Not really an antic, & late in the growing up phase, but: Junior Prom. Date had a hot-rod he was over-the-top proud of — chrome EVERYTHING on the engine. Did all the work himself & spent a ton of money doing it. He’d put a half-hood on it for prom night to show off the shiny engine. I wasn’t impressed & shrugged my shoulders & rolled my eyes when he was trying to dazzle me. It was like looking at a Visible Man Model & seeing all the guy’s guts. Anyway, he took me to dinner in Big Sur overlooking the ocean at sunset — very romantic & expensive. Then we drove to the prom down the Monterey Highway & as we came around a curve, a gust of wind hit us & ripped the half-hood off the car & carried it over a barbed wire fence and into a pond! Cursing, he pulled off the road & screeched to a halt, jumping out of the car almost before it had completely stopped. He ran back up the highway frantically searching for his precious car part. After several minutes he ran back to the car & opened my door saying he needed me to get out & help him search for it! “Seriously?”, I asked. “You want me to help you look for a piece of crumpled metal in my prom dress?” I looked down at my pink satin gown that touched the tips of my matching pink satin shoes. The roadside was dirt, with lots of dirty grasses & scratchy shrubs. It was dark since the sun had set almost an hour ago by then. While I was thinking of a polite way to say “No-Way Jose”, he was digging around in the trunk looking for a flashlight. Finding one, he returned to my open door & shouted “Okay! Let’s go find it!!” I’d been thinking about how much he’d spent on our dinner & how hard he’d tried to make this a perfect prom date with the long drive to Big Sur. So I said, reluctantly, “Okay, let’s go look for it.” And so, we spent the next hour walking up and down the road, poking into the bushes with sticks we’d found in a nearby ditch. Finally, the beam of his flashlight caught the gleam of the highly polished metal of the hood, sticking up out of the pond on the other side of the barbed wire fence. He headed towards the fence and looked like he was going to climb right over it to get the car body part, but I grabbed his arm & convinced him it was a bad idea. I really wanted to get to the prom with my date’s clothing in tact. So I promised to come back with him in the morning to retrieve the hood, and so he gave the wounded car part one last look, and reluctantly turned back to the car with me. We didn’t have much fun at the dance because he was preoccupied with his car part stranded way out there along the dark highway. But I did go back out the next morning, wearing jeans, and we managed to climb the fence & pull the hood out of the swampy, muddy pond.