We weren't angels

When I was months within my 5th birthday we made a move from Denver down to Mancos, Colorado where I spent my youth. We Dean boys would start our reputation of being energetic and unsupervised. Without a job at the time, Dad and the family had to take whatever shelter we could find so the first spot we lived in when we moved to Mancos was in the town theater. It was a theater for live productions and our living quarters were in the back dressing rooms and the areas behind the stage. It was very roomy, but sure wasn't what you would call a home. The theater itself was right in the middle of town and the part we lived in was on the second story. We made all parts of the theater our playground.Still, there was the whole world of Mancos outside the theater that was waiting for my brothers and me to explore. We had been forbidden to leave the confines of the theater, so we contented ourselves at opening up the windows that over looked the main street of Mancos. The entire theater was on the second level so we had as high a view point as anyone in the whole town when we looked out from these windows. We would spy on the different people as they walked up and down the street and gaze down on the tops of the passing cars. And then, of course, we had one of those amazing flashes of Dean boy ingenuity that seemed to pop into our heads at a moments notice. How much practice would it take to actually be able to spit on someone from the second level of a building? It was a question Dennis, my older brother by two years, and I wanted an immediate answer for so we commenced to start spitting at everyone who passed under the windows. At first we were spitting way too late as the little bombs of saliva would land on the sidewalk far behind any unsuspecting pedestrian. We used our common sense to time our spit so the saliva bombs and the walking human target arrived at a certain point at the same time. When we finally perfected our spit drop attack we found it necessary to perfect our retreating method. We never actually hit anyone as I recall, but there was one particular lady that almost got hit. The projectile of saliva must have missed her by inches, coming down right in front of her face, causing her to stop immediately in her tracks. Dennis and I had our heads well outside the window looking down on our little battlefield below us. Our lack of common sense about the law of gravity didn’t worry us any and the thought that the lady might look up and see us gawking out that 2nd story window didn’t occur to us either….until she started craning her head up skyward to see if there were any clouds in the sky!!! Our hearts started an immediate pounding and we pulled our heads back into the safety of the theater faster than I ever thought we could move. We sat there just inside the window for maybe 5 minutes to see if the lady would walk up the long flight of stairs into the theater and give us a verbal or physical lashing for our antics……she never arrived and we stopped our aerial assault on the townspeople of Mancos…..for a day or two.