In the spirit of George Carlin, who asked about a newby having only one new shenanigan, as opposed to those who were up to their old shenanigans…
What was your first?
Or, any new ones you might be adding to your collection.
My first, or at least a very early one, was recently reminded to me at a family get together where we were remembering the days of yore. Apparantly, at about the age of 6 or maybe 7, a bunch of us were all at a church sposored picnic, gathering, cook out type thing. Rows of picnic tables laid out for some 200 odd people waiting for the word to line up at the buffet/catch all table to fill our guts up… Dad leans over to me to ask or tell me something and (totaly on a whim) I cringe and cower and scream, “No, Daddy! Don’t hit me again!”
Hilarity ensued.
Yeah, I got in trouble for that later, and had explained to me why it was inappropriate. But that was then. Now, everyone remembers it fondly as my very first shenanigan.
So, tell me your first. Or your newest. Or your favorite. As long as it’s a shenanigan.
Hmmm, no shenanigans yet. At least I don’t think so.
I did have a small monkeyshine once, and a bit of tomfoolery. I also finessed once or twice. Plus, a couple of caprices that I’m certain we won’t be discussing. And, just maybe, a vagary. Oh, and few faux pas, and at least one bona-fide pas.
Mom, was having a church group over for lunch one day. So she took all my Dad’s Playboy mags out of the bathroom and hid them under the bed. I, at the ripe old age of about three went to the bathroom saw that the Playboys were gone, went and found them (How I knew they were their I don’t know) and returned them to their rightful place before my Mom realized.
She was SO embarrased, she never lets me forget about it. Niether has Dad but he looks upon it a little more humorously than Mom does.
Mom was a Babtist back in those days. So you can only imagine.
Once when I was barely old enough to talk, an old lady on the bus complimented me on my pretty sparkly pink dress. I talked to her a bit, and then she asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.
I apparently looked her square in the eye and said “I want to be a junkie when I grow up.”
My mother, Joanie (Blank), had a lovely white patent leather purse she was very fond of. I know she was fond of it, because she said something about someone getting their purse stolen on the bus and she hoped they wouldn’t steal her pretty white patent leather purse. So I got a ballpoint pen and wrote her name on it so everyone would know it was hers. When she started yelling, I realized that might not have been the best course of action, so I did what any red-blooded American 5-year-old would do: I lied, and explained to Mom that SHE had obviously written her name on her purse; after all, it was her name, right?
Mom said that if she had written her name on her purse, she would have spelled it right. Turns out it’s not spelled “JONE E. (BLANK)”
Oh dear, my life of impish behavior started around 4 when my mom announced we had a doctor’s appointment for me as soon as we finished shopping. I hated the doctor and behaved badly when I knew about these visits so… When my mom was busy looking at something I very gently unzipped the side zipper of her shorts. And promptly forgot about it, having avenged myself with a preemptive strike.
A few moments later a man approached my mom and tried to tell her what the problem was. He finally blurted it out and she was mortified. Well, it WAS the 50s!
And that was the beginning of many small, passive-aggressive acts of rebellion. Yep, I was a real hellion.
Like many families, we had the door frame that was well-marked with growth charts – dates and heights showing the progress of myself and my three older brothers.
Now, many people actually carve these markings into the wood of the door frame itself. Wise choice. My mother, on the other hand, wasn’t about to vandalize the house. She put the markings on bits of paper which were then taped to the appropriate spot. Unwise choice.
When I was…oh, I dunno, four? Five? Something like that…anyway, I decided that those bits of paper would look much better on the other side of the door frame. Roughly twenty years worth of markings, totally botched up.
My first shenanigan also happens to be my first memory. When I was just shy of two years old, my mom took me to the library with her while she did some research for a book she was writing. In the course of trying to amuse myself, I started crawling around underneath the table she was working at. I maneuvered myself through the rungs of the chair, only to end up with my head caught, unable to get out. After a long struggle, the librarian finally had to call the fire department to break the chair apart in order to get me out! She was very nice about it, though, and didn’t charge Mom for the chair.
That would be the time a friend and I got together, plotted evilly, and unrolled an entire package of toilet paper rolls in the hallway outside Mum’s room. Toilet paper flying everywhere, big fluffy clouds of white, it was like heaven–we bounced and flopped and jumped and rolled everywhere.
I thought Mum would keel over then and there when she saw the mess…
My mom didn’t knit very much. She made a couple of hats and two sweaters, and then she stopped. So it was out of the ordinary that she knit me a beautiful, cable-knit dusty pink sweater when I was about 4 or 5. I loved that sweater. It had buttons down the front of it. I wore it as a jacket. I wore it every day. I loved pink. The yarn she used to make it was called Dusty Rose, I still remember.
At the time, we had this giant blue Buick LeSabre. I had my hand inside my sweater as I was walking by the car one day, and I stuck my finger out inside the sweater and ran the sweater along the side of the car. I don’t know why, on a whim I suppose. But for some reason, there was now a dusty blue spot on my sweater! Right in the middle of one of the thick cable-knit parts!
Now, I had had it thoroughly beaten into my head that YOU DO NOT TOUCH THE CAR. I was terrified that my blue spot would give me away and that I would be sent to the dungeon! So I cut it off. Whew. The sweater looked normal again and no one would ever know my deep, dark secret. But, of course over the next few days it began unraveling, and I was totally busted!
When I told my mother the truth, she was so annoyed. But she re-knit half the sweater anyway. I resumed wearing it every day and never again cut another piece out of it. Wore it until I grew out of it. I wish I had a picture, or that my mother had kept that sweater. So does she.
My maternal grandfather was a Protestant minister. When I was two or three years old (I don’t actually remember the incident, but my mother never tires of recounting it), we went over to Grandpa and Grandma’s house for Christmas. As Grandpa delivered a solemn blessing he had painstakingly written and revised for this holiest of occasions, I suddenly began showing off my newly-acquired knowledge of one particular Yuletide carol by singing its familiar refrain: Fa la la la la La la la la! Of course, I now claim that I wasn’t mindlessly droning the syllables, but rather offering a pointed commentary on the religious purpose of the holiday being overshadowed by the secular impulses of the modern world…
When I was five years old, I suddenly felt this irresistible urge to carve something into the piano bench. But I knew that I’d get in serious trouble if I was caught.
So I carved my sister’s name. Took her hours to persuade the parents she wasn’t guilty.
My older boy shennanigin-ed me for the first time when he was 9 months old. I had some rather proper ladies coming to visit me, wives of bosses of my husband who wanted to see the foreign baby (I wised up to those visits soon after and just started refusing!). I cleaned the flat from top to bottom, and to make it feel more spacious, slid all the dividing screens back (we live in Japan.)
The house was perfect, but in the time it took me to open the door when the bell rang, Monster Baby had got to a drawer and yanked its contents out, a first. So when I ushered the ladies into the living room, Monster Baby was sitting there like an angel…
When I was about 4, we moved into a new house. I was trying to get back at my brother for something, so I carved his initials into the front door. My brother was 7 at the time, and knew how to make those letters, but I made them all wrong. They didn’t believe me for a minute.
At a BBQ at my Family’s cabin, my Uncle asked my sister & me to go get him a beer. Well my sister and I decided to drink the beer and filled up the bottle with Kool-aid.
My unlce took a big swig and proceed to spew the sugar water all over himself and the backyard. Needless to say, none of the adults were amused.
