About The Crispy Critters

For a high school with a student population of about fifty, there sure were a lot of cliques. I was never a cool kid or an insider, until I decided to form my own supergroup: The Crispy Critters. Actually, it wasn't really an act of will, and I never considered myself the leader of the group. This is just the way I like to tell the story these days.

There were four Critters: me, Anthony Sloan, David Bezanson, and Steve "Grog" Burns. I'd known Anthony since 7th grade, Steve since 9th grade, and Dave since 10th. Our friendship as a foursome gelled sometime during 11th grade, and by our senior year, we were officially The Crispy Critters. I forget how the name came to be. I think it was because there was this skateboard dude at the school who used the slang word "Crispy!" a lot. "Crispy!" seemed to denote either something awesome or something heinous, depending. If you wiped out on your board, that was crispy. If you aced a test, that was also crispy. We picked up this slang to mock it, and then we ended up using it as a collective name. Around the same time, a food company released Crispy Critters cereal, which pretty much made it official.

---jrw 09-25-03