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When I was a senior in high school, my friend Dan and I wanted to visit some colleges out east. Dan worked at Best Western, so we could get a deal on rooms. The only problem was we were both 17. We needed an 18 yr old. I asked my friend Misty if she was interested. She was, which was awesome. Then we needed a road trip car.

Dan had a friend who loved wearing mohair sweaters named Kelda. She was a couple years younger than we were, but she had access to a minivan - a perfect road trip vehicle for 4 people. Unfortunately we had to convince Kelda's parents that it was a good idea for their 16 yr old daughter who just got her license to come with us to NY and PA in their family car.

This required a meeting with all parents and step parents. Dan and I presented our plan. We showed the adults our perfect driving records, our high GPAs and our war on drugs attitudes. The parents loved it. In fact, Kelda's mother turned to me and said "I'm so glad you're going on this trip, I feel Kelda will be totally safe with you there."

What Kelda's mother didn't know is that the #1 reason her daughter wanted to go on this trip was to get fake IDs in Gary, Indiana. Kelda preferred "mature" men and wanted to be able to get into clubs and bars with them. She didn't want to push it, so she decided she’d get an ID that said she was 19. The ID was really more of a practicality for her than a genuine interest in alcohol. We dedicated almost an entire day to driving around Gary looking for fake ID establishments. We went into every abandoned, broken down building we could find. We poured over our roadmaps looking for the vague address she'd been given. We went into gas stations and liquor stores looking for this place. We asked random people on the street, people in fast food drive-thrus, the full nine.

Eventually we gave up. It was dark by then, and we had to get across Indiana to our Best Western hotel. It was sort of a shame because it would've been handy to have a fake ID. Not that I was a booze hound, but I wanted to go to dance clubs. Kelda was, needless to say, crushed. That girl put on her pink mohair and worked Gary. She really gave her all to finding an illegal establishment which provided fake IDs to minors. I hesitate to say she cried, but I know she went into the backseat by herself for a while, listening to Tori Amos as we were leaving the great Gary, IN.

Even though we were all young drivers, Kelda was clearly the youngest, both in age and in judgment. Dan and I dominated the driving. I drove the better part of the highways through OH and into PA. Shortly before we got to Pittsburg, Kelda said she wanted to drive; after all it was her van. As she drove into the city, her "turn to drive" was swiftly revoked as she ran a red light and went the wrong way on a one way street. Dan demanded she pull the car over and he took over for her. Once again, a back seat Tori Amos session was in order.

The four of us were all in Show Choir at our high schools, so our trip was filled with a variety of activities; singing show tunes, show choir dance moves and board games. For some reason, someone brought board games on the road trip. We never used them, but they were there, in case of activity emergency.

Eventually, we toured the colleges we came to see. I learned how to pronounce "Job" (the proper noun) and we got excited about private liberal arts colleges.

During the evenings we found new, eastern united states eating establishments, specifically Eat n' Park. I liked Eat N' Park because it reminded me almost exactly of Perkins (which is pretty much exactly like Denny's). Eat N' Park did the trick. A solid establishment.

The next night, we were looking for pizza places in the phone book. That's where we came upon "Crazee Mazee's" which from what I could gather from the ad was a Chucky Cheese style 'family' pizza fun house where a kid can be a kidsumer. It had a "crazee" old man as the icon, depicted there in the phone book wearing a funny hat. As I recall it wasn't even a cartoon, it was actually a photo of an old man. It was magically hilarious. So hilarious that I wish I would've taken the ad out of the phone book, brought it home and allowed it to inspire a scrapbook. Alas, I have a difficult time defacing public property.

After that, the rest of our trip became Crazee Mazee references. "That's Crazee Mazee" "You guys are being Crazee Mazees." "Look out world! We're a pack of Crazee Mazees!" "My Crazee Mazee-o-meter is off the charts." "This is some Crazee Mazee shit." "I'm so Crazee Mazee'd out right now." "It was like all Crazee Mazee, you know?"

Crazee Mazee - pronounced /Cray-zee Muh-zee/.

I'll Crazee Ma-see you later.

The summer between high school and college I was in a major car accident where my ford escort was totaled. My grandfather died the previous summer, and we'd inherited his 1984 Chevette, so I had a car to drive after the accident. The Chevette was easily my least favorite car. It only had am radio, it was an automatic, and it had the type of seats where when it gets really hot and then cold they crack and scrape up your legs/back/neck. Regardless of its flaws, the Chevette was a functional vehicle, so I would take it out.

Toward the end of the summer, my friend Misty and I had a few last hurrahs before college started. Misty was notoriously a good time gal. She would typically be up for anything and I really appreciated that about her. We went into Madison to visit my boyfriend at the time and his friends, one of whom I wanted to set Misty up with. We all had a blast and they got along famously. It was this evening, incidentally, that the story of Crazee Mazee became legend.

