My Mom, Janette, The Practical Joker

Yesterday I told you about the practical joke that my mother played on my father-in-law while he was in the hospital. It was April 1st, his birthday.
I exchanged e-mails with one of my college roommates after he read that blog. He said you ought to tell about some of the times we had at college. I didn’t intend to tell this story so early, but it just gives you more insight into my mother, Janette.

In the spring of 1973, I pledged a business fraternity (Alpha Kappa Psi) at the University of Texas at Austin. Today it is just a club, because women Titled IX, the fraternity and forced them to admit women.

Well, anyway, our pledge class was very small. I think we had something like 13 pledges. Somehow I was elected President of the pledge class. The two guys that helped me the most were Chris and Phil. Jeff was my big brother in the fraternity. After the semester was over and we became members of the fraternity, we all decided to room together the next year, our senior year. We moved into “The Cascades”, an apartment complex close to Oltorf and South IH-35.

This story starts that summer of 1973. We hadn’t lived there long until a beautiful girl started cooking us dinner on Sundays. She was gorgeous and oh by the way, she cooked for us wearing a very revealing bikini. I don’t remember her name or how this came to be, but the girl could cook and she was very beautiful in that bikini.

Every Sunday for several weeks this girl would come over or invite us over to her apartment and cook a grand meal. We were all infatuated with this girl, but Chris, now Chris was in love.

That’s where the problem started. You see, Chris was practically living with his girlfriend (his first wife) during those days. Got to get his permission to tell some of those stories about her.

After about a month, this girl told us one Sunday that she was moving to Panama City, Florida the next week and this would be our last meal. We were crushed. But that was when my mother concocted her joke. You see, my mom had an uncle that lived in Panama City.

I had told my mom how crazy Chris was about this girl and that she had moved to Panama City. She loved to tease Chris and the game was on. A couple of weeks after the girl moved, mom wrote a letter to Chris pretending to be the girl. She mailed the letter to her uncle and had him just mail the letter back to Austin from Panama City. Chris “was in love”, he took the bait, hook line and sinker.

Mom kept doing this for a couple of months. She would mail small gifts and letters and have her uncle mail them to Chris. Chris actually believed that this girl was in love with him and was sending him love letters. I told Jeff and Phil and we were laughing our asses off at Chris. With every letter, he was more in love.

This kept on into the fall semester and pretty soon the whole fraternity knew about the letters this mystery girl was sending to Chris. Most of the fraternity knew what was going on, but we were just letting Chris brag to us about this girl. While it was so funny, it was getting pretty serious. Chris was talking about breaking up with his girlfriend and try to go find this girl.

The fraternity had weekly meetings (yeah right) on Thursday nights at Hansel and Gretels. This was a great place to go and drink beer. Every Thursday, we discussed the condition of the world. It actually mostly was talking about the girls we knew. Bragging was the favorite sport after a couple of hours.

This particular night, Chris was telling us all about how he had decided to quit his longtime girlfriend and go find our bikini girl. Well, after we had consumed several beers, this story Chris was telling us was getting funnier and funnier. We all knew the truth.

Finally, we were laughing so hard, that I just had to tell Chris the truth. I told him how my mom had played this crazy practical joke on him. I told him how she mailed the letters and gifts to her uncle and how he had mailed them back to Chris.

It took awhile for me to convince Chris that I was telling the truth. He was convinced that this girl was in love with him. It’s hard to sound convincing when you are laughing so hard. Remember we had a few rounds by this time and most of us were feeling pretty good.

Chris finally realized that he had been the butt of a crazy joke and got mad and me and started chasing me. I ran for blocks with Chris chasing me and throwing rocks and cussing at me. The next day we all had a good laugh and a few more beers.

But I think Chris will always remember this as a great practical joke played on him by my mother, Janette. This ain’t all of her jokes, but that’s another story.