Author’s Note: This is the first in what I hope will be many stories about the stupid, stupid things that I did as an adolescent. While I wasn’t out breaking laws and being a hoodlum, I was involved in a fair amount of things that should have seriously injured or scarred me for life. In an age where parents now pad their children from head-to-toe, fearing that they may get even the tiniest scratch, those of us who are slightly older remember simpler, more dangerous times.

The following is (mostly) true.

In my 11th grade Communications class, we were asked to form into groups and write up the script for a TV show, then perform it in front of the class. This was at the height of the Jerry Springer / Ricki Lake / Maury Povich era, so it shouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to see where my group of friends was going with this one. In her infinite wisdom, our teacher let us pick our own groups.

We immediately convened in our corner of the room and started trying to make each other laugh. It was decided that one of us (all guys) had to have breasts and another absolutely had to wear a diaper and nothing else. I chose to have a compulsive cheese-eating disorder. This involved me eating sticks of cheddar with EZ Cheez squirted on top. I still haven’t fully recovered.

Another guest on the show had a compulsion to steal things and then smear them on his body. Also, he was hairy. Needless to say, he had to shower after class. One of us had to host the show. It ended up being the one not willing to either have breasts or wear a diaper. We found him a suit. A suit from the 70s. We were not messing around.

For the breasts, since we were all too shy or lacked the proper foresight, we did not have a bra to place the water balloons into. In a move that would turn out to be problematic later on, we decided that a towel would work fine. Just wrap them to his chest, arrange accordingly and POW, breasts.

The host, in an effort to cure the man with breasts, ended up clotheslining him out of his chair, straddled him and stabbed at his breasts with a ball-point pen. Distraut by the attemped distruction of his source of food, the baby-diaper guy starts bawling and running around the room, touching as many people with his flabby, nearly naked body as possible. Meanwhile the compulsive thief/smearer and myself got into a fight over my tube of EZ Cheez, which ended with both of us covered in the sticky, disgusting cheese-like substance. He was (of course) shirtless by that point, with the cheese smeared all over his hairy chest.

Meanwhile, the host and the breast-guy were having trouble. Because of the towel, the balloons were too well-protected. So for a good long while he was violently stabbing at them, squeezing them and pushing them together in an effort to make them burst. Finally, one of them was punctured and started spraying water everywhere. The host squeezed the breast, spraying the stream into his mouth and, eventually, all over the floor. This of course led to the guy in the diaper running right into the wet floor and ending up momentarily horizontal, about four feet off the ground.

And…scene.

Our teacher had been yelling for us to stop for quite some time, but due to the euphoria of the moment and the raucous laughter of our classmates, we couldn’t hear a damn bit of it. Eventually, she tried to get up to stop us, but was laughing too hard to make it to the front of the room.

We got a “B+.”

The next year, we were again asked to make a talk-show spoof, this time by a different teacher. We were to make a video of it, instead of performing it in class.

We did our take on the David Letterman show. The main plot wasn’t as funny as the one the year previous, but along with most of the other groups, we started a running theme through most of the videos of having off-screen people throwing random objects at the people in front of the camera for no real reason.

In one, three guys were working on a car. It was shot from the rear and all three of them, of course, had a substantial amount of their butt-cracks exposed. At some point, one of them yelled at a character off-screen for a crescent wrench. From the other direction, someone else threw a wrench, hard, at his ass. This was obviously high comedy.

Another was, essentially, a re-creation of “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” I don’t remember the take or the setting, but I do remember that all of the characters were constantly dodging a barrage of basketballs being thrown at their heads while they tried to get their lines out.

Even one of the girl’s groups got into the act, hurling old barbie dolls and volleyballs at the actors on screen.

In ours, though, we took it one step further. We threw a person.

Ladies and gentlemen, I was a human projectile.

We couldn’t figure out what to do with me on the Letterman show after I came on to do “Stupid Human Tricks,” where I displayed my ability to run into walls without getting hurt. So, about halfway through shooting, while our musical performers lip-synced to Ween’s “Voodoo Lady,” it was decided that I was to be thrown at the bassist.

Two of my friends picked me up, all 200lbs of me, and, without telling him, threw me at the guy pretending to play bass. I knocked him over and we landed in an awkward pile on the floor. He was pissed and started wailing on me with his bass, trying to smash it over my head. Fearing for my life, or at least my beautiful, beautiful face, I starting running around the cramped basement. The rhythm guitarist, who was playing a guitar case (we didn’t have enough guitars) got in on the fun and thwacked me in the back, knocking me face-first into a wall.

It was particle board, and it didn’t really hurt, but it sure looked bad. Ever the ham, I starting crawling around the floor, moaning and throwing up “metal” as the band continued to play. The band members took turns pretending to kick or stomp on me as I made my way around.

During all of this chaos, the lead singer and guitarist never broke character, lip-syncing to perfection and making a game effort at the guitar solo. This lent the whole scene a very surreal atmosphere.

Needless to say, from that point on, not only were we not allowed to pick our own groups for group projects. In fact, we weren’t even allowed to have group projects. Probably a good idea. Someone might have ended up actually getting hurt, the way things were going.

By the way, we got an “A.”