Doodie!

Caddyshack is one of my favorite movies. My kids and I always crack up during the scene with the Baby Ruth candy bar in the swimming pool.

The other day, my friend John told me a funny story which reminded me of "Doodie!" He said that when he was young, a group of kids rang the doorbell at his house. They were all wide-eyed and agitated. They told John that he had better get his mother and go to their backyard and stop his sister Linda from eating dog poop. I thought Linda must have been a toddler, not knowing any better. John said he and his mother went out back and found Linda counting money. Knowing how to count money, she must have been old enough to know not to eat dog poop. They asked what she was doing and she told them that the neighborhood kids had been paying her to eat "dog logs." John's mom rushed her into the house and started to call the doctor's office. Then, Linda told her mom that she had taken some freshly baked brownies and squeezed them in her hands into globs that looked like dog poop. Then she put them around on the grass in the backyard and boasted that she'd eat them for a price.

Veteran of the 1971 April Fools War

When I was a freshman in college, my friends and I lived in an apartment on campus. Early on in the year, we distinguished ourselves as jokesters while the rest of our dorm seemed to be either sweet spirits or campus dating queens. There was one notable exception. The girls in Apt 2 were non-stop pranksters. We enjoyed hearing about the pranks they pulled on each other. Once a couple of the girls took the beds of the others and hid them in the storage cage downstairs. When their roommates came home and found their beds missing, they were told that Maintenance had come and taken the beds to be fumigated for bedbugs.

Just past midnight on the morning of April 1, 1971, we heard giggling outside our apartment door. The door opened into the commons area where there were sofas and a television. The door was cut almost an inch off the floor. It came in handy that way. We would lie down on the floor and peer out to watch any interesting romances going on in the commons. We could also preview blind dates in case we needed to escape out the back door. Shortly after the giggling started, a strange chunky liquid oozed underneath our door. It looked a lot like vomit, but didn’t smell as bad. When we tried to open the door to catch the culprits, we couldn’t budge it. A couple of the sofas had been pushed up to the door. The gauntlet had been thrown down. We knew it had to be Apt. 2 and the war was on….but first we had to go to class.

When we returned from class, we found that someone had been in our apartment. There was a fetal shark in the kitchen sink. Our milk and cottage cheese had been dyed green and our underwear was in the freezer. “The V Hall guys were here!” was written in soap on the mirror in the hallway. We didn’t like the idea of guys messing with our underwear, but suspected that Apt 2 just wrote that to throw suspicion on the guys. We had all been survivors of two years of Beehive Camp Pranks so we expected the honey on the toilet seat. Someone had tried to make lime jello in the toilet, but didn’t have enough jello to make it gel. We discovered that most of our dishes were gone so we went over to Apt 2 to see if they would give our dishes back. Just in case they weren’t cooperative, I had a pan full of cold spaghetti pasta behind my back. Sue answered their door and acted like she didn’t know what happened to our dishes. "Those V Hall guys!', she said. She hung herself with those words because we didn’t say anything about what was written on the mirror. I dumped the spaghetti on her head.

Later, all 6 of the Apt 2 girls challenged the 6 of us Apt 4 girls to a squirt-gun fight. We went out with our guns fully loaded and found that Apt 2 wasn’t playing fair. They had recruited a young man to fight on their side. After we emptied our guns and went back to our kitchen to reload, I got a scathingly brilliant idea. We had a gallon jar of dill pickles in our refrigerator. I suggested that we fill our pistols with pickle juice and concentrate on soaking their male friend. We got him good with the pickle juice and he hated it. He went home in a huff.

We called a temporary truce so we could eat dinner. While we were eating, Apt 2 appeared outside the big picture window in our kitchen. They were all smiles. Then they brought out toothbrushes and toothpaste. We were puzzled while they brushed and brushed. Then they spit out the toothpaste lather on our window. We surrendered, but Apt 2 had to pull one last prank before the day ended. Sometime after we went to bed, they glued newspapers on the outside of our bedroom windows so when we woke up in the morning at our regular time, it didn’t seem like the regular time because we thought it was still dark outside.

We decided we’d have to get them back BIG TIME, but it would take some time to pull off a prank they would never forget. We started stockpiling all the newspapers we could find. We amassed a huge pile of them in our storage cage before the end of the semester. The plan was to stuff their whole apartment with wadded up newspapers. The only catch was that Apt 2 was right next to our dorm parents’ apartment. During finals week, when all the Apt 2 girls were out, we got our dorm mother to open their apartment on some flimsy excuse. We tried sneaking in the newspapers, but she caught us in the act. We explained what we were doing and she asked if she could help us! We found it takes a whole lot of newspapers to stuff a 3 bedroom apartment so we decided to concentrate on the bathroom. We got that stuffed up to the ceiling, but not before we greased the faucets, the flush handle on the toilet and the inside doorknob. We also stuffed all their closets and dresser drawers with newspaper.

The next year, we moved off campus and the Apt 2 girls stayed on campus because their parents didn’t trust them to live without the supervision and restrictions of campus housing. Wisely so, I might add. When we returned from Thanksgiving holiday, there was a turkey carcass hanging in front of our front door. We felt that warm glow, knowing that Apt 2 hadn’t forgotten us.