Gone East

Jack, Jack, Jack.....it's so obvious that you want me to tell this story.

So I'm coaching the Barrington RI debate team -- a young squad of mostly frosh and soph boys. The Bad Boyz of Barrington was one of the other RI coaches called them because they inevitably get into trouble.

So we had this tournamnet at St John's Prep in Danvers, and Jack helped out and came along as a driver/judge. After the tournament and on our way home, I take the squad to the Leaning Tower of Pizza to eat. I'm at one table with the sophomore JV debaters, and Jack's at another table with the frosh novices. This is sometime in the 80s, soon after the first Beverly Hills Cop movie came out. So we're eating and the menu isn't all pizza -- they also have pasta and they give you these nice fat and long rolls with your pasta dinner --- and there's some sort of scuttlebutt going on at the frosh table and they have some plan cooked but I'm more interested in talking to my jv's and Jack keeps pestering me to settle some dispute he has with the frosh and he wants me to come over and listen to whatever plan they had and finally I just dismiss them with a fine quote that has served me thru life: "Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess!" and with that the frosh cheer and jump up and run out of the restaurant.

That's when Jack decides to tell me that the boys were talking about the Eddie Murphy movie and the scene where he screws up a car from starting by sticking a banana in the tail pipe and the boys had noticed how the dinner rolls were about the same shape and thickness and what they wanted to know was whether they could take their dinner rolls out to the parking lot and well, you know...boys will be boys and cars won't be starting when the ignition key is turned.