Prom Disasters

As my son hurtles to the end of his high school career, barely motivated to get out of bed to go to school, I can’t help but think back to my senior year of high school. Like him, I really had nothing to go to school for. I didn’t need to pass any classes the second half of the year and I could still graduate. Passing wasn’t an issue, as I had taken fluff classes all year. I took a class called Tales of Mystery and Intrigue, where we read books, like Serpico. I took a class called Comedy and Satire, where we talked about things like The Three Stooges. I had no Math class, no Science class, and no French class. My senior year was pretty much a waste of time.

He’s also coming up to Prom season, and because he’s dating a girl a year younger, he’ll be going to the Junior Prom and the Senior Prom. Let’s be real, the girls think about it all the time and the guys for the most part couldn’t care less. At least that’s how it was when I was in high school. Maybe I’m just bitter after all these years, because both my Junior and Senior Proms were horrible. To say things didn’t go well would be an understatement.

The girl I was dating Junior year couldn’t wait for the prom. It was all she talked about for weeks. On the evening of the prom, we met up with another couple (her best friend and a guy that I had played soccer with, whom I’ll call Mike), took some pictures and then hung out with some other people for a while. We had one or two drinks with alcohol and Mike purposely made all the drinks kind of weak because none of us were big drinkers, especially the girls. Heck, I don’t think I was even slightly buzzed after two of them. We went to the Prom and after a short time my date went to the bathroom – and didn’t come back for over an hour. Apparently, she was getting sick…from the alcohol. I can’t even tell you how many dirty looks I got that night from outraged females, all suspecting that I had got her drunk for nefarious purposes. Disaster #1 in my Prom experience.

Senior year was no better. I had a girlfriend whom I liked very much and things seemed to be going pretty well. I honestly don’t even remember exactly what happened, but I think we had had an argument one night, and the next day a friend of hers overheard a comment I made, took it out of context and told her I didn’t want to go to the Prom with her. Me, being the dim-witted clod I was, didn’t realize anything was up until a day or two later when I talked to her and found out about what had happened. To make matters worse, she was going to go to the Prom with her old boyfriend because she thought I didn’t want to go with her. Disaster #2 in my Prom experience.

Feeling like I was going to be one of the few not going, I found out that a girl I had been friends with since Elementary School wasn’t going to the Prom either, so we ended up going together. We had been good friends, but not romantic, over the years so I figured we’d have a good time. Boy was I wrong. About ten minutes after we got there, she totally blew me off and left me to myself. I was a third wheel for most of the night, hanging out with people here and there until they went to dance …or whatever. On top of that, I had to see my now ex-girlfriend looking very pretty at the Prom with another guy (who, by the way, wanted to kick my butt). Disaster #3 in my Prom experience.

So as my son finishes up his last couple of weeks of high school, I hope he has a much better Prom experience than I did. Then again, it couldn’t be much worse.

Pranks

The other day at work we were discussing some pranks that have occurred there. In one of them, a stuffed moose from the Holiday Party Yankee Swap was kidnapped and held for ransom. In another, the Manager of Development came in to work to find his office filled with white and pink balloons, wall-to-wall and almost floor-to-ceiling. He could barely even get in the door to his office. In the most recent prank, everything at one guy’s desk was covered with plastic wrap. His chair, his laptop, his monitor, his pens and even his sticky notes were all individually wrapped in plastic cling wrap. Though there were suspects for all these pranks, no one took credit for them.

I’m not against pranks as long as no one gets hurt and nothing is broken. Growing up in a family with nine kids, including seven boys, you either have fun with pranks or you cry and whine all the time. My older brothers played a great prank on my younger brother and I. Three of them would be in their room and they would have us wait in the hall outside of it, then they’d let us back in and one of them would be gone! We’d look under the beds, under the blankets of the top bunk bed, in the closet, and out the windows in case he was hiding outside. He was nowhere to be found. Then they’d have us go back to the hallway for a minute and when we returned to their room, there he was! They did this multiple times and every time one of them was gone. It took us a few years before we realized that there was a trap door to storage space in their closet and that’s where the “missing” brother was going.

Being taught well by my older brothers and being a bit of a wise guy myself, I participated in far too many pranks over the years to detail here, but here are a couple that I remember like they happened last week. 

