mjmartin:
When you are initiated, there is a particular ceremony, which involves dressing in a funny costume. Apparently sensing that I was nervous about the whole affair, the old Mason that was handing the ceremony discretely told me, “don’t worry, the goat feels just like a woman.” I was five steps out the door before they started laughing and told me to come back.
Check out the old catalogue linked in this thread. It is from a company that supplied funny costumes and elaborate hazing ritual equipment to a variety of goofy secret societies. They were apparently especially fond of electrocuting recruits.
I used to have an image of a magazine ad from circa a hundred years ago. It is for a “night mare” (in large text, with other descriptive text that followed) and has a drawing of several people sitting on a weird dragony thing. It was some sort of ride-able (or at least sit-on-able) novelty thing that was either 7 or 9 feet long. I lost the image years ago and have never been able to google it up again.