Halloween is one of the holiest days of the kid calendar, behind only Christmas and the last day of school. Christmas = presents. Last day of school = freedom. Halloween = junk food. However, as childhood continued on, you may have learned that Halloween meant something else: that "trick-or-treat" isn't just a greeting - it's a warning. And when you turn 13 you suddenly realize, hey, not only can you eat a lot of candy on Halloween, but you can also hellraise and not get in trouble!!! This post is about an assault of silly string and other nonsense that my friend, The Cup (a character he played in one of our childhood movies), and I planned for Halloween 2000 but never actually fulfilled. This, my friends...is The Plan.
This epic Halloween attack received an ingenious title that took seconds, possibly even minutes to come up with
So here you go, in full, the complete battle map of The Plan:
Click for a larger view - you'll wanna see this penmanship
At 13 you're at the age where simple things take on a greater definition. Looking back, I don't know exactly why we came up with this plan, but if I had to guess it would be that at the time there was a lot of moving going on in the neighborhood and a bunch of babies were moving in. This was unacceptable, so The Cup and I had to establish ourselves as the bosses of the neighborhood. One way to do this was to launch assaults on Halloween...or something. By the way, regarding the map - due to the size of the paper, I had to scan it in fourths and then put it back together in Photoshop.
Anyway, this is a map of our neighborhood. It's basically a circle of houses harbored beside Highlands Park. Truth be told, trying to decipher the symbols and coding on this map is like deciphering Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. While I'm not 100% sure on any of this, here's the color coding key to the best of my ability:
Purple = Starting point
Blue = Base
Green = Stringing
Orange = Hiding Place
Black = Some sort of mayhem?
I'm guessing black was another mischievous deed, like egging or t-peeing or something. The problem is the black X's are in pretty arbitrary spots so I'm not exactly sure what the dealio is. The starting point was at the dead end where Rolf Geezen used to live up until 4 months prior to the scheduled assault. My house was to be used as a base and you'll see that I blurred out a few other houses that had names attached. These were considered "allies", or, houses of people we knew who we figured wouldn't be offended if we hid in their bushes while the cops scope out the kids who were silly stringing 4th graders.
The starting point as well as our base
This section clearly shows how serious we were
As you can see, we went into great detail for the park drawing, including little pictures for the tennis courts, bathrooms, and the Snack Shack (a place we were regulars at). Again we also find several orange and black X's as well as a rare green one that I had previously overlooked. Best guess - the orange is hiding, the green is for silly string, and black is for I don't know.
A stringing target in the middle of the street. I'm sure that would have had zero repercussions
So the plan of The Plan was to circle around the neighborhood, launching these rogue attacks...because in the event we get caught, no one would be smart enough to figure out that we're just going in a circle.
We drew The Plan up in mid-October and, due to its intense secrecy, decided it would be wise not to have our names on it. So we white-ed out our names since no one would notice the blotched white stuff and wrote our aliases, Joe Schwartz and Rob Schmit, founder and co-founder, respectively. But wait! We couldn't leave this plan in clear plain site for anybody to find. That would be like inviting the Nazis to a meeting about the Manhattan Project. So we rolled it up and hid it...in the bushes in front of my house...since no one will EVER think to look there and even if they find it, ha! Our names aren't even on it anymore!!! Flawless, perfectly executed plan.
At the end of the day this plan was pretty much an afterthought. We had a can of silly string but I think it was defective. In reality, the plan was about as legit as saying that Ashton Kutcher is a valid replacement for Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men. It's funny; when you're 13 the world is a big place and everyday you explore something new. On this particular day we thought we could be tough guys but in reality...we were good kids. It was all talk. We were both brought up right. Throughout childhood you think up crazy ideas and plots no matter how bizarre, inconceivable, and nutty they may be. Childhood is a time for wonder...The Wonder Years, if you will. This was our bizarre, inconceivable, and nutty plan for that one day. Sure, in another dimension we probably went through with it and wound up in juvenile hall, but that's neither here nor there.
Again, maybe we were a little upset because there weren't a heck of a lot of kids our age in the neighborhood and Rolf Geezen had just moved away, so thinking of a way to "take over the neighborhood" was our response. That's really my only logic for it, as that philosophy also paved way for the formation of the Gatorade Mafia, a gang of 14 year olds who would regularly be at Highlands Park during baseball season and do tough guy things such as eat candy, drink Gatorade, and talk trash to the players from behind the backstop. But that's a story for another time.
You're probably wondering what we wound up doing instead on that Halloween night. Well, isn't it obvious?
We went trick-or-treating!
