2002 April Fool's joke backfires
| No, Manresa is not adding these two floors to St. Mary's Hall, and there never was a basement. | |||
Next year, there will be no April Fool's Day issue of The Lamb, so don't expect one, don't look for one. This editor will still be too busy scraping the egg off his face from this year's fiasco.
It all started with the misconception that we should have a fake issue of The Lamb for April Fool's Day. How foolish of me. I quickly threw together a two page issue, and changed the banner to read "The Lamp." On the front page, in an enhanced photo, two disproportionate floors had been digitally added to beautiful St. Mary's Hall, with the bogus headline "Manresa to add two floors, convert basement for dining." The text in the article was written in pseudo Latin - pure gibberish - and was said to continue on Page 2. And in the monthly space for "Coming Events" were dates for several outlandish events, including an April 31 photography session for the 2003 "Don't Mess with my Tu-Tu" glamour calendar. (30 days have September, and April too as I remember.) Page 2 simply wished the reader a "HAPPY APRIL FOOLS DAY," in huge letters. Knowing full well that it would not be appropriate to place such foolishness in church, I indiscriminately narrowed the distribution list to six or seven contributors to the real April issue of The Lamb. Then, early in the morning of April 1st, I snuck a copy into each person's morning newspaper, or under their windshield wiper. Then all the trouble started. One near and dear friend read only the headline and glanced at the photo in the car on his way to morning Mass. He didn't read the garbled text, didn't see Page 2, and didn't realize it was a joke, so he proceeded to share the "news" with others. Later that day, when he realized it was a joke, he pulled a joke of his own and left a message on my answering machine saying how upset he was. I scrambled to apologize, I had no such intentions. (The joke was on me.) Then, a week later, I was again taken aback when I learned that a second person to whom I had delivered a copy in Red Church had recently moved to a new home in Ormond. So I now owe an apology to some innocent family in Red Church who found the ridiculous joke mistakenly inserted atop their newspaper on April 1. (Again, the joke was on me.) So let me make this perfectly clear: Manresa is not adding two floors to St. Mary's Hall, there never was a basement, and mercifully, there will be no SCBMoM glamour photo calendar in 2003. Amen. 