What was your first shenanigan?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I’ve posted this story before, but I think I was late to that thread…I still swear I did it because I thought that everyone would get a kick out of my wacky hijinks.

When I was about 4 or 5, my family took me to a family reunion-type party at my grandfather’s house. I was a bit of a loner among the kids, so I thought I’d hang out with an “older crowd” for a while. The coolest older crowd I could find consisted of mostly teenagers and young adults, with a few people my parents’ age thrown in the mix.

This crowd was particularly cool because they were going to play croquet.

I grabbed a mallet. It was almost as tall as I was.

I mainly tagged along, watching them play each wicket, occasionally getting someone to let me take a swing at a ball. I felt like the ultimate cool. There was one smart alecky guy in the crowd who kept teasing everyone else. He wasn’t being mean, just tossing out some good-natured heckling when people weren’t playing so well. I had seen characters like him on TV, and I knew just what would get my cool crowd laughing.

The next time he started trash-talking, I raised my mallet in the air and whacked him on the head.

An unsettling thudding noise, as it contacted his cranium. And then.

What I expected: Everyone would laugh, because he was the inept villain, and everyone loves to watch goofy bad guys get hurt! Of course, he would see a few stars and moan “owwww…” but then he’d get up and shrug it off.

What happened: He doubled over in pain, shouted some expletive, and everyone in the group turned on me. “What did you do that for?!” “Oh my God, what possessed you to do that?!” They got my parents, and I was so embarrassed that I shut myself in the downstairs bathroom all day. The poor cut-up got an icepack and a large knot on the head. I wonder how many people he told about his injury.

“Yeah, a little girl with pigtails tried to lobotomize me with a croquet mallet.”

22

At the age of 4, the neighbor’s little girl & I went & sat down together in the middle of the street in a suburb of Chicago, & played with toys for around 45 minutes. Our parents searched the house & yard frantically, until my Dad looked out the front window to find out why all the cars were blowing their horns.

I was blocking traffic.

He paddled me all the way home…

23

MIne was also church picnic related. My friend’s dad had a station wagon and was assigned to take cases of pop to the picnic site. During the drive, my friend and I took every 3rd or 4th can from the cases and shook vigorously. Much hilarity ensued when we arrived and people started having random little soda pop explosions. Everyone blamed my friend’s father’s driving for shaking the cans, but WE knew better… :smiley:

24

Old golden retriever + vasoline + band aids + two three-year-old boys = very angry mothers

25

Kindergarten School Pictures. My mom dressed me in orange. I hated orange (still do). When the pictures came back and I was all ugly and orange… well, I fixed them. Permanent Blue marker “frames” around each and every photo, some on the white edges, mostly as pretty blue sunbeams shooting out of my head. 32 years later, my mom is still mad.

26

I was little. So little I don’t remember it - maybe 3? Surely no later than that, but I doubt it was as early as 2. I carved my name, Amy, into my parents headboard, complete with backwards “Y.” Apparently, my mom was quite upset - they’d just bought the new bedroom set (excellent quality - they still have it) and it had set them back a pretty penny.

Of course, now she says it’s precious and makes her bedroom set priceless, but then it was quite the crime.

27

About age 5, my dad would have friends over to play pool, and they’d often send me upstairs to fetch beer. I discovered that if I helpfully opened the can before going back down, I could take a sip here and there with nobody seeing me. And every single time they’d bust me. It was years later that I finally made the connection that when you drink from a can, a little beer is left in the groove. :smack:

First mass shenanigan? Age 7, 1st grade in Mrs. Staab’s class. (God rest her soul) I had just learned the prior weekend how to make paper airplanes. She left the classroom to go to the front office for some reason, and I saw my opportunity. About 5 minutes later she returned to 28 kids throwing paper airplanes around. Why it took 2 decades to diagnose ADHD is beyond me.

Then there was the time, about age 5 or 6, when I and a friend took permanant ink markers to my dad’s new gorgeous speedboat. All I remember is it had to be sandblasted and repainted. Everything else about that is repressed. My ass still hurts.

28

The first shenanigan that I can clearly remember is the night my folks had guests over after I was supposed to be in bed. My brother and I wanted to know what was going on, so we tried to sneak down and peek into the parlor. I was probably about 2.5 to 3 years old. I slipped on the top step and rolled all the way down the stairs. However, since I knew I should have been in bed, I suppressed the crying fit I’d have normally had, and quietly crept back to bed. A body full of bruises wasn’t an unusual state for an active and clumsy boy, so Mom didn’t know about this until I told her. When I was in my teens.

Another shenanigan I like to tell people about was when I was about 7 and my next-oldest brother was 8. Our teenaged older siblings had a friend who drove a VW Beetle, and refused to ever lock it. We lived in a suburb of LA, and even us kids knew not locking your car was asking for trouble. We’d tell this guy every time he came by that he should lock his Bug.

Eventually, we and a couple of the neighborhood kids decided we should teach this guy to take care of his stuff. So, every time he parked the Bug in front of our house and went inside, all the 7- and 8-year-olds we could round up would push while my 8-year-old brother would put the thing in neutral and steer. We’d take the car a block or two away and park it again. We did this probably a dozen times before we gave up, because the bozo was such a stoner that he seemed to think that he’d just forgotten where he’d put the car. He’d wander around until he spotted it, and promptly forget the whole incident.

29

I deny ever having committed a shenanigan. However, in Kindergarten I was accused of a shenanigan.

In my Kindergarten class, there was a period of about a week when every day I regaled the class during Show and Tell with a tale of what my grandfather was doing in our basement as he built a bathroom.

My teacher was about convinced I was making the whole thing up, when she had a chance to talk to my mother and determined that everything I had said was true (at least to the degree that Kindergartner’s understand it).

