All of this talk about Bible quizzing has taken me way, way back to the place where my memories reside. There are a few special moments from my quizzing years that jump to mind. You might think that a bunch of pre-pubescent nerds who like to sit on bum pads that light up don’t know how to have a good time, but you would be wrong! We were daring little adventurers.

Quizmeets were held at churches all over Saskatchewan and we would get billeted out to homes at each location. It was always fun to see who got the worst billets: whose basement was the creepiest, whose little white dog would hump your sleeping bag while you tried to go to bed, who served the grossest meals. I think I always won. Creepy billets abounded.

One year there was a big group of us who were all billeted to the same home. We stayed up late into the night, until one of us, Dauna, fell asleep. As Dauna innocently snored away, my friend Jen and I plotted about how we could take advantage of the situation. I pulled out a tube of my toothpaste and we proceeded to put globs of it all over her face. We were laughing so hard, but desperately trying to keep quiet so as not to wake poor Dauna. We stared down at her as she slept with huge blobs of Aquafresh on her face and decided that the prank wasn’t quite complete. So I grabbed some toilet paper and scrunched it into little balls and stuck them on top of the toothpaste globs. The task was done. We were satisfied with our work and went to sleep.

The next morning Dauna roused and went to the washroom. Jen and I snickered to ourselves, thinking of the shock she’d get when she looked in the mirror.

She didn’t come out.

We went to have breakfast, and about a half hour later Dauna joined us, all clean and free from toothpaste globs. She didn’t talk to us or make eye contact. She was ANGRY.

Now, Jen and I hadn’t meant for the toothpaste globbing to be seen as a vicious and personal attack on Dauna. We thought we were just having fun. The unwritten rule and sleepovers was that if you were the first to fall alseep, you were fair game. I had had my training bra frozen at a sleepover one time. No big deal. What harm could toothpaste do?

Well, Dauna was not amused, and she was really hurt by what we did. She hated me for the next 5 years. We became quizzing rivals, and we never got along.

Eventually we got over it and became better friends in the later years of high school. But wow, I never knew what damage a tube of Aquafresh could do to a friendship!