No Foolin’…At Least Not This Time Around

I racked my brain today trying to come up with a good practical joke to pull on my family.   No such luck.   Instead, I quickly funneled my attention to thwarting such a joke possibly being played on me.   Then my thoughts turned to pulling some sort of a bluff on this blog site with my loyal readers (something along the lines of what I have done other years).   Again, my creative juices just didn’t seem to intersect successfully with my mischievous side.   So, you’ve been spared…at least for now.

Yet, that doesn’t mean, mind you, that I don’t fondly remember some of the interesting pranks that have been accomplished in the past.   I must confess, I’m not sure they all were April Fool’s related…but c’mon, is that a necessary requirement to having some fun?

I think back to my high school days (almost 30 years ago) when my buddy Mitch and I decided to play a prank with a dead skunk.   You see, a neighbor of ours was having some terrible trouble with skunks somehow getting into his basement.   Well, we thought we would set him up by making sure that another skunk, albeit a dead skunk, paid him a little visit.

Late one night after dark we snuck onto his lawn and just a short distance from the door propped the skunk up into a realistic pose thanks to some well placed cedar shake shingles.   A short while later, the neighbor arrived home seeing the skunk in his yard thanks to his truck’s headlights.   The story goes…he ran into his house, pulled out his shotgun…and proceeded to fire off three rounds at the dead skunk before it tipped over.   Of course, the next morning when he went to remove it with a shovel he quickly realized he had been victimized the evening before by some prankster.

Of course, most good practical jokes require something a bit newsworthy or a good set-up to pull them off.   And so it was about 20 years ago in the news there was a recall for bird food as it had been tainted resulting in the death of many backyard songbirds.   Aha, the perfect opportunity for another joke.   At the time my cousin was big-time into feeding and was ripe for the set-up.   I told her the night before that there had been a recall of black sunflowers and that she should check her bag to see if it was on the list.   Of course, she didn’t…and I knew that.

During the night while I knew her husband and her were at a party…I slipped into their back yard and placed several bright red imitation cardinals scattered on the ground underneath the feeder.   The next morning wasn’t pretty…and perhaps it was best I was not there.   I was told my cousin, still feeling the effects of a bad hangover from the night before, peered out her kitchen window with coffee cup in hand only to see the faux carnage of her beloved cardinals lying motionless on the snowy ground.   Let’s just say it was emotional…and her husband later told me if I knew what was best I would never bring up that incident to her.   Well, 20 years or so have elapsed and this is one of the first times I have confessed to my misdeeds.   I still think it was funny, if not just a wee bit rotten of me to do it.

I suppose it was about 15 years ago I was in business with a guy who had this bad habit of opening my mail.   You see, he was a control freak and it didn’t matter to him if MY NAME was on the envelope…if it came to our business post office box in his mind it was fair game to be opened.   So how could I teach him a lesson by opening something he had wished he had not opened?   Quite easily.

A close friend of mine worked at the county courthouse and conspired with me to play this prank.   An official document was drawn up called an ROP, which stands for Recognition of Parentage, legally establishing a man as the father of a child when the parents are not married.   Imagine the look on my business partner’s face when he opened and read that fake document.    By the time I got the letter it was carefully taped shut and my partner denied it was him who had opened it.   Come to think of it, from that point on I didn’t have a lot of trouble with opened letters anymore…so with the prank I declared the problem solved.

Maybe now that I have gotten a bit older I don’t feel the need to pull pranks on people quite like I once did.   Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean I don’t still appreciate a good gag when I hear of one happening…just so long as it’s not at my expense.

2007 Jim Braaten. All Rights Reserved. No Reproduction without Prior Permission.