I used to have an obsession with throwing things up on the ceiling that I think came from The Three Stooges episode where Moe throws a pie up on the ceiling, which then falls onto the face of a rich woman when she looks up. In the fourth grade, Ms. Silverstein, my teacher, stepped out of the room for a moment and I promptly took a Fudgie (a piece of chocolate candy for those who don’t know what I’m talking about), rolled it in a ball and threw it up at the ceiling, where it stuck – just above the door. Most of the kids thought it was funny, so I did the same thing with another, which was followed by more laughter. Ms. Silverstein, sensing something was wrong, came back in and looked around the room trying to figure out what was going on. Meanwhile, the first piece of chocolate was loosening up and barely hanging on to the ceiling right above her head. Just after she turned to go back to her desk, it fell to the ground, missing her by about an inch and landing on the floor. Luckily for me she never did figure out what happened.

You think I would have learned from that near miss, but no, I did something similar in eighth grade. We were doing an “International Week” in Social Studies where each student gave a report on a different country. Someone’s choice was Italy and the person brought in some cheese to share with everybody. While most of my classmates tasted their cheese, I rolled mine into a ball and threw it at the ceiling where it stuck just above my desk. Too many of my classmates were looking up at it so I thought I better get it down before the teacher, Mr. Lown, saw it and gave me detention. I hit it with my pen, but it didn’t move. I waited a minute, so as to not draw attention to myself, and threw my notebook at it, but it held on tight. I figured I needed something bigger, so after another minute I threw my text book up at it and knocked it down – along with the whole ceiling panel that was then all over me, my desk and the floor around me in about a hundred pieces! Needless to say, I got caught.

Looking back all these years later, the pranks I did in school were stupid, as was shutting the classroom closet door on my friend Smitty. Many pranks are kind of stupid. They’re fun at the time, but not so much later. Thankfully no one got hurt in any of the pranks I was involved in, although I did have to sit below a gaping hole in the ceiling of my Social Studies class for about a month. That was painful.

False Phrases

Recently I was thinking about things my parents used to say when I was a kid to make me feel better, or get me to do something, or pump me up to attempt something. There were a lot of things that turned out to be true, but there were a lot of things that turned out to be inaccurate or flat out wrong. Every family had their own sayings, but I’m guessing that many of us heard the same ones.

Here are a few sayings that were supposed to teach us life lessons:

• Good things come to those who wait. Mom told us this to cheer us up when we didn’t get something we wanted. We heard this one a lot in my house. Somehow this was supposed to make me feel better about not getting something, when in reality I would have felt much better getting what I wanted right then. Now that I think about it, nothing comes to those who wait.
• Work hard and you’ll get ahead. Mom and Dad told us this so we’d do our homework and do well in school so we could go on to college. I think it was supposed to motivate us to give our all to tasks and persevere. Sadly, in today’s world you work hard and you get a pat on the back. That is, if your company is being downsized, in which case you get shown the door.
• The cream always rises to the top. This goes along with the previous phrase. It was supposed to teach us that if you do your very best, you’ll magically rise to the top. I’ll tell you what rises to the top – dead bodies…unless they have a pair of cement shoes.
• Cheaters never prosper. Ha! Professional athletes and politicians have turned this one on its head. We heard this one a lot, too, because Mom and Dad wanted us to always play fair and follow the rules. As with most kids, we didn’t always live by this rule.

Here are a few sayings that Mom and Dad employed to get us to eat stuff we didn’t like:

• Carrots are good for your eyes. Which was followed by “Have you ever seen a rabbit with glasses?” I have to admit, I never did see a rabbit with glasses. However, I did see a lot of people who ate carrots and still had glasses, Mom and Dad included. I didn’t eat carrots much and I never needed glasses. That is, until I hit my mid-40’s and now I can’t read anything without my goggles.
• Eat all your vegetables and you’ll grow up big and strong. I am Exhibit A that this was false. We had vegetables almost every night with dinner, along with salad, and we had to eat all that we were given (or took) and I never did make it to six feet. I know, I know, some will say I did grow up big and strong – big headed with strong B.O.
• Fish is great brain food. I’ve never been a big fish fan and yet I was still pretty smart growing up. I still remember Moe telling Larry, in response to his declaration that fish was great brain food, that he should fish for a whale! I heard that one from my brothers a few times, too.

