The List: 5 personal April Fool’s Day successes

by Brian Clarey

1. My latest

I had big plans for my favorite holiday this year. The original caper had me taking every outdoor newspaper box in downtown Greensboro and stacking them in pyramids in the middle of the night — totally obnoxious, certainly ambitious and with the added heft of a statement against the proliferation of these things on public streets. I was ultimately convinced that this would almost certainly end badly. But we still managed to get off a couple good ones in this week’s issue. Our back page is amazing.

2. My first

This was in 1983, and it involved a product called “Fart Spray,” the back of the band room and a very uncomfortable session in the vice-principal’s office. Mind you, I was very young.

3. My favorite

Right around 2005, when I was editor of Yes Weekly, we announced that the Red Hot Chili Peppers were booked to play a surprise one-off in Center City Park, in the middle of downtown Greensboro. We thought it was a pretty obvious gag — I mean, seriously — but a crazy amount of people really believed it. We had dozens of calls and emails, and a personal visit from a biker-looking dude who wanted us to reimburse him for his mother’s plane ticket, bought, he said, especially for the show. “She’s a big fan,” I remember him saying.

4. My funniest

One year we ran a gag article claiming that the city of High Point had declared prostitution legal during the weeks of the International Home Furniture Market. More than a year later we got a call from a guy who asked us to explain to his father that it was a prank. “He swears up and down that it’s true,” he told me.

5. My best

It may or may not have been April Fool’s Day that I met my wife — frankly, it was such a blur that neither one of us remembers much about those first few weeks. But we ballparked it to April 1, conveniently set right between our birthdays. We have been laughing it up ever since.