the senior committee on pranks

okay...

so, i'm talking with my friend, mike johnson, in study hall.
we're trying to decide what we were going to do for our (first) senior prank.
it had to be wild, it had to be crazy, and it had to be practical--no one gets hurt.
mike was the class president, i was the class...clown. we were great friends and big into saturday night live. (a year or so before that i had memorized and learned to recite steve martin's comedy bits word for word and had risen to the top in the high school comedy world.) when we were together, mike and i were the festrunk brothers, the outrageous czech guys who hit on all the foxes and said the word 'buttocks' a lot.
this time though, we were going to be the blues brothers, jake and elwood, on a mission from god--or maybe better, bluto and d-day...although, to tell you the truth, i think we were both belushi...

we agreed that a greased pig would be the best. getting into the school at night wouldn't be a problem. my dad had been a cop in the city when i was little and had confiscated a few sets of really nice lock picking tools over the years and had taught me how to use them. we talked to one of our friends who we knew worked on a farm and we asked him, very secretively, where a couple of young guys like us could find a piglet and if he'd be into helping us 'borrow' one from someone. that's how ray krumenacker got involved.

ray thought it would be a lot easier if he went and stole the pig alone--less chance for noise and the other pigs wouldn't get so riled up. so it was agreed that we'd meet him at 8:00. my only job was gonna be getting into the school, which ray was pretty skeptical about, mike said, you just bring the pig, we'll get him where he needs to go.
i can remember mike coming into my house, both of us dressed in dark clothes, our faces blackened like on hogan's heroes, and my father asking what we were up to. the less you know the better, we told him , and drove off into the night. i remember the blues brothers 'groove me' blasting on the radio as the headlights of mike's dad's volkswagen scirroco bounced off the puddles on ackert hook road, reflecting up into the trees, into the night, as we sang and laughed and yelled at each other in ridiculous eastern european accents.

we met ray at the predetermined location, he in a beat up volkswagen of his own. somewhere along the line, ray had picked up a couple friends of his, juniors, mark welch and albert curnan, who had been hitchhiking down the road. apparently, having a pig in a burlap bag in the back seat was too much for ray to keep to himself and the idea of picking these guys up and telling one of them to sit in the back with the pig was one of those can't pass up moments. ha! i woulda done the same thing.

now it was time for me to get us in and i was pretty confident...until i saw that the school had recently replaced the old kwickset locks with these brand new, state of the art, schlage 1150's, the lock that had the reciprocating variable tumbler in the back!! i didn't have a pick that was long enough to reach back there and for just a second i thought we were sunk. then i remembered that far in the rear of the school, outside the building, was a grating that was locked with a basic master lock i had tricked once or twice for kicks and knew that we had a way in.

telling ray--and mark and albert--to sit with the pig in the car out front and wait for us to come to the front door, we went around the back of the school and i popped the lock. unfortunately, it meant that mike and i had to get in through the cinder block tunnels--roughly about 2 feet high and three feet wide--that labyrinthed under the school, housing the big green iron water pipes. so like bronson in the great escape, we crawled the length of the school, roughly 300 yards, and came up in the boiler room.

it took forever.
we were sure that ray and they guys--plus our new little pal--would be long gone.

but they had faith.
we let them in, posed for a picture--mike was in the photography club and terrific photographer--and i picked the lock to the classroom we we going to leave him in. (i will say now, this was never meant to be personal on mr. hryshko. we just didn't want to leave the little guy running the halls of the school--a classroom would be a little more cozy--and we were just trying to figure out which teacher's reaction would be the best. mr. hryshko was the obvious choice.)

it was a good night.


back: me, mark welch
front: mike johnson, ray krumenacker, albert curnan
down front: a pig

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i don't watch the news, i don't read the news--the only news i get is from jon stewart and that seems to be enough.

i don't watch or read it 'cause:
1.) the news is usually very depressing and at times will make you feel extremely powerless
and
b.) the big news agencies are all owned by major corporations now so you know it's gonna be "corporately edited"...

so i don't get the news and am usually pretty outta the loop.
but i do glance over the AP news i get on my yahoo home page and so i know what they'd like you to think are the top stories of the hour...
anyway, not being a news guy and not being up on all things current, i still would like to introduce this new feature i'm calling

PEOPLE IN THE NEWS
this is where i will randomly select a photo from the news feed on any of the ones that come my way, and comment on it.
for example;

this is senator max baucus (D-Montana) who is currently on the finance committee looking into the american health care situation.



my comment:
he looks a lot like the professor from gilligan's island

and that's how that's gonna go.

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"five for friday"

1. who played the professor on gilligan's island?

2. what was the name of the blues brothers first album?

3. what were the first names of the two czech wild and crazy guys, the festrunk brothers?

4. where should the reciprocating variable tumbler go?

5. how did the principal find out about the pig...?

i'm off to do reunion things.
have a great weekend!
smell ya later!
todd