It's a date which conjures tangible angst for many. On the Ides of April, we're forced to correspond with the Internal Revenue Service, an entity about as fun to contact as my great aunt to whom I was forced to send a thank you note for some Amway acne cream she sent me for my birthday.
On a personal note, tax day formerly personified the glimmering apex of a season working in the trenches as a young, mulleted accountant. And make no mistake—after twelve weeks of toiling nights and weekends to assure our clients' minimal tithing to the exchequer, we partied like the Secret Service.
With one exception: unlike the President's elite personal guard, we'd already negotiated a sliding fee arrangement acceptable to both us and our sultry Colombian prostitutes, and hence no media fallout ensued.
I don't know, the whole a la carte prostitute business doesn't seem like it should be that complicated, especially for anyone who's mastered Arby's drive-through menu.
Aside from the annual American tax festival, several other notable events have occurred on the fifteenth of April in the annals of history.
The RMS Titanic sank exactly one hundred years ago, on April 15, 1912. Due to its centennial status, it's been top of our minds of late, and unfortunately, Paramount Pictures has opted to dredge up that old James Cameron whinefest in three-dee, starring Leo and Kate.
Horrific factual events aside, it's too bad songs aren't capable of drowning. Call me callous, but I wouldn't have been at all traumatized to witness "My Heart Will Go On" snapping in half and sinking into the frozen murk.
After having been shot by John Wilkes Booth while attending Our American Cousin at Washington's Ford's Theatre, Abraham Lincoln died on this date in 1865. I've always wondered, however, subsequent to protecting the President for the entire duration of the Civil War, how could Lincoln's security detail have allowed an assassin to simply stroll up and shoot the President from point blank range.
Oh, right.
In another powerful moment in history, on April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to play in the major leagues in his debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Having served in World War II and playing a brief stint in the Negro League, Robinson was recruited by Dodger president Branch Rickey, who'd been determined to end the unwritten rule of segregation in Major League Baseball.
Even though Robinson was often forced to eat his meals and sleep on the team bus while his white cohorts enjoyed the comforts of restaurants and hotels, he still enjoyed the freedoms to endure racial harassment at every stop while contributing his athletic talents to the financial betterment of his franchise.
Talk about a win-win.
Pol Pot, Cambodian leader of the Khmer Rouge who personally decimated his nation's population by twenty-one percent, died on April 15, 1998. The man committed such atrocities that all I'd like to say is his demise happened far too late and I sincerely hope Pol Pot and Adolph Hitler are engaged in an eternal shank dance in Hell over who gets Ted Bundy as his bunk buddy this week.
April fifteenth is convincingly a date of dubious repute. It's neighbor the fourteenth doesn't pack nearly the punch; Wait, I take that back; it's the day Barbara Streisand tied Kathryn Hepburn for the Best Actress Oscar in 1969. Talk about riveting television.
As for the other side of the bookends, on April 16, 1972, Apollo 16 departed for the moon. Not a huge deal, though. By then, the lunar surface was already dotted with a Sleep Country USA and three Starbucks.
Obviously, the fifteenth of April is this month's big dog, capable of chasing those lesser mutts off the stoop. Now stop reading this and finish those taxes.
