Sophistication

I guess I feel compelled to mention April Fool's Day because, well, it's April Fool's Day.

Here's one of my early experiences with April Fool's Day, in which someone fooled me.  I wrote a Haiku about it circa 1981.

April Fool’s Haiku

You are pretty.  Want

to go to the dance with me?

Ha ha.  April Fool’s.

While I am an O.K. jokester, I am NOT a good April Fool's Artist. 

There was the time that my best friend, Marygrace, had a fake rock that was really just a piece of foam painted with such precision that it, indeed, looked like a real rock.  She let me borrow said rock on April Fool's Day (I may have been in Junior High) so that I could "fool" my mom.  I took the rock home and showed my mother, pretending that it was very heavy in the palm of my hand, and said that it was from the moon.  I then proceeded to whip the rock at my mother.  Obviously, the intended result was that the "rock" would harmlessly bounce off of her, yet giving her an awful fright.  Now, what I neglected to tell you is that the "rock" was attached to a metal key chain, which upon impact wailed into my mother's collarbone leaving a large welt (which turned into a bruise).

------

There was the time that I was in my freshman year of college and my friend, Stacy, and I thought that it would be HILARIOUS to call our respective homes at 1 a.m. on April Fool's Day, have the other person pretend to be an R.A. and inform our parental units that we had been kicked out of school for pulling the fire alarms.  

The fact that Stacy's mother cried inconsolably for 1/2 hour did not stop me from calling my parents with the same April Foolery.  My parents didn't cry.  They also didn't speak to me for several weeks.

-------

It takes real sophistication to be good at April Foolishness.  Sophistication, my dear friends, is not, has not, and never will be a word used to describe me.

Happy April Fool's Everyone... and more importantly, happy almost birthday to my best friend, Marygrace.  Mayr's mom, my second mother, Lois, claimed to have been in labor with Marygrace on April 1st.  Lois said that she "waited" until April 2nd to deliver Marygrace because she didn't want to have her first child born on April Fool's Day.  (I truly believed Lois until I went through labor twice myself...and as much as I love her, I have to call BS, because nobody can "wait" in that situation).

Now, I know I'm repeating stories here, but this just reminded me that Lois loved a good joke.  It was on April Fool's that she took the girls' Cher head (one that you put makeup on), placed it on her pillow, fashioned a body out of pillows, made the girls wake Pa telling him that Ma was ill.  He nudged her "body" and the head rolled off giving him the fright of his life.

Now Lois, that was a sophisticated jokestress!