APRIL FOOL'S DAY

I originally was planning to pull off an April Fool's Day prank in my blog but, upon reconsidering, decided doing anything on the internet could get out of hand in a big way. Look how crazy things got in 1957 when the BBC news program Panorama announced that, thanks to a mild winter and elimination of the dreaded spaghetti weevil, Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper harvest of spaghetti. They accompanied this story with pictures of Swiss peasant farmers pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees. Hundreds of viewers were duped and called in wanting to know how they could grow their own spaghetti trees. It took some time, but the show's highly respected anchor, Richard Dimbleby, was eventually forgiven by his viewers.

So, in lieu of stirring up some world-wide chaos, I thought I would instead share the tale of my favorite April Fool's Day prank I managed to pull off. April Fool's Day was a big deal to my father and he enjoyed a lot of success in tormenting his wife and young daughters. By the time I was around fourteen I decided it was time to fight back. After much thought, I hit upon a plan. My dad chewed tobacco; the leaf type that came in a pouch. I replaced the tobacco with some nice fresh, moist horse poo. As we all know, the first Tuesday in April is an election day and my dad happened to be running for Town Supervisor. The first of April that year was a day or two before the election. Dad was quite keyed up and prone to expounding on the issues to his captive audience at home. As he worked himself into a froth, he pulled out his pouch and proceeded to pinch a good-sized wad of "chew" and was waving it about as he drove his point home. I had let my mum and sisters in on the prank and we all sat entranced by that chunk of "poo chew" as Dad would bring it in close to his mouth for the deposit but then pull it away, as he wasn't quite ready to pause in his tirade. Suddenly, the enormity of what I had done washed over me in a sickening wave, but I was frozen in a state of fascinated horror when Dad finally arrived at some type of ending punctuation and opened wide to tuck the wad in place. Thanks to God's marvelous design, the nose is placed strategically above the mouth and Dad caught a whiff of what he was about to put therein. He exploded with an emphatic oath, or two or three, as he examined the offending "chew" at arm's length. Mom and sisters, Tara and Nan, sat mute while I offered a weak, "April Fool's". Dad looked at me in surprise and then, much to our relief, burst out laughing. *Whew* To this day, Dad acknowledges, "That was a good one!"

The next year I tried to top that one by sewing the fly shut on his boxers and he nearly wet himself in the men's room of the law office he worked in before discovering my duplicity.

Happy April Fool's Day!