Growing potatoes in a cage.

Elizabeth,

How could you bposibly blow the cover on our old friend in Tennessee? No way we can still be a customer this summer.

Brother Bim

Forget vodka, forget moonshine. Grow weed and you'll have a victory garden! That's what all the "real" moonshiners are doing anyway. There's much more market for it and you can sell it for more. But, alas, you will have to sleep in your garden with a shotgun.

And, you should put red christmas balls on your plants. So, they look like tomato plants from the air....

I just know this....

Joyce W. - Have to wipe tea off my screen. Brilliant idea. Xmas balls. Why didn't I think of that.

All I remember about my 11th grade Science Fair project, for which I attempted to distill vodka, (being completely unable to identify the juniper berries that seem to be necessary for bathtub gin - although I was absolutely in love with thatconcept - and assuming that huge quantities of potatoes would attract less attention anyway) is that if it goes wrong, you will go totally blind with one sip. Oooor, that's an Old Fart's Tale, like hairy palms.

Joyce, when I was a campus police officer at a certain small college known for its counter-culture approach to life, we frequently had occasion to confiscate pot plants. We'd take them back to the office for a couple weeks, just in case the administration decided to press charges (they never did).

The janitor would not only water them but he usually hung cherry tomatoes on them with bent paperclips.

After a few weeks in our basement office, we'd carefully put them in the dumpster behind Security, which was regularly checked by scavenging students.

All good suggestions. Joyce W, we should talk. I'd have never thought of Christmas bulbs. Not that I would ever have thought of growing weed, either. But if it comes to that, I owe you one for the tomato disguise idea.

Lissa -- "when I was a campus police officer..."
You never cease to amaze.

"when I was a campus police officer..."

I'm guessing she spent so much time at the campus police station they finally said, 'Oh what the hell...give her a badge."

Lissa ... I call your "certain small college known for its counter-culture approach to life" and offer this raise: I both matriculated at and graduated (still an unusual combination!) from Hampshire College, going back to the very first days the place existed in the early 70's.

No grades, no course requirements: if you could convince a couple of faculty committees that you knew stuff, you could graduate. (Okay, maybe that's a little understated.) Our soccer team was coed and mostly played barefoot and our only other serious intercollegiate sport was Ultimate (played with Frisbee-like flying disks). And though I have no first- or second-hand experience of the following, it was widely known that Playboy magazine voted ours the best College Hallowe'en party for many years in a row, that both students and faculty vied for space in the rooftop greenhouse for experiments with hybrid weed varieties, and that the single largest expenditure from the science department one month was for "capsules, gelatin (pharmaceutical grade)." In the exact geographic center of the campus, a yurt!

(Weirdly strange factoid: I am not the only Canon to come from Hampshire in that era! If he knew about this blog, there might be an MI Canon as well!)

So Lissa ... show your cards!

MD Canon--I never would have guessed!

MD Canon, yes, I was working at Camp Hamp. This was the late 80's, early 90's though, so I'm after your time. The yurt was gone, but I worked that Halloween party. It was a very, very busy night.

Really, with a description like that, who'd you think I was talking about? Reed? Pshaw!

Bucky, the ex-Marine Quaker who hired me told me he wanted me because I knew all the tricks. So, something like that (I actually attended a nearby college).

"when I was a campus police officer..."

I smell bacon, uh oh, now I'm confused

Lissa ... How very cool that you know Hampshire! Of course I would have given you a lot of applause for Bard or Antioch or Evergreen or College of the Atlantic as well.

Lissa is a Smithie???

It was an interesting place to work, MD Canon. Where else can one chase the sheep off Rt. 116 then deal with a student who has had way too much Bolivian marching powder, then get offered a hash brownie for helping a modmate, then end up discussing herbal tea and Bakunin with a student doing purity tests on some white powder or another in Cole?

A HS buddy went to Bard. Bard was normal next to Hampshire.

Dahlink, wash out your mouth, girlfriend! I'm a Mountie!

Smithie, indeed! Give me some credit. I'm with Wendy Wasserstein, Nita Lowey and Frances Perkins, not Barbara Bush.

Of course, I took a few classes at Smith. UMASS, too.

Lissa wrote,"Where else can one chase the sheep off Rt. 116 then deal with a student who has had way too much Bolivian marching powder, then get offered a hash brownie for helping a modmate, then end up discussing herbal tea and Bakunin with a student doing purity tests on some white powder or another in Cole?" And so what did you do after lunch??

For the record, I never dated anyone from Smith (though I, too, took classes there). I faithfully chased (but did not catch ... so, I guess, also "chaste") a sweet young thing from Mount Holyoke. I regularly worshiped at All Saints, adjacent to the MHC campus. Famously, next to one of the most beautifully classic campus settings, All Saints was constructed out of two recycled pre-fab small aircraft hangars, with no locks whatsoever on the front doors.

I worked the night shift, usually. Things tended to be busy.

Yes, I remember All Saints. Attended a few times, when I was still Episcopalian. Not as pretty as the campus.

I hope you got over to the MHC chapel sometime, MD Canon. I used to enjoy sitting in the pews, watching the stained glass window change as the sun rose behind it.

I did sit in the MHC chapel many times. And I had a just-past-dawn experience there once. I made some extra money by typing theses, and I was up all night typing for a friend hard against a deadline, with her writing and me clicking away. When we realized that the sun was up, she (Stephanie??) called time out and we took a splendid walk on a May morning, including finding a cleaning person going into the chapel. (Evidently she was either exceptionally wise or had seen it all, since she didn't bat an eye when a guy and a girl asked to go into the chapel at 6:15 in the morning!)