At the end of the night, which rolled in around 2am, Misty and I headed home.
Toward the edge of Madison, low and behold, the familiar sound of a dislodged muffler became apparent. By this time in my driving career, I was very well acquainted with the muffler's lullaby of hassle. I pulled into the 24hr Cub Foods parking lot.

I looked at the muffler and figured I would do what I'd done in muffler story #1 - tie the muffler to the axel. Alas, there were no wire hangers, only chains and rope. I was afraid to use the rope because A.) I was convinced it would set the car on fire and B.) It was about 2" thick, making it difficult to make taut. The chains were completely useless in this scenario.

Misty and I went into the store. I was concerned we'd get kicked out of the parking lot for loitering, so we thought we'd get some snacks. "Snacks" turned out to be cigars and juice. We were 18.

It was the first time I'd had a cigar. It was a thrill. We took some time deliberating over what cigar to get. I was very attracted to the cherry ones. I loved the smell of cherry pipe tobacco, and I thought this would be a comparable experience. We got some swisher sweets, a brand I continue to purchase today. They're so delicious, and I don't smoke enough cigars to know any better. We had to buy a lighter as well. We bought three because we were so amped on what a good deal it was to get three lighters for the same price as just one. Three lighters - I used one, once, and then put them in the glove compartment, convinced that they would set the car on fire.

There we were, 3am, sitting on cement dividers, smoking cigars and drinking juice in the parking lot of Cub Foods. I decided to call my dad to find out what to do about the muffler situation.

My father said immediately, without any hesitation,
"Drive the car around the parking lot until the muffler falls off."

Brilliant.

That's exactly what we did - took turns driving the car in circles, smoking cigars, drinking our juices until eventually the muffler came totally dislodged and shot out from underneath the car. We had to spend a significant amount of time hunting around the half dark parking lot for the muffler so we could put it in the trunk of the car and go home.

Thinking we'd done our fair share of amateur auto repair, we drove home with a sense of pride - a job well done.
Our evening was not over, however, and as we got on the highway home, all of a sudden the passenger door started to shudder. At first we just figured the door needed to be re-shut. Misty opened the door and slammed it closed, but it didn't latch. Misty held onto the arm rest to keep the door from being blown open and off the car. At that point I stopped. Sure enough, the door was barely hanging onto the side of the car.

We had a ways to go, and it was impossible for Misty to hold onto the arm rest the whole time. I went to the trunk and looked at options. We had the standard bucket of sand and shovel, also the chains and the rope. I decided to go with the rope.

We tied the rope around the arm rest and the window frame. There wasn't much length to the rope, its mass seemed to be primarily width. So we tied it to the gear shift.

I emphatically demanded Misty wear her seatbelt, which she of course did. I encouraged her to hold onto my seat, and or the dashboard for the rest of the ride home.

This appeared to be the only time on earth when an automatic shift was preferable to a manual - to tie a rope around, to keep the door from flying off the car.

My senior year of high school, I purchased a hat that was just like Rudy's from Fat Albert, except green and corduroy. I have no idea what I was thinking except that I was deeply into James Brown and must've been inspired by "make it funky". The hat was about as "funky" as a white girl from rural Wisconsin can hope for. Unfortunately I didn't have a cool jacket to go with it; I just had my 6'4" father's wool lined army jacket that went down to my ankles. It was a good jacket for Midwestern winters, and the hat matched in both color and over-size.

One day, I had to take my brother to an appointment. For some reason I took my mother's Buick station wagon. There's a very real possibility that the heat wasn't working in my mother's car, so she was taking my escort and if I "wanted to drive a car I'd damn well drive what was available" because she didn't see me "buy the cars around here". But maybe the Escort was simply getting repaired. Either of those scenarios is completely feasible.

My brother is about 6'6" and at 13 was approximately twice my body MASS. He has the circulation of a hummingbird, which blows my mind and I attribute to being breastfed until he was 3. While I was wrapped up in my over-sized winter garb, my brother was probably wearing a t-shirt. My brother also had extremely long hair. Think Gandalf of Lord of the Rings.

As we drove into town, it became more and more difficult to hear each other speak because of the extreme volume of the exhaust system. Eventually there was a dragging metal sound and I figured it was the muffler. We stopped in front of Natalie's house because I knew she was home and we could go in and get warm in between caring for the car.

We roared up to her house and parked in front of it. I got out and discovered that not only the muffler, but as far as I could tell the entire underside of the car had come loose and was dragging along the road.

We took a respite inside the house and then went to work on trying to fix the car. I say "fix", but I mean "make less dangerous and illegal".

