Boys Will Be Boys, our other popular recurring feature here, is our modest attempt to teach the boys of America the inappropriate wisdom of their fathers. Men across the land have responded to my call and are sharing with me all the inappropriate, and often disgusting, activities they did as children. So far we have told about snipe hunting, spitting off a bridge, competitive belching, arm farts, and more, with many more rude and inappropriate activities to come.
What I am discovering, however, is that boys frequently do many rude and inappropriate things without ever having to be taught. For instance, wet towel snapping. The other day I was in the men’s locker room at the Benicia swimming pool and a group of boys were snapping wet towels at each other. A wet towel, unlike a dry one, can leave a quite a sting upon impact, and this is why, dating back to the beginning of time, boys have been engaging in wet towel fights in locker rooms. The greatest at this I ever saw was my boyhood friend Mark Croghan, who could snap a towel the way Indiana Jones uses a bull whip.
Do girls soak their towels or tee shirts in water, twirl them up like a rope, and then snap them at each other’s butt in their locker room? I do not know the answer to this, but my guess is…not. Nor can I imagine girls doing what I saw a bunch of boys do today at the pool. There were maybe six boys standing around, all in swimsuits, shirts off. One of the boys took his open palm and swung it as hard as he could against another boy’s back, hitting the skin so hard I could hear the pop several feet away. But the boy who was hit, instead of reacting with shock and anger as one might expect, was smiling.
See, he was in on it. It was probably his idea. And he looked proud as all the other boys crowded around him to see what kind of mark it had left on his back. It was bright red and seemed even larger than the hand of the boy who hit. Better still, it remained a conversation piece for quite a while as the boy walked around the pool showing it off to other friends. He could even make the mark get bigger or smaller by moving his shoulders back and forth.
How do boys get ideas to do hare-brained things like this? Got me. But if you ever did any stupid, idiotic pranks when you were a child, or had any done to you, drop us a line. We’re always interested in foolishness of all kinds.
