Boys Left With Bleeding Tongues After Licking Flagpole

CHESTERTON, Ind. — Two fourth-grade boys mimicking a scene from the movie “A Christmas Story” wound up with their tongues stuck to a frozen flagpole.

Gavin Dempsey and James Alexander were serving on flag duty at Jackson Elementary School Friday morning, with the job of raising and lowering the school’s flags. They decided to see if their tongues really would stick to the cold metal.

“I decided to try it because I thought all of the TV shows were lies, but turns out I was wrong,” Gavin said.

Karen Alexander, James’ mother , said her son told her he got the idea from the movie, which is based on stories about a boy growing up in the northwest Indiana community of Hammond in the 1940s.

“I can’t believe he did it, but they learned their lesson,” she said.

James said he plans to eat a lot of ice cream to help nurse his wound.

“When you’re young, you’re just messing around,” he said.

Billie Dempsey, Gavin’s mom, said a nurse called them to tell them the boys’ tongues were bleeding.

“The nurse asked them, ‘OK, who double-dog dared who?”‘ Billie Dempsey said, a reference to a phrase that a character in the movie used to dare another child to stick his tongue to the pole.

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“When you’re young, you’re just messing around.” Brilliant words of wisdom from a 4th-grader. The only difference between people my age who got into strife “messing around” when we were young (don’t ask about the bars in the railing at the train station…) and these young pups is that thanks to the wonders of Teh Interwebs, youthful messings-around such as this are now recorded for posterity for the world to see.

Still and all, I’d bet they have learned their lesson, and they do have their youth as an excuse. Unlike the almost-armless West Aussie…