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prank my mother. “Okay,” I instructed Matt, “let’s conferencecall my mom, and you pretend to be a police officer.” I went over his lines with him, and we dialed Mama. I could hear her pick up downstairs.
    “Do you have a son named Pasquale DePandi?” Matt asked in his best serious adult voice, identifying himself as an officer with the Montgomery County Police Department.
    “Yes?” Mama answered. “What-
a
this is about?”
    Matt drew a deep breath. He was a natural. I listened, excited for the punchline.
    “I’m so sorry to tell you, he died in a car accident.”
    Up in my room, I heard a boom, followed by a prolonged wailing. “Noooooooooo,” Mama howled. I raced downstairs to find her weeping on the kitchen floor.
    “Mama! Mama! April Fool’s! It’s April Fool’s Day!” I cried.
    “Noooooooo, nooooooo,” she kept screaming through her tears.
    “It’s a joke!” I assured her, hoping she would find my fake glee contagious. “Pasquale is alive!”
    “Waaaaaaa?” Mama jumped up and began beating me with every kitchen utensil within reach—wooden spoons, metal spatulas, a random cheese plane. She hurled pans at me as I fled her wrath. Fast-forward to me as an adult, getting ready to go on
TheArsenio Hall Show
with my husband, Bill, and sharing this memory with the producer, who thought it was hysterically funny and urged me to tell it on air. Arsenio hadn’t heard it and didn’t know what was coming when he followed the prompt his producer had provided. When I finished telling the story, he looked stricken and said something like “Oh.” The studio audience was uncomfortably silent, and when I looked past the lights, I saw a sea of moms glaring back at me.
Oops.
The only two people laughing were Bill and the wicked producer backstage.
    I don’t even have a great moral to the story. The important life lesson I took away from this episode was to think before I pranked, and avoid targeting old-school immigrants who have no idea what April Fool’s Day is and have zero awareness of child protection laws in this country. I was outgrowing these childish practical jokes, anyway. Soon, I would be entering high school, and it was time to mature. That meant broadening my horizons, and graduating from prankster to aspiring juvenile delinquent. Sex, drugs, and drinking remained on my taboo list, which narrowed my options somewhat, but the bad behavior I did engage in, I turned out to be very good at: It’s not that I didn’t get caught stealing cars; I just always managed to get away. I was sort of a one-girl
Dukes of Hazzard
in greater Washington, D.C.
    My first escapade behind the wheel was honestly more of a favor than a felony. Monica had gone off to college in Boston, but her best friend, Niki, was still like part of our family and treated me like a kid sister. As I grew older, Niki would become both a mentor and friend to me. So when she found herself in a pinch and needed a ride to the airport, I was flattered that she turned to me for help as a stand-in for her absentee BFF Monica. I generously offered Niki my parents’ Mercedes. We got to the airport, and it only then seemed to dawn on Niki that someone—thirteen-year-old me, to be exact—would have to drive the car back home. “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” Nikiassured me. The airport was a good twenty miles from Bethesda, on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, but you could take surface streets and avoid the dreaded Beltway. This was all pre-GPS and iPhones, of course, but I was sure I knew the way. It didn’t take me long to get lost in one of D.C.’s sketchier areas. This was when the District was considered one of the most dangerous cities in America, racking up nearly five hundred murders a year, and here I was, an eighth-grader joyriding her daddy’s Mercedes through a neighborhood where people got shot and killed for their sneakers and Eddie Bauer jackets. I clipped a curb while making a turn, and a police car