So my father tells me this story one evening over dinner. A man’s name had come up, and when it was mentioned, my father recalls a story attached to this name. For privacy’s sake - and because, I’ll admit it, I don’t remember the name anyway - we’ll just call him Kenny. Keny was a troublemaker in school back in father’s day. Think the sixties, when my father was in… I dunno, junior high, maybe? Maybe a little earlier, maybe a little later. He didn’t say.

Anyway, Dad went to school with this kid. Same class, maybe, maybe a little older, maybe a little younger. Didn’t matter. It was a small, small town. In fact, it was this town, in the same school I went to, in the same building, and the story takes place in the same auditorium, a small stage with heavy blue curtains and a couple hundred aging wooden fold-up seats. Back in the sixties, they went to school here.

And Kenny was a troublemaker. Well, so was my father, but I didn’t get the impression that they’d been close. Or maybe they had, once. I have no idea. Whatever. But Kenny liked to, uh… blow shit up.

He came to school once with dynamite and stuffed it in his locker. He wasn’t planning on hurting anybody with it - he’d just had to bring it to town on the bus because he lived so far out in the country, and after school, they were gonna go blow up an old car. But somebody ratted him out, and he got caught, and I don’t know if the car ever got blown up or not.

But later, Kenny was accused of planting a bomb in the auditorium. They had guys searching all over the place, in the rafters above the stage, everywhere, and some unlucky soul fell off in the midst of this search, which amused the kids to no end.

The kids, you ask?

Yes, the kids. Because while they were searching for this bomb, some bright-eyed administrator thought a good place to put all the kids was in the auditorium until the chaos was over.

The auditorium… where the bomb was supposed to be.

…

Bright, eh?

There was no bomb, by the way, but it amused the hell out of my father. I’m sure. It’d amuse the hell out of me - “Come on kids, let’s go! We need to keep you somewhere all together now for the bomb threat… I know! Let’s go sit in the auditorium and watch them search!”

Can we all agree that somebody was smokin’ crack that day, or what?

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