"That Time It Wasn't What It Looked Like."  

Back in college I was in a fraternity, let's just call it "Tapa-Tapa-Keg."



One semester I was asked if I wanted to be the Tapa-Tapa pledge master,
along with my "brothers" Frank & Kevin.

Our duties as pledge masters were simple: Humiliate pledges and order them to do stuff we didn't want to.



Wait, what? What I meant to say was: Our duties as pledge masters were to teach the pledges about the steep history of Tapa-Tapa, while leading them through a series of challenging, yet fun, team building activities.

So let's skip forward to the culmination of this pledge period, a magical time known as "Hell Week." Hell Week marked the last time the pledges would have to put up with our shit.

If they made it through this week, they'd have earned the right to pay for our friendship.

During this final week there were a few rules.

1. All 26 pledges would have to take-up residence in our fraternity basement.

2. The pledges were only allowed to leave the house to attend class.

3. When in our presence, pledges would have to kneel before us on one knee.

4. At the end of the final week, pledges were required to throw us (and campus) a big party.

If they failed to do any of these acts, Kevin would make them wear nothing but an adult diaper, then Frank would cover them in Crisco and call them "Crisco The Kid." (I know, it sounded a bit odd and homoerotic to me too.)



These were the house rules and we assumed the pledges would find their new living arrangements uncomfortable — but we forgot how shitty and cramped the freshman dorms were.



These guys actually enjoyed living in the basement, what the hell was wrong with them?! So we came up with a couple new ways to make their stay a bit less enjoyable.

Our first step was to crank "Cracklin' Rosie" (by Neil Diamond) on 24-hour repeat, for 6 straight days. The pledges would now have to sleep and wake to the thoughtful vocals of Neil. Over...and over...and over...and over again.



Our second move was to paper the basement walls with a certain Playgirl magazine that we'd lifted a few weeks earlier from that little old lady
"who liked it rough and Redford."





These new additions made their stay much less enjoyable, yet somehow they suffered through it all to the bitter end, now it was time for the big party.

We all gathered in the basement about an hour before the festivities were set to kick-off. The pledges took a knee and it looked as if we were set to go, then I noticed they forgot to take the guy porn down from the walls. This oversight would have been a major embarrassment if outsiders had seen it — so we singled out the pledge who was in charge of taking it all down. Kevin had him put his diaper on, and Frank readied the Crisco.

It was at this exact moment that the cellar doors creaked open and 3 unknown freshman came bounding in, their faces filled with absolute terror as they took in the horrors before them: I was standing in a dark basement flanked by one guy holding a tub of crisco and another holding a box of adult diapers. There were 26 guys kneeling before us and one of them was wearing only a diaper. Male porn blanketed the walls and Neil Diamond blared from the stereo.

This was one time it really wasn't what it looked like.



Give a squirrel a nut :)

All work by "The Acorn King" is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License