Shenanigans of Childhood! I was a weird kid. Surprise. I loved to trick my family and do absurd things to them. Unsurprisingly, the person I pranked the most was my mother. I believe my most famous prank on my mom was the great trapdoor scam. We lived in a big old house in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and it had a staircase leading up and a staircase leading down, right from the foyer. After we'd moved out of the house, I revealed that there had been a trapdoor under the stairs that I used to hide in. My mother said that was silly; she'd cleaned that floor so many times that there couldn't possibly be a door there that she'd never seen. However, I was so young and innocent and convincing that eventually she began to doubt that I was lying. What you have to understand about my mother is that she thought we were easily tricked. She used to tell us little fibs that we wouldn't believe, and then act like we had been fooled. One example of this was the day we went to the fair and she stayed home, and when we returned she said a hot air balloon had landed in our backyard, having been blown off-course, and that the news team came and her knee was in a shot that was aired on the news. She said there were marks on the grass from where they'd had to drag the balloon away. We weren't convinced. But she made fun of us for believing her anyway. We didn't get it. Another time she tried to make us eat apples but told us they were raw potatoes. She got mad that we didn't want to try them and made us eat them, so we discovered she was making it up. And then it was all "haha I got you!" We failed to understand why it was a good prank to have her make up a weird lie that didn't trick us into doing anything until she MADE us "fall for it," so to speak. Anyway, we visited North Carolina over ten years after I'd convinced my mother that there had been a trapdoor in that house. We were in the area, and the tenants of that house let us come in and look. (That was rather stupid of them, in my opinion, but we weren't going to hurt anything.) My mother said, "So, where's that trapdoor?" I replied, "Hey, mom, you remember that hot air balloon that landed in our backyard?" She almost killed me. This appears to be the halter top. Something I did to my mom when I was a little kid was the halter top gag. She had this halter top that she suddenly started hating, and she threw it out one day. I rescued it from the garbage and put it in a cereal box, and asked for that particular cereal for breakfast only to have her find the halter top inside. I'm sure eventually she managed to throw it out without me seeing, or else it still lurks to this very day. Yeah. Too cute to be a little bitch, huh? When I was about the age you see above, I liked to play yet another prank on my mom. One day I took some red jeans and a hooded sweatshirt and stuffed them with other clothes and blankets and stuffed animals. I stuffed it to look like a real person lying on my bedroom floor. Then I got the leftover pigtails my mom had kept from my sister's and my last haircut and put them under the hood so it looked like it had real hair. I opened the window, then ran out and told my mom someone had just jumped into our window and passed out on our floor. Imagine her surprise when she lifted the hood of the child and found that it had my underwear for a face! My sister helped me sometimes in creating my mischief. We had just been to see the movie Gremlins in the theater. We wrecked our room to make our parents think the Gremlins did it. They were not amused. Neither were we when we got punished. I also got my grandparents once, and it was with the fake vomit gag. This is one shensters have undoubtedly all played. I ate a big dinner, frolicked afterwards, was warned by my grandmother that I might get sick if I did that, kept doing it, crawled into a corner like a dog and pretended to puke, put the fake vomit on the floor, and pretended to cry. The point of the story is that my grandfather, after realizing what (he thought) had happened, he immediately exclaimed, dismayed, "Oh, no, our new carpet??" Have you had enough of my childhood shenanigans? If not, too bad. Because I can't remember any more. Go away. back