Prank Letter #2

As a high school Junior, I had become, well, pretty sarcastic. Our school (while good in certain respects) didn’t have many advanced classes. Also it was something like 99.999% white, so we made a lot of jokes about that. I had a friend, Josh, who used to go to BCS, and I arranged to use his parents’ P.O. Box as the return address for a prank letter. Here it is:

I still remember giggling hilariously at “1/8 Native Armanian.” I thought I was hilarious. It was a couple of weeks before Josh called me and I went to pick up the response — I wasn’t sure I’d get anything at all, but it was a big hefty enrollment packet! The cover letter, though, is the best part:

But the really painful thing was, I had this letter and a response that I thought was so funny, but I couldn’t tell anybody about it! I told a couple of friends, but I was worried that if I told anyone else I’d end up getting in trouble. But it’s been almost 9 years, so at this point I’m probably safe.

The next year, my senior year, our Yearbook teacher Mrs. Nace was talking one day about some weird letters they had gotten at the school that had been passed around the office. I asked her what they said, and she described this exact letter! I gulped, because I thought she was on to me and was slowly getting around to accusing me. But then she said that they had eventually figured out that it came from some parents of a student who had left the school… so I guess they thought Josh or his parents sent the letter. It was so hard not to explode with laughter at that moment, but I was still worried about getting in trouble, so I held it in.

There are several books of prank letters that really inspired me, but the first and foremost is Drop Us a Line, Sucker by James and Stuart Wade. Letters From a Nut and other ones by Ted L. Nancy are also really good. They’ve led me to write at least a half dozen prank letters like this, but these are the only two I’ve ever gotten a response from… so far! 😉