Senior TP Night
Here’s another blog entry you can read or listen to as I recorded it for the Grantcast. If you want to subscribe to the Grantcast, you can do so with iTunes, or by using this feed in your favorite podcatcher. Enjoy!
Senior TP Night
By Grant Baciocco
There was a tradition at Burlingame High School that, the night before the first day of school, the Senior class would give the front of the school the TP treatment. Meaning, they would cover the beautiful sequoia trees in the front of the school with toilet paper. I must say, I can still remember my first day of my Freshman year, pulling up to the front of the school and being awed at the sight of that toilet paper hanging off the trees. It was intimidating, “What have I gotten myself into?” The annual TPing of the school was something that you didn’t think about too much as you progressed through the years, but it was always in the back of your mind, “When I’m a senior, I get to do this!”
I was in band all four years of high school. A drummer. And for band kids, school actually started two weeks earlier in the form of Band Camp. We didn’t go away or anything, we just came to school each day and worked on our marching and pep rally type songs for four hours or so. Because of this, we were around the school for several days before the year began. Senior year, as the start of school creeped closer, thoughts of being able to TP the school started to creep into my head. I frequently discussed it with my two close friends, Dan and Jeanette. We were all excited about this tradition it was now our turn to partake in. There was only one problem, we were band kids. As such, we didn’t often interact with the ‘cool kids’ who’d be the main ones TPing the school in just a few days. But then I had an idea. “What if,” I told my pals, “We did something else? What if we TP’d the school in a different way?”
Dan, Jeanette and I discussed the different possibilities of achieving this and suddenly we hit upon the idea of, while the other seniors were toilet papering the outside of the school, what if we toilet papered the inside? This idea excited us all but we quickly realized that we couldn’t just break into the school and, on top of that, the school did have an alarm. Then a guardian angel appeared. Now, I will not reveal who this guardian angel was but I will say it was someone who was very knowledgeable about the the workings of the alarm system of the school. Not how to disarm it, but just which areas of the school were alarmed and which areas were not. We were told that a large open hallway area between the band room and two english classrooms were not alarmed and that would be our best bet as a place to wreak our TP mischief. This angel gave us a map showing which doors and windows to stay away from and even discreetly hinted at how we could enter the building without a key or breaking any windows. We were all set.
The night before school we drove to the campus and drove right past all the other seniors TPing the front of the building. We drove back around to the band room and parked and found our way to the secret entry point. In seconds, we were in. We knew going in, that the hallway would be harder to toilet paper than a bunch of trees, so we brought a long scotch tape to help us hang the toilet paper from he walls. Also Jeanette, being crafty, made some hilarious signs to hane above the doors of the classrooms. English teacher Mr/ Morgan got ‘Glen’s Pad.” Mrs. Caret got ‘Elaine’s Bungalo of love.” The band teacher, Mr. Kimura, got ‘Mr. K’s,’ which was also the name of a local nightclub in burlingame.
We spent about an hour making everything perfect and, when we were finally satisfied, to honor the moment, we snapped a few pictures of our handiwork and carefully snuck out of the building and into the night.
The next morning I was so excited to get back to school to see the reaction of the people as they walked into the band room area hallway, I parked and made a bee line to the door to the hallway. I ran up to the door, flung it open and…the entire hallway was spotless. There wasn’t a square of toilet paper anywhere. The signs were gone from above the doors. It was your average, everyday hallway. I was crestfallen. Jeanette and Dan arrived and they too were majorly bummed out. We had worked so hard.
Apparently, what had happened is the janitors had arrives earlier, found the mess and cleaned it all up before anyone else arrived. Insert sad trombone sound here.
Not to be deterred in letting people know what we had done, I wrote an anonymous letter to the Burlingame B, the school’s newspaper telling everything that had happened. And I included one of the pictures of the toilet paper hanging in the hallway. The letter ran and the world knew. But it would have been much better had they seen it with their own eyes. I read the printed letter and the picture accompanied it. Under the photo, a byline, Photo by Grant Baciocco. Oops. Maybe I should have just shut up about it.
I was never punished or anything. But that was the story of the one time the inside of Burlingame High School was toilet papered.
©2015 Grant Baciocco/Saturday Morning Media