Times Missing Letters Story: The Dirty Version

Ah, the Times' readers are having fun with the misplaced-letters theme. They write in response to a story about the Elmhurst Hospital sign in which letters were blacked out to spell Im hurt. The paper reproduces some of their fond memories ("'All Dogs Go to Heaven' became 'All Dogs Go to Heave'"), titillating us with a reference to "more than half of them" that "were, well, inappropriate for a family newspaper." We are under no such compunction, and will tell you below the fold what Jerry Smith and David Piper did when we were at school with them.

They lived in an apartment across the street from an old movie house with used plastic slip-in letters on its marquee. Jerry and David got a ladder one fine night and, with a little creative mangling of the plastic, changed the name of the current feature, SLAP SHOT, to SLOP SHIT. But they didn't leave it at that. As fate would have it, there was a pay phone near the theater entrance, and the boys called it throughout the next morning, trying to get people to pick up the phone so they could ask them what was playing at the theater. A few did. One of them said, "I don't know if I should say. It's kinda dirty." But one woman caught on and, in righteous indignation, pointed and yelled into the phone, "I see you up there! I see you! It's Slop Shit, motherfuckers! Slop Shit!"

Oh, what larks.