Weekend Assignment #53 - April Fool's Prank

Weekend Assignment #53: Your Best Prank

Weekend Assignment #53: Recount a tale of a particularly successful April Fool's prank you perpetrated, had perpetrated on you, or witnessed personally. As a matter of humor, it's best if the pranks are not merely cruel (i.e., if it ends with someone in tears or in the hospital, that's probably stretching the limits of the phrase "successful April Fool's prank"), but aside from that, bring 'em on.

Extra Credit: Prank someone famous. Tell us how.


Dear John,

Sad to say, I'm a serious kind of guy. I don't prank people. I deliver lines with a straight, albeit bearded, face. I don't drink. I'm a stand up citizen (there's never any seats in church on Judgment Day). So I am hard-stretched to think of an April Fool's Day prank, successful or otherwise.

However, as noted below, I married my wife on April Fool's Day, so I guess the joke's on me. But before the marriage, I had to discover just how gullible my wife-to-be was. So one evening over a great meal, just before the first snows of Autumn, my gal, my brother and I were sitting at the table with my beloved and the topic happened to land on snakes. Tammi went to great lengths detailing her hatred and horror of snakes, her anger at discovering we have some garter snakes living in an old elm tree stump on the front lawn which means she'll not even ride the mower within 20 feet of the stump -- she just refuses to mow that part of the lawn...

I casually mentioned she'd have to use a certain amount of caution when walking to the mailbox if the driveway wasn't plowed, for fear of the snow snakes. At first she didn't believe me. But I can be extremely persuasive. The coup de grace was delivered by my brother, however, when he insisted, straight-faced, that we were indeed telling her the truth. Snow snakes grow no larger than garter snakes, are white in appearance and spend most of their time pursuing rats, mice and voles by following the rodents' tunnels under the snow. They are nonpoisonous and extremely helpful to the Maine ecology, else we'd be overrun with rodents. My brother is the image of innocence. And, despite that image, or maybe because of it, he can prevaricate with the best of them.

Reluctantly, Tammi believed us. The topic would come up casually and we never told her the truth -- that snow snakes were the product of our overactive and fertile imaginations. We'd simply go along with whatever the reference might be and the wife was none the wiser.

One day, it snowed a wee bit while my wife was at work. Now, being a Southern Belle in Yankeeland was hard enough. But she went off and started telling all and sundry to be careful going to their cars in the parking lot, "'cause the snow snakes might get them." After gales of laughter, ridicule and the general refusal of all and sundry refusing to countenance the tale, she knew she'd been had.

It was a frosty greeting yours truly received that night when I came through the door after work. Not only had it snowed and she'd had to drive in it (Southerners can't drive in snow, don'tcha know), but she'd learned the truth about snow snakes.

"And that is why, Your Honor, that she has never believed another word out of my mouth."

Give our best to Krissy and Athena. Keep your driveway shoveled - wouldn't want the snow snakes to get your girls...

Grins and giggles,

wil

PS. If I had my druthers, I'd like to prank George Bush about his daughters. Say, a phone prank. To the Secret Service - from the Charge d' affairs at the American Consulate in Mexico City. "The girls have been arrested for possession of Ecstasy by los Federales in Piedras Negras (across the Rio Grande from Eagle Pass, Tejas) on Friday evening in a seedy bar on the wrong side of the tracks." That the Secret Service accompanying them "had been arrested for illegal possession of handguns by a foreigner" - a felony in Mexico, by the way. That despite their powerful paterfamilias, the Mexican government, in the form of the DA for the state of Chiuahua "refuses to drop the charges because he is running for re-election against a very powerful PAL candidate running on a "Law and Order" campaign..."

I wouldn't tell the Bushes the truth until AFTER he'd declared war on Mexico...