My senior year at the University of Mobile, I schemed a plot and persuaded my buddy Cris to help me carry it out. I spent the night at her dorm room, and we got up very early and donned all black clothes. Unfortunately, we hadn’t set our alarm early enough, because it was already light by the time we got up. We were the only people up and about, except for the security guard patrolling in her little car. Unfortunately, this made us stick out. Fortunately, security at UM has never cared about much of anything.

We went out to the quad in the middle of the university. Cris stood in the center, while I played out several feet of twine. Then I walked in a circle as far as the twine would let me, holding a plastic bag of rye grass seed in one hand and sowing about a foot wide swath with the other. Next I shortened the string and made another arc of seed. Then we eyeballed a couple of dots. When the security car would drive by, we would drop the twine and act like we were chatting.

When we returned from winter break, we admired our handiwork from the third floor of Weaver Hall:

I think groundskeeping had tried to blur it by planting more rye seed around it, but our face definitely had the taller grass.

(Cris and I were senior class president and vice-president at the time.)