damont

In a post a couple of weeks back I mentioned the Great Fight Song Parody Caper of my senior year in high school.

suba_al_hadid asked for the lyrics if I could remember them. Well, I have remembered them, but before I relate the lyrics, a bit of background so they'll make sense.

On the weekend just before my birthday in my senior year at Allentown Central Catholic HS, the local paper broke the story of a scandal at William Allen HS, one of the two public high schools in the City of Allentown and probably CCHS's second biggest rival (behind Bethlehem Catholic). A couple of kids at Allen had made up a bunch of phony $5 bills in shop class for a "money tree" silly Christmas present (bunch of fake fivers adorning the branches with one real on at the top). Those fakes got burned in the fireplace... but the students forgot to destroy the plates they'd made to print up the fakes. It seems that some other students found the plates and started printing up fakes of their own... and the fakes were good enough to pass for a while. Then a local community college student got in on the act, printing up fake $1 bills and passing them. Then some other local students started making photocopies of real bills... some of which were good enough to fool some area vending machines, which doesn't speak well for the manufacturers of the bill-acceptor mechanisms. Anyway, people got caught passing the fakes, and the original problem got traced back to the Allen High shop students. The scandal broke about a week before we were scheduled to play Allen in basketball in a *very* big game on our home court (IIRC, the winner would get a first-round bye in the league tournament).

It so happened that my best friends and I had missed a physics lab for some midday school activity just before this, and were making it up after school one day just after the scandal broke, and before the game. Our physics teacher was massively cool, and an alumnus of our high school; during the make-up lab, talk naturally turned to the scandal, and our teacher started thinking of topical parody lyrics to the tune of Allen's Fight Song. We chimed in with suggestions, and before the lab was finished a final version had been settled upon. The physics teacher was also the assistant band director, so he taught it to the band during the few days remaining before the game. The evening of the game, everyone gathers at the gym; I'm with the CCHS band on the home bleachers, and Allen's band is in the visitors' seats. As the Allen team came out onto the court, the Allen band stood up and started up their fight song -- when, to their utter shock, *our* band stood up... and sang the parody lyrics at them:

If you need some money, we can print some up;
It'll only take a minute, we can do it in our shop;
We're the kids from Allen High, and we can go to jail for this,
So when you get your bucks from ALLEN HIGH you know that they're counterfeit!

It took a couple of years before our band stopped singing the parody.