Lovett School issued the following announcement on Apr. 14.
You don’t often get to watch a Mariachi band serenade Mr. Melito at lunchtime in the cafeteria. But a few weeks ago the SGA cabinet arranged it as their last hurrah of the year.
According to cabinet member Katie Fryburger, a junior, “It was the end of the year and a lot of the jobs had already been done and we wanted one final thing to do.” Originally thought up by Ellie Mayfield as a joke, it ended up coming to fruition on April Fool’s Day after the plans were approved by Ms. Hooker.
Unfortunately, Mr. Melito was not fooled and really didn’t even find it surprising since music and other such things used to be common in the cafeteria pre-pandemic. “I thought it was a return to the way things were before,” he said “I thought it was a nice way to start the weekend.”
April Fool’s day started back in 1582 when the French switched calendars and those who went unaware of this momentous change were labeled “poisson d'avril” (April Fish or figuratively April Fool) as they continued to celebrate New Year’s on April 1st. Ever since then April 1st has been the day to fool the fools. While it’s not especially well-celebrated (or dreaded) nowadays chances are that you’ve been fooled at some point in your life.
In Spanish class, “today” my teacher said was “El Día de los Inocentes.” What followed was a surprise that us fools couldn’t believe was real; the day we had all been waiting for, hoping for, and not truly expecting was upon us when we finally got to watch Encanto. Unfortunately, we were unaware of this since the plan on MyLion said we would spend the class doing various activities around the subjunctive (needless to say this was a welcome interruption to that plan).
Later, my track coach lined us up after our workout and said we were running five 400s. We all gaped at him and with dread in our hearts approached the line. At the last moment, he told us we had been fooled and asked, “Y'all don’t really think I’m that mean do you?”
As I wandered around the upper school on April Fool’s Day I decided to ask others what their own April Fool’s day experiences have been.
I first questioned ninth-grader Sophie Hatfield but her memories of April Fool’s Day pranks were sparse (as expected). I started off by asking her when April Fool’s Day was and while she remembered it happened on April first she went on to say this, “Monday no . . . Tuesday, Friday . . .”.
At this point I asked her with some trepidation if she had been fooled or fooled anyone on Friday, “No, no” she answered. Her answer was much the same concerning past April Fool’s Days.
She did recall one personal experience where she was the fooler, “One year my social studies teacher was my advisor so we planned to just put dolls everywhere,” she said. Overall, it seems that like most of us she had little experience with April foolings.
This sad lack of any and all foolery at Lovett hasn’t always been the case. In fact, even the newspaper used to put out an April Fool’s Day edition with some, well, questionable jokes.
One such edition of this was the “Lionpalooza” published in 1997 and filled with some very, let’s just say, interesting articles. The briefs included, “Lost: Senior Privileges. Please return, no questions asked,” and “Daniel Epstein will forego college next year so he can stay at home with his mom.” There was also an article about “Zach Radford - the man, the myth, the Pez Dispenser.”
After some more research, I discovered the newspaper writers weren’t the only ones who used to engage in these somewhat concerning pranks. Lovett students, especially Lovett seniors, also used to be involved in a bevy of incidents. In order to discover more about this, I headed to some of our school’s most veteran faculty members, who would hopefully have the longest institutional memory.
I started with Coach Davis who has been here for an extremely long time. While he didn’t remember many of them since the pranks did happen over 20 years ago, he did recall one from a very long time ago.
“I only remember one April Fool’s Day and that was when we had a home tennis match,” he said. “The girls wore the boys uniform and the boys wore the girls skirt”.
I also headed to Mrs. Morgan who has taught here for 25 years. Her memory was of the prank that ended it all.
“The big prank which was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back,” she said, “was when some Lovett kids went over to Westminster and I can’t remember exactly what they did to their sign but they defaced it in some way and the Westminster kids came over here and they did something to the lion.” This led to a meeting of the headmasters and a subsequent ban on pranks.
So, here we are all these years later with only approved pranks (if any) on our own April Fool’s day. Maybe that’s good and maybe that’s bad, but either way, at least the Lion’s dignity hasn’t been further damaged, even if Mr. Melito’s was slightly compromised.
Original source can be found here.
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