Do You Know the Muffin Man?

...because if you do, some people at Lake Highlands High School would probably like to talk to you.

I'm not sure how much attention this story has gotten outside of Dallas/Ft. Worth, but it's been a really weird week for the school in the neighboring Richardson district. On Tuesday, 18 school employees got sick from eating tainted muffins that had been brought to the teachers' lounge, allegedly by a young man who said they'd been made for an Eagle Scout project. It turns out that the muffins were laced with marijuana and possibly Benadryl, and the school's 86-year-old volunteer receptionist, "Miss Rita" Greenfield, was knocked particularly loopy by the mixture, dissolving into giggles on several occasions. (She was the only staffer who had to be held overnight at the hospital, but she's fine; in fact, she was planning on returning to work either today or Monday. And if it seems weird to think about someone's grandmother being high on weed, a friend of mine to whom I told this story said that he actually knows someone whose grandmother gets high on weed on a regular basis. Yikes.)

After another way-too-eventful day on Wednesday, when the power went out in the morning, forcing the cancellation of classes for the day, things got back to normal yesterday. Today was probably pretty interesting as well, as students were scheduled to view the surveillance tape of the muffin-bringer entering the building, in the hopes that someone would recognize him. This may have seemed at first like some sort of senior prank, but product-tampering is serious business, and the FBI has gotten involved.

I also thought about this incident today when one of my schools' band parents' group threw a cookout for the top band during lunch. How long will it be before things like the muffin incident end up tightening the reins on end-of-the-year festivities like that? Will every band parent behind the grill have to have a food handlers' license? (After all, it's been proposed in Dallas that people who feed the homeless might have to do just that.) I'm hoping that a few bad apples like the muffin man don't spoil everyone else's fun.

UPDATE: A week later, everyone knows the muffin man (scroll down for story).

Another chapter in the story: Happy Chapter Day to my fraternity chapter, Gamma Theta of Phi Mu Alpha at UNT. The local brotherhood is 66 years old today, and we've had many notable musicians pass through our portals, such as Herb Ellis, Frank Mantooth, Bob Dorough (of "Schoolhouse Rock" fame), Jimmy Giuffre (composer of "Four Brothers") and Gene Hall (the first lab band director at what was then called North Texas State Teachers College)--and those are just the jazz guys. To quote a popular fraternity song, may our banner "float for aye."

Fry has a fan in Floyd: Speaking of Denton, there was a good column in the paper today from writer Jacquielynn Floyd about the efforts to save Fry Street. While many people concede that there's nothing the local government can do to stop the developer, she notes that he could still be sweet-talked into being a hero...and if nothing else, embarking on an possibly-quixotic quest like this could help mold today's students into the preservationists of the future.