HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I have a darling sister, Nancy, who is even in the comments here sometimes. She is 10 years younger than I am, and completely adorable. She is a genius chef, and has a thriving and innovative catering company in Indianapolis. She gives dinner parties right out of Downton Abbey, or White Lotus, or, once, a hockey game. She is completely beautiful, and effortlessly bilingual in Spanish.
Here is one of the buffet tables she and her Great Cooks and Company created.
And here are some of the cupcakes she provided for a wedding. Yes! These are cupcakes.
A couple of days ago she texted me and said a friend of hers was in danger of losing her little daughter, and wanted to know if I thought she, Nancy, was too old to adopt a five-year-old.
YIKES. Oh my goodness, I thought, Nancy, you are way too nice for your own good.
She’s just the sort of person who would do that, ignoring all of her current impressive and immutable responsibilities and her future, to embrace a child in need and take her in. How do you tell someone not to do something like that? And it broke my heart that I, who have so many resources, would probably instantly refuse to do that.
So I wrote her a careful sweet note, praising her generosity and her kind spirit, and her impulsive big heart that would even consider doing such a thing, and then I proceeded to outline some of the practical difficulties (personal legal emotional educational and endlessly on) , that she would have to deal with if she adopted a five year old girl.
And again, I reiterated, how wonderful she is, and how I was proud to have her for a sister.
And she texted back:
APRIL FOOL.
I am such a dupe! She fools me every year. Every single year! She comes up with the most perfect and most believable of scenarios, and I fall for it every time. EVERY. TIME.
It happens every year, and every year I swear I will not be duped again. And every year I am.
Once my little brother even called me on the phone, on April Fools Day, and as we were talking he stopped and yelled: there’s a spider on you! And I shrieked!
Remember: This was on the phone. He could not see me.
I hate April Fools Day, and I am glad it’s over. Weigh in, you all, on April Fools things? Now that we have passed that hideous hurdle….
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Oh, Hank, that adoption story is diabolical! I can imagine my sister doing the same thing except it would be a 150 pound Great Pyrennes and I would be shrieking to myself, “You already have three special-needs dogs you can’t have another!!”
Fortunately, my family of origin was more into what I can only describe as goofy pranks. I had a weird Barbie with marker on her face and a bad haircut, and when I was in my teens, she started showing up unexpectedly. My mom (I assume) put her atop the shower head before I went in to wash up, and I retaliated by posing her swinging from the dining room chandelier. She showed up under covers, “planted” in Mom’s garden, and, memorably, inside a box of Frosted Flakes. It was genuinely so funny, for both the pranker and the prankee.
HANK: Yes, that’s the exact thing that’s annoying about AFD “jokes” –if they are funny on both sides, that’s great. If they are hurtful or embarrassing, I say no.
HALLIE EPHRON: I’m not a big jokes/pranks fan. The line between funny and mean can be very slender, and very much in the eye of the beholder.
Having said that, I shudder to remember how my sister Delia and I tormented our younger sister, telling her she was adopted.
JENN McKINLAY: When the hooligans were in residence, it was pranks galore (rubber ants in their lunch boxes, fake vomit on the floor, plastic wrap stretched across doorways, etc) but now that Hub and I are free birds (better term than empty nesters) there are no such pranks happening and I am 100% okay with that.
RHYS BOWEN: Julia’s weird Barbie is like our hideous Santa. Years ago my SIL’s mom gave them a Santa statue that she’d found at a garage sale Needless to say they hated it and contrived to give it back the next year. And so it had gone on ever since. This year I was asked, by Tom’s mom, to wrap and present the statue back to Tom. He was caught completely off guard and we have it on video!
The best April Fool was when I was at school and the home room class of a clueless teacher swapped with another class. Teacher called the roll and 30 different girls answered without her noticing anything was wrong!
DEBORAH CROMBIE: I come from a seriously non-pranking family! Maybe because both my parents grew up in really hard circumstances, but such a thing would not in a million years have occurred to them. Rick, however, is the oldest of five kids, and there was a lot of pranking in his family. He still really likes to tease, and he ALWAYS gets me with something on April Fool’s Day, but no way can I beat Hank’s story!
HANK: How about you, Reds and Readers? Now that the AFD danger is over, how do you feel about that "holiday"?
And have you ever been really fooled?
