It was a hot summer afternoon, and Bruce and I listened with little interest as Shirley Temple warbled the song on a channel 2 rerun.

(Uh, we weren't really watching a Shirley Temple rerun, mind you ... it was just something that had come on after Captain Satellite ended and before professional wrestling started.)

We were watching TV and having our typical summertime conversation ("Whutta you wanna do?" "I dunno ... whutta you wanna do?") when Shirley started singing, "Lemonade stands, everywhere ... Cracker Jack bands, fill the air."

"Hey!" Bruce blurted. "That's it!"

"What's it?" I asked cautiously ... after all, we were a couple of guys watching a Shirley Temple flick.

"I've got a great idea," he said.

Yeah, like Bruce ever had a great idea.

OK, so maybe he did invent "neat falls" (a game where one of us stood on one end of the lawn with a toy gun and the other guy ran from the other end until he got shot, then the guy who, in the opinion of the judges—that would be Bruce and I—died the coolest, was the winner ... it usually ended in a tie).

But that would just about be the only good idea he would have as a kid. You see, I was the idea man. Still, I figured I'd humor him.

"OK, Mr. Wizard, what's your great idea."

"Let's open a lemonade stand."

I hated to admit it, but next to neat falls, that might have been his best idea ever. So I had to agree.

"Hey, we could make a ton of money!" I said, taking over as though it had been my idea all along. "I think we've got a few packs of Kool-Aid ... go home and see if your mom has any lemonade.

"And check your cookie jar ... we could probably sell a few Oreos, too." (Even at such a young age I could recognize the importance of diversifying to reach a broader market.)

We met in his kitchen and filled every pitcher his mother owned with some sort of flavored drink, taste-testing each one for quality control (I won't even mention that we used the same spoon for each taste test, for fear that some of our former customers may be listening).

We loaded his wagon with paper cups, a plate-full of cookies, my toy cash register filled with all the change out of our piggy banks and gallons of cold drinks. And we headed down to the busiest corner of our neighborhood to set up business.

Now why we ever thought that we could become successful business partners I'll never know. After all, there was that mistletoe incident.

It was just that previous December. We had discovered a load of mistletoe growing in one of the trees in the canyon across the street from my house. We figured if we could get our hands on that stuff, we could make a bundle selling it door-to-door in time for Christmas. Trouble was, we were too little to climb the tree.

So we were forced to take in a couple of partners—our creepy older brothers. It was a partnership of necessity ... they were bigger so they could climb the tree, and we were cuter so we were better salesmen.

Anyway, it was a disaster. We hardly sold anything, and at that, Bruce figured he deserved a bigger piece of the profits because we were using his wagon. And our brothers got poison oak so bad that they were scratching until New Year's Eve.

Despite that failed business effort, we tried again that summer with the lemonade stand.

We set up on the busy corner and waited, and waited ... and waited. There weren't many cars, and the few that went by never even slowed down.

"I can't understand it," I said, chomping an Oreo and gulping a little grape Kool-Aid straight out of one of the pitchers. "You'd think there'd be more cars out at 11 o'clock on a Thursday morning." (What's a kid know about the 9-to-5 workday?)

The July day grew hotter and hotter, and the melting ice was diluting our once cool, refreshing drinks. But we were careful to maintain our high standards, scooping out any pesky flies with our hands if they happened the dive bomb into a pitcher.

We actually served a few customers that hot July day. We ended up making a buck seventy-five (though we weren't exactly sure how much of that was profit from our 5-cent a cup sales effort and how much had been capital from our piggy banks). I walked off with a cool 75 cents, and Bruce made a dollar (after all, it was his wagon).

We spent three and half hours baking in the hot sun to earn that $1.75, and we agreed ... there had to be a better way to make a living. So we dissolved our partnership that day and got back to doing what we did best.

"Whutta you wanna do?"

"I dunno ... whutta you wanna do?"

Want to talk? Call me at 408.354.3110, ext. 31, or drop me a note at dsparrer@svcn.com.