Blazing Reader:
April 1st 2015. I thought it would be fun to leave a letter at the door of all the residents in my apartment building. The letterhead read "Brown Herring Properties Inc." — a play on the landlord's "Blue Heron Properties Inc."
The letter stated that the building would be moved by helicopter to a barge on the lake in the centre of town. You can read it here. About 27 people loved the joke. Three despised it. One of them went door-to-door trying to track down the perpetrator.
"What should we do?" asked my wife Nicole.
I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Maybe a music video?"
The next day, my then eight-year old son Jonah and I composed and performed a parody of Verdi’s “La Donna é Mobile" called "Ode to April Fools" and published it on YouTube.
The day after, CJBK News Talk Radio in London, Ontario called asking if they could play the song and interview Jonah. (You can hear a recording here).
April 1, 2016. The next letter was about a pet python that had escaped into the plumbing system. The same ladies went door-to-door trying to gather signatures to have the police arrest me for making the place unsafe.
April 1, 2017. The third letter informed tenants that the laundry room would henceforth be closed and they would be expected to wash their clothes in the lake while reenacting scenes from Shakespeare (to help increase tourism).
April 1, 2018. The fourth letter announced the conversion of our chain-smoking superintendent to Mormonism.
I remember I almost did an April Fools letter on April 1, 2020 about the "emerging pandemic." But, I ran the idea by Nicole and she said the neighbours would burn me alive. She was probably right.
So take a break from worrying about whether a collapsing banking system will leave us eating Bitcoin for breakfast and check out those April Fools letters and video.
Stay sane and remember to laugh,
—John C. A. Manley
PS And if you like the humour in those letters, then you'll enjoy Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story even more.
John C. A. Manley is the author of Much Ado About Corona: A Dystopian Love Story, the forthcoming All The Humans Are Sleeping and other works of speculative fiction. Get free samples of his stories by becoming a Blazing Pine Cone email subscriber at: https://blazingpinecone.com/subscribe/
