Mick & Bec

My old pal, Carol (aka Mick), gave me the most wonderful birthday gift this year! Long, long ago, she and I wrote an article or two for the school newspaper, and Carol sent me a folder full of clippings! We even wrote a little comedy piece together we called “Mick & Bec”, and since we were on the newspaper staff, we made it a regular feature. I loved writing for the paper and really loved going to the city paper to lay it out and watch it print. We had a lot of laughs on those late night journalism sessions and trips! But my favorite part of it all was writing Mick & Bec. We were goofy kids and fancied ourselves SNL players or commercial actors. I haven’t changed much in that respect ... always willing to do just about anything for a laugh!
I will resist the urge to do some editing 25 years after the fact and share some of our stuff with you now:

Purple and Gold
Watertown High School
Watertown SD 57201
November 4, 1983

Mic and Bec discuss:
Do ads really affect our lives?
By Becca Harvey and Carol McKee
WARNING: THIS COLUMN WILL SURELY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH.
Do you ever wonder why the Mick & Bec column is so great? It’s because we eat right, exercise, and take Geritol every day.
One of these girls is Mick, and the other is Bec, can you tell by looking at their hands? Speaking of dish soap, as if everyone is going to flock over to your house just to look at themselves in your dishes.
Have you ever noticed how every romantic situation has to do with coffee lately? Imagine you’re watching the sun set on beautiful Lake Kampeska with Mr. Right (or Mr. Close-Enough), obviously caffeine-free coffee is the last thing on your mind right now!
Can you believe these toothpaste commercials? Whoooooo cares if your toothpaste is topless or not? Personally, we wouldn’t want the Crest team waging war against the Cavity Creeps inside our mouths. We’d gargle before bed and hear Taps.
Next time we go to the grocery store, Mr.Whipple will probably bomb us with Charmin. We’ll end up suffering flashcube blindness from Michael Landon being The Happy Photographer. We could be innocently rolling our shopping carts down the aisle and some character will scream, “Midasize it!” while some confident soul will probably go around flaunting his armpits if he’s Sure. The bagboy may not even help us because we accidentally scratched our scalps. But, when it’s all said and done, Cathy Rigby will tell us it’s all perfectly natural, even though we don’t normally go around chatting about it.



Watertown High School has some strange traditions, as do all high schools, I’m sure. One such tradition is the Tuckabatchie (TUCKS) Club. TUCKS is an organization for junior and senior girls. Its purpose is to recognize academic excellence and provide service for our school and community. To be a member of TUCKS, juniors must have a GPA of 3.25 and seniors a 3.0. I don’t honestly remember the specifics, but the club involves some bizarre initiation process with the senior girls hazing the junior girls (babies), forcing them to run all over town, dressed absurdly, not even knowing who their torturers were. All of this leads to a formal dance where each Tucks girl invites a boy of her choosing to be her escort.
Additionally, I will be honest, I had forgotten about James Watt and was horrified at the last sentence of this article. I had to get on Wikipedia to put my mind at ease and realize that Carol and I were actually very timely with our comments and pretty funny, too, if I do say so myself!

Purple and Gold
Watertown high School
Watertown SD 5721
September 30, 1983

Mick and Bec discuss:
Tuck trials - is the guy worth it all?
By Carol McKee and Becca Harvey
WARNING: THIS COLUMN MAY BE HAZARDOUS TO YOUR HEALTH.
Read a Mick and Bec column. They’re not like the columns you read at home, but we think they’re the best columns around. We use real humor in our columns. Some writers use imitation humor. You see, we’re determined to be the best commercial writers in the business. And when you try a Mick and Bec column, we think you’ll agree ... that perhaps we are ...
(Sidebar: That bit was actually my favorite commercial at the time for Old Home Bakery's fried pies.)
Can we talk here? As you all have noticed, Tucks arrived last week. You could tell by simply glancing down the halls at all the ridiculously dolled-up lockers. Evidently, high school girls like the immature look in lockers this season.
Along with having lipstick written all over their faces at the initiation picnic, baby sisters also had the opportunity to twist their hair into a million little pigtails. And, of course, they had the joy of drinking juice out of baby bottles and choking down slimy baby food.
Apparently, these girls enjoy going through agony, only to have the added trauma of asking Mr. Dream Man to the Tucks dance. That is where the most interesting of Tuck rites occurs.
First of all, the new Tuck member must make her plan-of-attack. Some girls use the direct approach. They go parading over to his locker, knocking down several innocent bystanders along the way. When she finally reaches her destination, she bombards him with questions about the dance.
For the more subtle type of chick, there is the beat-around-the-bush approach. This girl will try anything from spying at her man from behind corners, walls, posts, etc. to following him down the hall at a respectable distance. If she ever does summon the courage to ask Joe Wonderful to the dance, would this character even go with her after all that?
Next there is the phone call method. The advantage to this approach is not having to ask him face to face - which poses a number of problems.
For instance, what if a big wad of spit comes darting out of her mouth while she’s trying to ask him to the dance? Or what if her dry, parched lips somehow stick together? Or worse yet, what if she is experiencing technical difficulties with her nose, and there are no Kleenex available?
If she overcomes all of these hazards, it’s time for his big decision. He could:
A) Be delighted.
B) Say, “I don’t believe I know you.”
C) Godforbid, say “No”.
D) None of the above.
E) All of the above.
If the answer is anything but A), it’s fairly simple, she merely moves on to her alternate choice. If the second choice says says no, then she will ask a third guy and so on ... and so on ... and so on ...
If all else fails, and that woman is a black, a Jew, or a cripple, she could always ask James Watt.