BOLTING

Jimmy's comment on my previous post jogged my memory of a 'prank' I participated in many, many moons ago . . .

During high school, there was an unspoken rule that you hung out with your friends on Friday night, while Saturday night was Date Night. Now, if you were like me, the dating involved a personal pan pizza, a Love Boat, followed closely by a Fantasy Island.

But Friday night was all about my peeps. In the Fall, we would go to all the home football games, where our butts never felt the cold, aluminum bleachers. Instead, we'd roam the long path between the concessions and the away stands, seeing and being seen. Post-game, and once we had our driver's licenses, we went to the local drive-in, where you could sit in your car, eat fast food, and watch the other fools tooling around the circular parking lot. No, I did not grow up in the 1950's, but yes, the drive-in is still there.

During our junior year, we tired of the drive-in and needed something more exciting in our lives. We all had crushes on some of the senior boys, many of them stars of the basketball team. One of us had the bright idea that we should start doing drive-bys of these boys' houses. Pre-internet days, that meant we had to let our fingers do the walking in the white pages. Likewise, pre-GPS days, we followed up with research in the city atlas book. Armed with this knowledge, we would slowly cruise by their houses at 10 pm, while they were presumably out with each other, at parties we were never invited to . . .

It was during one of these outings that I decided we needed to leave some sort of clue that we had been there. Sort of like marking our territory, because that's how teen girls roll. None of us were prepared for this impromptu idea, so we scoured our friend's 1972 Cutlass Supreme for something to write on. All we could find was an unopened roll of Bolt paper towels, which my friend needed for her car's lack of ventilation. We tore off a sheet, wrote something ridiculous like "You're a FOX!" signed it, "The 5 Junior Girls," and put it in their mailbox. Thus, BOLTING was established, and we were able to talk about our activity in the school halls without anyone else being the wiser. We also had code names for the boys, which added to our game. "Let's BOLT Superman tonight" meant nothing to a passerby classmate (not that anyone cared about our conversations).

Our typical Friday night continued, with basketball games, and more daring paper towel notes afterwards, such as "Great basket in the 4th quarter" or "You looked hot in your new warm up jacket." Normally, we'd just pull up to the mailbox in front of the dark house, pop the paper towel note in, and speed away, on to the next drop-off location. Sometimes, we'd see a light go on in the house and we'd chicken out. Occasionally, the driveway would have a lot of cars, so we would nervously park up the street and one of us would sprint back to the mailbox, leave our message and then make a run for the car. After a number of weeks, it got boring, not knowing if the intended targets actually received our notes, or if a parent (or the mailman) just tossed our paper towels in the trash.  Then, one momentous Monday morning at school, I overheard one of our boys ask a popular girl in our grade if she had left a note in his mailbox! She denied it, of course, and I ran to tell my friends the good news!

This bit of encouragement led to more ideas. We paid for anonymous ads in the school newspaper, signed "The 5 Junior Girls." I sent a Valentine card to one of them from New York, while I was on a ski trip. But the best note we pulled off? Well, back in 1980, we had our Izod shirts and these:

Since we had the entire wardrobe of our victims memorized, we knew they each owned a pair of white painter's pants. Wanting to really see if they were getting our notes, we wrote 5 paper towel notes asking each of them to wear their painter pants the following Monday . . .

On some random Monday in March of 1980, five foxy senior dudes wore white painter's pants to school and five dorky junior girls had a dream become a reality!

Those boys graduated, we became senior girls, and BOLTING ended, with our identities never to be revealed.