The day that Chris pulled the bug out of his ass…

It may be hard to believe, but when Chris was seventeen years old, he wasn’t the open-minded, politically-charged, socially-conscious codger he is today. In fact, if you told his friends in 1990 that by 2006 Chris would not only be politically-charged and socially-conscious, but would use such crass terms as cunt-ass peehole, we would have thought you were nuts.

Ferris Bueller made the following observation about his friend Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off:

Pardon my French but Cameron is so tight, that if you stuck a lump of coal up his ass, in two weeks you’d have a diamond!

Similar observations could be made about Chris. He was a good, upstanding, suburban Christian kid who didn’t want to get in to trouble and have his parents mad at him. It was actually quite respectable…if you were his grandmother!

That all changed one Friday evening in May of 1990. Chris was left to watch the homestead while his parents, brother, and sister went on vacation. A bunch of us were out at a party at a friend’s house, and we had started harping on Chris about having a party while his parents were out of town. During our senior year, a bunch of us had hosted parties while our parents were out of town, and we wanted Chris to do the same.

The conversation turned to what type of party Chris could host, and someone jokingly said Chris should host Jell-O wrestling. Chris immediately shot down the idea, but we all persisted. It took almost two hours to convince him, but Chris finally caved at about 10:00pm. We immediately left the party, went to various supermarkets in Elmhurst, and purchased as much Jell-O as we could carry. From there we went to Andy’s house and started making a lot of Jell-O. At the end of the night, each of us took several Tupperware containers of Jell-O home to store in our refrigerators.

The next day, we went to Chris’s house to prepare. Chris’s parents had just remodeled the basement, and Chris didn’t want to get anything sticky, so we had to cover his bedroom in Hefty bags. We also had to cover all the windows, so none of the neighbors could look in on what we were doing. We used the remainder of the Jell-O to make Jell-O shots. Guido went out and bought a kiddy pool. We called girls on the phone and gauged their interest in participating on the fight card for the evening. We called our friend Brian and made sure he was bringing his video camera.

That night, Chris hosted the party. We ran it like a WWF event. We interviewed all of the participants and their managers. Our friend Geoff was the ringside announcer. Our friend Garth beat his girlfriend Stephanie in the first match. Guido beat his girlfriend Tracey in the second match. Andy and I beat Christie and Jennifer in a tag-team match, and won the coveted Jell-O belt. People had sex in Chris’s shower. There was Jell-o dripping from the ceiling. Guido (clad in nothing but his skivvies) slipped on the Hefty bags and hit the ground with a thud. It was great.

As I was helping Chris mop up after the party, I remembered thinking that he was a pretty cool guy when he let his hair down. Luckily for all of us, Chris began letting his hair down a lot more in the ensuing years, and became the open-minded, politically-charged, socially-conscious codger I spoke of at the beginning of this post.

On a personal note, I was the steward of the Jell-O wrestling video tape for the last sixteen years. My plan was to transfer the tape to my computer, put the clips up on YouTube, and show you it in its entirety over the next week. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost this little slice of Chris history, and cannot provide a visual account of the event. Just picture a bunch of seventeen and eighteen year olds drenched in Jell-O and you can get a general idea of how the evening turned out.