Shenannigans

My friends and I had a few fun games we liked to play in high school, one of them was Green Goblin. For those of you that are unfamiliar with this game, allow me to explain it to you. In urban and suburban areas, trash days are typically the same day every week. That means that the night before trash day, most people on a given strret or subdivision have all rolled their trash cans out to the curb for pickup. These cans typically look like this:



hence the name Green Goblin. The object of this game is to drive along late at night in somebody's family station wagon, which at my rural high school was the Caprice Estate Wagon, circa 1985.



We would park next to one of the green trash cans, and would have the first contestant grab the handles of the rolling green goblins. The object of this game was to see how far a given person could hold onto the trash can, and at what rate of speed would losing the can occur. The winner was typically the person who was able to keep their green goblin upright and rolling the longest and at the fastest speed. Even better was the getaway driver, who typically knew the neighborhood well for a fast and efficient escape. Nothing worse than the thought of getting lost in a subdivision, especially once the local constabulary had been contacted regarding our shenannigans ( I LOVE THAT WORD!!), and dispatched from their favorite doughnut shop to come investigate.





Next up on the list of fun things to do in a car was mailbox baseball. This game could be wildly entertaining, but could also be very dangerous. The danger came from mailbox owners lying in wait in their driveways with a shotgun:



as we drove by, one guy (or girl) hanging out of the rear window swinging for the fences. Another danger was when a homeowner would reinforce their mailbox with a steel rod inside, giving the home run hitter a nasty surprise from the recoil of their swing.





Last but not least on our exciting list of late night fun is a game we called Garage Door Hell. In the mid 1980's, garage door openers were on a lot fewer freqeuncies thereby having less openers opening more doors. We would roll through a nice upper middle class neighborhood in our trusty Estate Wagon:





and would have approximately 10 "clickers", pressing the buttons constantly as we drove.



Imagine the surprise of Peter and Nancy Homemaker as their garage door started rolling up at 2am. I can only imagine the stress and heartache we caused in those households, and how many teenagers got blamed for coming home later than curfew, haha. Around 80% of the doors would open using this method, so we could have quite a bit of fun on a given night.

I look back on all of this now, and wonder yet again how I managed to survive my teenage years. We really did some crazy things back then, and as I remember them now I wonder just exactly WHAT THE HELL WERE WE THINKING?