The Festival of Laughter/ Swedish Basketball

Reading about how a whole city conspired together to play a trick on a guy, I was reminded of something I did in 7th grade. My mom had taught me the day before a game called Swedish Basketball. What you did was take a quarter and a pencil and a piece of paper. Using the quarter, you would trace three dark circles in random places on the paper and then mark each circle with a number of points. You'd place the paper on a table, and sitting up straight in a chair, you'd roll the quarter off your nose without bending your head and try to get it to land on one of those circles; but when a person rolled the quarter down their nose, (if he did it right) he would leave a long black line from the top of the forehead down the to the tip of the nose. Anyway, my best friend and I decided to have some fun with our friends. One at a time, we'd pull a girl aside and say, "Hey, have you ever played Swedish Basketball?" We'd make it sound really awesome and we'd let her roll the quarter again and again until we couldn't hold laughing anymore and she figured it out. This may sound really mean, and we were called "meanies" often, but the part that made me laugh the hardest is how each girl reacted in the same way. First, she'd be red in the face, angry at us, calling us names and whatnot. But once we said, "Let's go do it to someone else," her attitude would change in a split second. With a giant smile on her face, she'd giggle and say, "Oh yeah, definitely." There was no malice in her expression, and none of us really meant to hurt anybody's feelings. In fact, we only played this "game" with the friends we hung out with daily and with the boys we liked. It wasn't about humiliation or being mean. We were just out to have a good time. I did feel a little bad when this boy named Jason thought we were laughing because he couldn't get the quarter in the circle, and he ended up trying so many times, he had a marker thick (and dark) line down his forehead. He didn't realize it was there for at least a half an hour. He was really goodnatured about it though, and he laughed about it a lot.