30

First grade.
Rainy day.

No recess.

25 or so restless kids are now painting picutures. The teacher steps out of the room for a few moments and comes back to a full blown paint fight and 25 shrieking kids.

It was an accident, I swear. I decided that the cow in my painting would be out in the rain. So I got a good ammount o blue on my brush and in proper Jackson Pollock sashiion starting ploping rain onto my masterpiece. I got some of the other kids pantings as well. Thins quickly went down hill from there.

But it was all for art.

31

I started early.

When I was about 2 1/2, my grandfather took me to the zoo. I was a very verbal child. An important factoid: my dad has a quite colorful vocabulary.

At the dinner table that night, after the zoo trip, the adults were asking me about the different types of animals that I had seen. I rattled off lions, tiger, elephants…and then added: “and that DAMN buffalo”.

32

I swear I’ll pistolwhip the next person who says the word “Shenanigan!”

My latest was the other day when I was bored to death at my girlfriend’s apartment. I decided to play a game with her and turned the channel on the TV, took the remote control, went into her bedroom, and hid it under her matress. Came back, and she was still watching TV on the same channel I’d changed it to. She wasn’t going to play along…so, I picked up the next random object I saw and hid that. She still wasn’t game, so I just started picking up whatever I saw and hid it. Eventually she started looking for everything, but not very good. She got mad and gave up, so I had to remember what all I hid and where.

I know I forgot about one thing, which she ended up finding later. I’m sure there’s a few other things that slipped my mind which one of us will find and wonder “how the hell did this get here.”

33

My first shenanigan is one I don’t remember. But how my dad reacted to it was perfect, a textbook example of how to handle ornery kids.

I was about four, I’m told, and had just started attending Sunday School. I never remember ever acting up in public, but I’m told I was disruptive, and behaved badly. My first shenanigan.

My father’s solution was to take me outside of the superintendents office and tell me “Okay, you don’t have to go to Sunday School. In fact, I won’t let You go to Sunday School. You’ll never get to be in the Christmas program, or do the fun things with the other kids.”

That sort of treatment of course made me want to go. My dad was pplaying the part of Tom Sawyer, and I was the sucker who whitewashed the fence.

Of course, now I’m a SS teacher myself, even.

34

You’re a NAZI?!?!

:cool:

35

When I was 4 or 5 years old, I attended my friend’s fifth birthday party, which was a picnic in her backyard, which was huge (she lived in the country). I was allowed to light the candles on the birthday cake. I somehow managed to set fire to the long grass in the backyard. :o

36

Back around age 6 I was known as Double Dog Doug because I did just about anything anyone dared me to. This included:

a) Peeing in the schoolyard (had to go to the custodian and get a scrub brush and soapy water).
b) Writing “Fuck you” in the girls’ bathroom (see above for restitution. Also, I believe I actually wrote “Fyck you”, so it wasn’t as if I was being nasty or anything.)
c) GRABBING a great big fistful of a friend’s birthday cake before the party even started (lost that friend for a good week or so).

37

I regret to say that I don’t have any especially exciting stories to tell on the subject. I’m just here to say what I’m sure many of you have already realised - ‘shenanigan’ has one of the best thesaurus entries ever.

~ Isaac

38

Well, growing up in a tough neighborhood, my peeps in the ‘hood and I did some pretty daring and nasty stuff. Hey, you did what ya had to to survive, man, ya know? The worst was - man, I’m not sure I should even confess this on a public message board, but, what the hell - on those hot summer days, when there just wan’t relief to be found, late afternoon we’d hear that bell ringing. We knew what was coming. We knew we wanted it. We knew we had no funds to get it. So as the sound of that bell came closer, we’d get right up to the street, the whole gang of us. We’d stop our bikes and wave our arms like crazy, like we were in need, like we couldn’t be passed by, and then the man would see us. He’d drive that big old truck right to us and we would…RUN. Run like the dare devils we were and hide from that Ice Cream Man and laugh our heads off as he drove away, realizing he’d stopped for nothin’. Yep, we were bad, bad I tell ya.

39

I don’t remember this, but my mother still tells the story:

When I was about two, I watched my mother working on an art project that involved cutting pictures out of magazines. I wanted to be helpful, so I found a book with lots of pictures and started ripping the pages out. I got most of the way through my parents’ Doonesbury collection before I was noticed and stopped.

First I can remember isn’t an event, as such. I just liked to draw stick figures, and I drew them all over the place. Most notably on lamps. It did not improve the aesthetics.

40

Prolly the first one I remember was when I was about 4 - a shenanigan with a coverup. My father had taken us kids to Mass one Sunday. Dad liked to park about a block away from the church, rather than the too-small church parking lot, because it was easier to get away from the church after services. Mom was home - I guess she went to a different service that week.

At one point, I realized that my older brother, then 8, was nowhere to be seen. I asked Dad where he’d gone. “To Communion”. Having no clue where “Communion” was, or what it was, I decided to go looking for him. Perhaps “Communion” was at the car? Better go find out!

Somehow I made it to the car safely. No brother. So I headed back to church. And got hit by a car as I crossed the street in front of the church. I don’t really remember that part, I just have a vague impression of “bump” then I was sitting on the sidewalk, with Dad and a bunch of other people around me. I was apparently uninjured and forgot all about it.

Until 14 years later. I was chatting with my mother about who-knows-what, and casually mentioned “you know, that time I got hit by a car…”.

It seems Dad had never told her this story. She let Dad know that she Was. Not. Pleased.

To this day I have no clue why I was worried about the whereabouts of that particular brother. He was rotten to me then and has continued rotten in the mumblemumble decades since then.