I'm HUGE in the St. Petersburg (High School) Times

I received this e-mail today:

"Hello, I edit a newspaper for high school students published by the St. Petersburg Times. We are on deadline for our last issue before winter break and needed a little holiday fun, so I found your site and Ed Attanasio's tips for fledgling santas....below is the little item I have written that excerpts his piece and credits your Web site....To make sure I don't get any lumps of coal I wanted to make sure the excerpt is okay by you and that I am crediting your site correctly.
Thanks for your prompt reply...Gretchen Letterman"

I wrote back to give the school the okay to run my article. I made some dumb remark like "I'd love to run a few of my projects past your father." It was a bad David Letterman joke, but I couldn't resist. Then, I got this e-mail back:

"Ha, Ed!

Thanks much. We ended up having room to use only ONE tip, the hilarious one about dealing with insulting teenagers (our audience, those insulting teenagers). Tomorrow the print link will be up at tb-two.com, go down a bit to print edition on the left side and look on page four. We had photo of a local santa but needed something funny to run with it. I think I googled santa and teenagers and voila, there it was, the perfect item. If you'd like a print copy, send me an address and I'll drop it in the mail.

No one's ever asked me if Dave were my DAD, that's making me laugh. I actually am his younger sister but if you could see the color of my hair, you would not have made that mistake. Fortunately I have a staff of 30 or so high- school age writers who keep me young enough to do this job (I hope).

Thanks again, happy holidays. Gretchen"

After some negoitations, my Santa article will be appear in their school paper. For the excerpt, I will recive six Pee Chee folders, two macaroni & cheese mystery entrees from the school cafeteria, three deflated dodge balls and a lifetime all-access hall pass. I do believe I made out like a bandito!

Now after this incident, I've thought about making St. Petersburg my adopted high school. I did a little research about them and their mascot is called the Green Devil (?!)

What is a Green Devil? Is that like an Evil Al Gore? Why is this demon green? Is he green with envy because the kids at Manatee High School (who beat them in the 5A football playoffs a few weeks ago) have a better mascot called the Hurricanes. I have never understand why teams are named after bad weather! Maybe Manatee knew that their mascot could never be a Manatee, because a Manatee is like a bloated seal and not very threatening.

At least they have a good football program at St. Peterburg High School. They went 10-2, and had a good year right up until they run head first into Manatee.

But, I'll need to clarify the whole Green Devils mascot thing before I get onboard with this school. A goofy mascot could be a deal breaker