Who’s the fool?  I am, for thinking I’d get done at work early enough to write a proper April Fool’s Day post.  I was going to do a fake post, talking about the new format of the blog.  I never got quite far enough to figure out what our new fake format would be, though I expect fashion and pop music would have been involved, and I would have posted pictures like these:

But, alas, that was not to be.  And then Bethany reminded me of the best April Fool’s Day prank (and probably the only) I was ever involved with: Operation Lulubelle.

I can’t remember if either of us has ever mentioned Operation Lulubelle before, though it would surprise me if it hadn’t come up once or twice.  Our junior year of high school, Bethany and I, and our friend Martha (but mostly it was Bethany—she’s the creative one) came up with this idea for an April Fool’s Day prank we could play on our English teacher, Mr. Grady.  We recruited what seems to me twenty-one years later to have been almost the entire faculty of our high school to come to our classroom, one at a time, and pull people out so they could “talk to them about something.”  We tried to pair teachers and students who had something in common: like the track coach pulled out the kids on track, etc.  And no one came back.  Eventually the only people left were Mr. Grady, Bethany, and a couple others we selected purely for our own amusement.  One student got left because his teacher “got involved in an activity” somewhere and forgot.  Or wimped out.  Whichever.

There were many SNAFU’s in our plan besides Mr. Mezzera forgetting about his role in Operation Lulubelle.  For example, we wanted to make a video of everyone from the class yelling “April Fool’s!!” and have it delivered to the classroom for Mr. Grady and the selected few to watch, but as it turns out, making a video in short order wasn’t the easiest thing to manage in 1993, and that part didn’t happen.  Now, I expect we would have done it on one of our cell phones and texted it to someone in the class so Mr. Grady could see it.  Looking back I am always surprised there were no recriminations for the three of us.

I know Bethany remembers way more details than I do, and would write a much funnier version of this episode in our collective lives.  But it’s late, I’m tired, and I think I’m going to watch Family Guy.