The best April Fool’s Day joke I ever witnessed was when Ed Rendell, as Mayor of Philadelphia, placed full-page ads in both Philadelphia daily newspapers, announcing that the city had sold the naming rights to the Liberty Bell. Sold the naming rights! And that in the future it would be called the “Taco Liberty Bell.”
This April Fool’s Day joke became national news and was covered in all media. It was a brilliant idea, and it placed Philadelphia in the national spotlight for about a week.
The announcement that the Manhattan District Attorney and the Grand Jury decided to indict the former President – this was not April Fool’s.
I only wish that the elected Republican senators who rose to Trump’s defense were perpetrating April Fool’s Day jokes. Not so. I mean, the spectacle of Lindsay Graham raging against the Manhattan District Attorney should have been an April Fool’s Day exercise. So should Ron DeSantis’ outburst, and former Vice President Mike Pence’s description of the indictment as “outrageous.” What then would he call the January 6 thousands of Trump supporters shouting, “Hang Mike Pence!” With then-President Donald Trump egging the crowd on. The armed crowd, that is.
Apparently, a number of April Fool’s Day jokes were circulating on the internet. But I confess that I missed seeing most of them. And I certainly did not plan any myself, although I discovered on the internet a web page which recommended pranks to play for the first day of April.
I guess I was too distracted, worrying about my best friend’s sister. My BFF is, as regular readers of my column know, is Debby Wolff, Esq. Her sister is Barbara Kardon, who was stricken with appendicitis and ended up in Bryn Mawr Hospital for laporoscopic surgery. This was no joke!
Debby spent several days with her sister, and Barbara’s doctor daughter Valerie came in from New York to take over Barbara’s care..
The online flower delivery service which I had used many times before disappointed me this time. Although they kept insisting that the flowers and get well balloon which I had ordered had been delivered – forget about it! I spent so much time on the phone, trying to track down the mythical paid-for get well flowers and balloon that I ended up yelling at the clerk on the phone from the service and demanding that they refund my purchase price. Barbara had already been discharged and sent home before anything had been delivered, despite the emails which the on-line service kept sending me. And despite the many phone calls I had made to their website, Ohmy!
I only wish that the nasty people who were circulating rumors on the internet that Senator John Fetterman had a body double – that these people were doing their dirty work as part of a nefarious April Fool’s Day prank. Only they were not joking.
And I wish the news that Villanova’s women’s basketball team had lost in the tournament – I only wish that that had been a prank report.
The short-lived tenure of Temple University’s most recent failed president was not an April Fool’s joke, because it arrived on March 31. One day too early to be called April Fool’s.
When we think of the late Peter Liacouras and his 18 successful years as President and visionary leader of Temple, everyone who followed him was a failure. Except for Dick Englert, who has probably been at Temple for over 40 years and who did an admirable job as interim and then as actual president of the university.
When I worked at Temple during the 1980’s, I never had any qualms about walking across campus to an open-air parking lot on Broad Street late at night after a basketball game or event. Today, however, people are afraid to walk in the daylight around campus. Or anywhere in center city.
Maybe the “prayers and thoughts” of Republican elected officials, instead of restoring the ban on automatic rifles used in the most recent school shootings, are really the R’s way of celebrating April Fool’s Day.
I hope that next year’s April Fool’s Day will be a happier day, and that we actually find things to laugh about. As a unified nation!
Bonnie Squires is a communications consultant who writes weekly for Main Line Media News and can be reached at www.bonniesquires.com. She hosts the “Bonnie’s Beat” TV show at MLTV- MAIN LINE NETWORK