Lastly, here are a few sayings that Mom and Dad used to get us to stop doing things they didn’t like:

• Your face will get stuck like that. Mom seemed to always catch us making goofy faces at each other and said this to get us to stop. Guess what? It didn’t work. We still did it and our faces are perfectly normal, some may even say handsome. Though I must admit, in a few moments of insecurity I did check my face in the mirror just to make sure I wasn’t cross-eyed with my tongue hanging out of my mouth.
• If you sit too close to the TV, you’ll ruin your eyes. Since the advent of TV, kids have sat as close to it as they could. In my house, we sat close to the TV so we could hear it because someone was always goofing around and making noise – many times it was me. However, I don’t think there was ever a scientific study that proved that if you sit too close to the TV, your eyes are adversely affected.
• If you listen to music too loud, you’ll go deaf. There was only one reason for this, and it was because our parents, mine included, hated the music we listened to. My brothers and sisters and I listened to rock, from the Beatles to Zeppelin, until a couple of family members lost their minds and went disco on me. There was only one way to play it and that was loud! Meanwhile, Mom was playing her Englebert Humperdinck and Tom Jones albums pretty loud herself.

There you have it, things our parents told us that weren’t true. Maybe in twenty years my kids will have a list of phrases that my wife and I told them that weren’t true. That is, if they can come up with any.

Guilty

There are times you do something that you know is wrong, or you realize after the fact that it was wrong. If you’re like most people, you feel guilty. Some people feel hardly any guilt; others feel more than is warranted. Remember in the movie A Christmas Story when Flick gets his tongue stuck to the sign post in the middle of winter? After Flick comes back, the teacher, Miss Shields, tries to get the kids to own up to who made Flick do it. When Flick won’t rat out his friends and no one will come forward, she says, “I’m sure the guilt you feel is far worse than any punishment you might receive.” She follows that up with that pitiful face that’s supposed to make the kids feel bad and says, “Don’t you feel terrible? Don’t you feel remorse for what you have done? That’s all I’m going to say about poor Flick.”

The voice-over comes out with a classic line at this time, “Adults love to say things like that but kids know better. We knew darn well it was always better NOT to get caught.” Guilt? Not so much. You can’t make people feel guilty. They either do or they don’t. I tended to have a “guilty conscience” when I was a kid. When I did something wrong, and I knew it was wrong, I could just picture my Mom standing there with a sad face, shaking her head, making me feel terrible. However, I was usually able to shake that feeling off because like the kids in A Christmas Story, I knew it was better not to get caught. There was one time, though, that I did get caught.

Somehow, my friend Smitty had found out that you could get into our elementary school through the roof. Apparently there was a door on the roof that wasn’t locked. So one Saturday morning we went to the school, Smitty shimmied up a pole to the roof and about 30 seconds later opened the front door for me. We crossed the hallway to the office and the first thing we did was what a lot of kids always wanted to do – speak over the intercom. That’s right, we turned on the microphone and started doing bits from The Three Stooges. We each did the “Doctor Howard! Doctor Fine! Doctor Howard!” bit, Smitty did the “Ba ba ba boo, are you listening, ba ba ba boo!” bit, and we both did our finest imitations of the school principal reading the morning announcements. Then in the blink of an eye, everything changed.

Smitty was staring out the front door, wide-eyed, pointing. One word was all it took to bring all the fun and games to an end: “Cops!” We turned off the intercom, walked casually out the front door and hoped the police officer would think we were just walking along, minding our own business. That thought was dashed when the police car screeched to a halt directly next to us and the officer jumped out. He asked us what we were doing in the school and how we got in. We tried to say we hadn’t been in the school, but he wasn’t buying it. He told us to wait next to his car and went and checked the front door, while Smitty and I debated making a run for it.

He looked around a bit and came back to us and asked us again what we were doing in the school, studying our faces to see if we were telling the truth. When he told us that a silent alarm had been tripped when the front door was opened (I wish we had thought of that!) and we were the only people around, we were smart enough to confess and told him the whole story. He even laughed a little when we told him we were doing Three Stooges stuff over the intercom. I actually thought we were off Scot-free and was starting to relax a bit when he asked us our names and where we lived. This time I couldn’t get rid of the picture of my Mom standing there with a sad face, shaking her head. I felt terrible. I WAS GUILTY!

Smitty and I walked back to our neighborhood in near silence, contemplating the punishment that was sure to come, not just from our parents but from the school, too. I felt like a juvenile delinquent. I wondered what reform school would be like. We came out from behind my house and, horror of horrors, the same police cruiser was sitting in front of my house with the police officer talking to my brothers and some other kids who had been playing basketball. He called us over, told us he believed us that we were just goofing around on the intercom, and gave us a mini-lecture about breaking into schools and how much trouble we could have been in.

I couldn’t believe that we were actually off the hook, and yet I still didn’t feel good about it. I had done something wrong and I had got caught. Even though I didn’t get in trouble for that incident, Miss Shields in A Christmas Story was right. The guilt I felt truly was far worse than any punishment I might have received.