No. This is not about the Windsors or my lemonade stand idea. Oh that it were.

It’s about the Industrial Arts class, one of many that I flunked, and my daughter’s dental appointment, in her case, about getting a $1,600 crown on a tooth that had a crack in it.

I don’t think I need a “crown,” and I’m sure glad, because I don’t have that kind of money anymore.

We just got through having the house painted, and I’m thinking of opening that lemonade stand at the foot of the driveway, for making extra cash.

My daughter, ordinarily a very articulate woman, struggled (through numb lips and a bad headache) to describe her recent “crown” experience.

“First they find the crack,” she moaned, “then they make a mold of the tooth. Then they take the mold and send it in” (takes a drink of water) “then they put in a temporary crown, then two weeks later you go back, and they put the permanent crown in. It hurts, the whole thing hurts,” she said.

End of call.

The “send it in” part intrigued me.

Where do dentists send these things? Is it some little shop on a strip mall, next to a laundromat where they repair teeth in a back room, and then send them back? Am I wrong?

This whole dental drama reminds me of my first experience with a different kind of “crack” I came upon in high school in something called Industrial Arts.
What you may very well ask what was I doing in “Industrial Arts” when all I wanted to be was an actor.

The Industrial Arts teacher (whose name, like most everything, escapes me) had a serious lisp and parted his hair in the middle like the Russian writer Anton Chekhov preferred to do. I know that only because I played Mr. Chekhov in a school play.

I vaguely remember this teacher talking about a “crankshaft,” and apparently if yours had a crack in it, you were in a world of trouble.

That was a long time ago, and I know less about crankshafts now than I did then. I didn’t even drive until I was 43. Ask Her.

Can you see why I was made to sit out in the hall in Industrial Arts? Eventually I dropped out and took up Home-Ec and got real good at omelets.

I was a lonely, skinny kid in school, and had no friends in there except for April Knight, who kept the bullies from hitting me.

I’m not making this up — that was her actual name, I swear.

April was really tall with short, cropped black hair, and wore farmer overalls, all the time, the kind with straps over the shoulders, and a T-shirt.

April was a “tomboy.” That was what they called girls like April who could punch harder than any boy in school. True story. “Tom Boy?” We’ve moved on since then.

I lost touch with April, but I’ll bet she became a prison guard. I’m gonna look on Facebook.

About the stand. Do you think it’s seemly for a late middle-aged newspaper columnist to run a lemonade stand, even as a gag? Let’s see some hands.

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.