As I established in muffler story #1, there were no jacks in our cars, and if there were, I didn't know where they were nor how to use them. What we did have in all the cars were shovels, buckets of sand, and wire hangers. I thought I was lucky on this car occasion to have my brother along, because he has the strength of 10 men. The trouble was the Buick was set low to the ground. Because of my brother's size he couldn't fit under the car. I thought perhaps I could if he lifted the car, but as he said and I agreed, he didn't need a hernia at age 13.

Instead I drew on my physics education and used the shovel as a simple machine to lift the underside of the car up off the ground. Unfortunately, because it was the entire underside of the car, rather than just the muffler, there was nothing to attach it to via wire hanger once it was up off the ground.

I thought perhaps we could completely dislodge the underside of the car and put it in the trunk and drive home. I'd done that with my muffler a subsequent time it fell off the escort. We tried to use the shovel to that effect, but to our dismay we couldn't get a very good angle on it, even when my brother agreed to lift up the car just a little bit.

The fact of the matter was the part that was still attached to the car, was attached very well. I called my parents and told them that the underside of the car was dragging and that we thought it would be best to reschedule the appointment and come home. My parents begrudgingly agreed.

It was an EXTREMELY FOGGY, late fall/early winter day. There was no snow, but it was very cold and foggy. As we started to head home, I made 2 decisions. The first was to avoid going in reverse at all costs. I had a very vivid image in my mind of having the rear dragging underbelly of the car catch on something while in reverse and flip the front body of the car up, over and onto the roof. The second decision was to avoid getting the mother of all fix-it tickets. I decided to take the back roads.

Cops didn't patrol the back roads, only the highways, so I figured I was "safe". As I drove, the fog became more and more dense. It reached a point where I could only see about 10 feet in front of the car. The Buick, like every car my family owned, lacked a horn. I was concerned because I was driving DRAMATICALLY under the speed limit, and was afraid a car in less disrepair than ours would come careening into me unless we were honking the horn. I thought maybe we should roll down the windows and make noise. Then it occurred to me that our car was easily making more noise just by being on than any other car in the county.

The dense fog and the surrounding woods, thick with naked tree branches, evoked a feeling of literary fantasy - like sleepy hollow, middle earth or pet cemetery. Somehow my brother fell asleep as we drove a vehicle the volume equivalent of a siren blaring fire truck. With my enormous brother sleeping next to me I could just hear the APB radio: "possible kidnapping of an unconscious Andre the Giant by Oliver Twist, get away vehicle appears to be the upper half of a Buick station wagon. Can I get some back up?"

Fortunately, I was on the back roads, where there's no law and no APB radios.

While this is not the actual car, this is basically what it looks like.

I've always been slightly into fake fingernails. I would occasionally get a pack of Lee press-on nails for my own enjoyment. They were $2/pack or something. I've never been a manicure girl, I just like the cheap nails you can take off and re-use.

One day, when I was about 16, I drove my 1984 Ford Escort to the store to buy some popsicles for a Star Wars marathon at Dave's house. I decided to get some fake nails for the event as well. I picked up Natalie on the way to Dave's. As we were driving, I heard this terrible sound - a constant, loud roar, accompanied by the sound of metal against pavement. I immediately pulled over to see what it was.

The muffler had come dislodged in such a manner that the exhaust pipe opening was suctioning the road. I was convinced the car was going to explode because the exhaust wasn't being expelled. I was mildly panicked, but had to move my car out of the bus stop lane and drive to a side street with less traffic. Fortunately during that brief drive the car did not explode.

I knew I had to do something about the muffler; otherwise the car would most likely explode on our way to the west side. Time was of the essence as the popsicles were melting in the backseat.

I didn't have a jack, to my knowledge, and I'd never been shown how to use one anyway, so it didn't really matter. I would have to remove the muffler by hand.

I sat in the driver's seat, my blood red Lee press-on nails firmly attached. It was purely out of necessity that I regretfully took a breath, put my fingers on the dashboard, and curled my hands so the fake nails would all come off in one shot. It was excruciatingly painful. It had to be done, however, as I was completely a-dexterous with those nails on.

My blood curdling warrior cry helped ease some of the pain. I looked down at my red (from irritation), sore nails and I went to the back of the car. I tried to touch the muffler, which was very hot. Clearly I could not remove it with my flesh covered hands.

Fortunately, I always had wire hangers in the trunk of my car. I fashioned the wire around the muffler and hooked it to some bar going across the bottom of the car (an axle?). Feeling that my fix was sufficient we made our way to Dave's.

The wire hanger muffler sling worked all the way to Dave's and back home again! My dad was so proud.

Not the actual car, but similar.