In high school, I found myself needing more cash than I could readily scare up with other means available to me. Which meant I needed a job, and the one readily available to me was in one of the two local supermarkets. I use that term advisedly - each was about 4000 sq ft, with only two checkout lines. Big enough, but not “super” by any stretch of the word except as compared to the Pure Ice, which was just a shack…

Anyway, I was working there and saw this woman, who was a known shoplifter, come into the store. I let the manager know and he had someone follow her around as usual.

Apparently, she’d up’d her game since the last time she was in, and about ten minutes later, there was a giant crash, and when I went to check, the baby food display had been knocked over and several hundred of those horrible little glass bottles of Gerber baby food were rolling around the floor, many of which had shattered.

I ran to get supplies to cordon off the area and start cleanup, and as I came out of the back I saw this woman waddling towards the door. Setting the picture a little more clearly, she was seriously overweight, so “sprightly” wasn’t exactly an accurate descriptor on the best day, but she’d moved from that slightly pained gait of the chronically obese to something qualitatively different.

I kept an eye on her as I turned to the giant mess, and as I turned back once I’d dropped off the supplies, heard a wet heavy “schlump thunk” sound.

Looking at her, I saw a very large frozen turkey between her feet, wrapped in her panties.

As I headed toward her, she stepped out of her panties and started moving much faster towards the door, and once out the door jumped into a running car. Alas, the driver managed to back out hitting the car of an arriving customer, and stalled. The manager got up in the driver’s face preventing any further attempts at leaving.

When the sheriff arrived, the story came out. She’d used the diversion to slip a frozen turkey up her loose-fitting flowing dress into her underwear, whereupon she cradled it like she would a very late term pregnancy and made her way to the door. She hadn’t counted on it being increasingly slippery as it thawed from the heat, and she lost control - and with it, her underwear.

The sheriff took her and her sons in for mischief and vandalism for the baby food they destroyed, and the panty-clad turkey as evidence.

Pretty sure that’s got to be right on up there on the weird scale, even for a small town in Texas.