking, from a rather large mold of orange Jell-O.

Tucked among the boxes of pizza sauce was another corrugated box, labeled as containing packets of orange Jell-O.

This is an idea; that is a box of orange Jell-O.

Entries included Jell-O bread, made with gelatin rather than eggs; "Undescended Twinkies," which floated on orange Jell-O, and "Tuna Surprise," tuna fish and peas in aspic, which took a prize "for bouquet and 1950's nostalgia."

He asked for and received $110,037.37 plus 37 boxes of orange Jell-O.

There they were, a roomful of nurses feeding each other crackers that crumbled on their chest, juice that dribbled down their chin, and spoons laden with orange Jell-O that tasted like grandma's punishment for sassing.

"Hell, don't say I didn't warn you," said Sam Fetisher, and he spooned a trembling lump of orange Jell-O into his mouth.

She pointed at the orange Jell-O with chips of cabbage floating in it like fine wood bark.