{THE CALL THAT NEVER CAME} LJ Idol Week 33, in which there is a campaign super nova
I'm sure this will come as a great surprise to many of you, but I was a bit of a prankster in high school.
Okay, I'll wait a second while you recover from the shock.
We good? Awesome, let's continue. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I can get a bit...er...intense when sufficiently provoked (hey! I heard that), but generally speaking, I find practical jokery to be a fine art in which the elements of whimsy, creativity, and downright absurdity are combined in perfect measure. Vandalism, bodily harm, and hardcore criminal activity are cheap shots and therefore disqualifications from the show ring. Ridiculous immature humor can most definitely play a role, but it has to serve a higher purpose, because...well...any dick or turd can make jokes about dicks or turds. However, there is one situation where the crass factor works wonders, and that's when the butt (or butts) of the gag are a bunch of Srs Bznss Killjoys [TM] who take themselves and everything around them ENTIRELY too seriously. Take, for example, the student body of James Morton High School, a festering cesspool of every stereotypical spoiled Southern white kid you could possibly scrounge up. If you need a point of reference - King of the Hill was actually based on the town I grew up in. Yes, really. Football was the official religion, cheerleading was a close second, and there were 900+ kids in my graduating class alone. Our school song honestly should have been "Run through the Jungle."
So let's go back in time to my senior year, which would be the spring of 1999. I was a bit of an odd duck, but I'd moved past my timid nerd stage by this point and sort of gathered a ragtag group of fellow goofball freaks, geeks, and weirdos to pal around with. We were all good students, none of us ever got in any real trouble, but we took great amounts of joy in pranking the school. Usually we just did silly little thing that flew under the radar - advertised meetings for non-existent clubs (the Extraterrestrial Student Alliance actually got a few takers!) spoofed the student newspaper letter head to promote completely fake themed dress-up days (Hawaiian Luau Day was a moderate hit), and hung up some extremely satirical Crime Stoppers posters featuring a cartoon rat in a trench coat encouraging people to "rat out your friends and make a quick buck" after the real campus Crime Stoppers started offering rewards to people who snitched out classmates for stuff like bringing Tylenol on campus or having a pack of cigarettes in their car when it was parked in the student lot. All of this was vaguely amusing to us, but by the time Spring semester rolled around, we'd reached a consensus that dammit, it was our senior year, and we were gonna go out with a bang. We all had similar outlooks on the matter and shared the perspective that stuff like vandalizing the school and doing jerky things to teachers was, at best, incredibly boring and beneath our caliber of pranking, and there's really not a whole lot of satisfaction to be had in being a boring jerk. Besides, the axes we had to grind had nothing to do with the teachers in the school or the bricks that made up the building. Hell, we got along with our teachers better than we got along with most of our classmates, and the school was actually a pretty neat looking place! So what could our silly little group of screwballs do that could possibly be worthy of...
Like the Divine Lord Loki himself had spoken to us, a sign appeared. And I do mean a sign - specifically, a big blue one featuring a glammed out cheerleader fakey-fake smiling for the camera and announcing her candidacy for a Student Council position. Of COURSE. Student Council! Now, this is the motherstone of ridiculous popularity contests at just about any school, but at Morton High, it was just special. You take a bunch of snotty Texas princesses with too much free time and open access to Daddy's bank account, give them an election to compete in, and you end up with a veritable circus of professionally done glamour shots, custom printed flyers, and special order 20-foot banners, all plastering the hallway in gaudy, horrifying splendor. Student Council, goshdarnit, was Serious Business [TM]. And we had just found our mark.
But oh, what to do! Of course, there were the easy, obvious, jerky options: graffiti the pictures, steal the signs, white out the names, boring boring BORING. We were admittedly tempted to pencil some comments onto a few of 'em, but dammit, that's plain ol' vandalism and we were made for better things! So that evening, we went to the craft store, and decided that since we were young adults on the brink of graduating and joining the real world, the only viable and mature option was to abide by the old adage of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!" In other words, the obvious solution was to make our OWN signs for our OWN candidate. And since we were, however, still actually IN high school and had not yet graduated and crossed that painful threshold into adulthood, we felt perfectly justified in bestowing upon our fake-o candidate the regal, ceremonial name of Mike Hunt. (If you're not groaning and shaking your head already - say the name out loud to yourself and pay close attention to what it sounds like. Rollin your eyes yet? Excellent. Let's move on.) So we labored many hours over neon posterboard, tubes of glitter glue, rainbow sharpies, and a computer with Paint Shop Pro. The end result looked like Beavis and Butthead had joined forces with Punky Brewster to create the most immature and outlandishly colored campaign in the history of the world.
Many of our signs were shaped like male genitalia and sported such classy, subtle slogans as "Size does matter!" and "It's not hard! Vote for Mike!" This worked doubly well for the mammoth-size ones we fashioned from neon poster board. We also had various stacks of computer-generated flyers that ran the gamut from slightly loopy, to massively obscene, to complete non-sequiters. One of them was a faded tan color sporting the text "Mike Hunt: Wanted for indecent relations with your mom" in old Western style font. One had a picture of our school's mascot with a circle and a line through it and boldly declared "Mike Hunt supports pest control." When all was said and done, we had about 10 different varieties of printed fliers and probably about 30 hand made neon signs.
You might think that sneaking these things into the building was difficult, but the key was disguising them as opposed to hiding them. This stack of fliers? Oh yeah, that's just extra computer paper for my comp sci class! Oh, those poster boards? Yeah, it's a science project! Check out this Periodic Table on the top. Student lugging around an oversized art portfolio? Ohhh, she must be in senior level figure drawing! And so on.
Suffice it to say, our installation art caused quite a stir. On the first day, people were talking. On the second day, everyone was talking. On the third day, Crime Stoppers was talking and putting out an APB for whatever hoodlums were hanging "inappropriate and disruptive signs" in the hall. On the fourth day, a member of our group got caught with a poster. However, this particular member of our group happened to be a sweet looking Kuwaiti immigrant girl who was extremely quick on her feet. She immediately handed the poster over to the looming assistant principal, feigned her best deer-in-the-headlights look, and began wildly chattering in Arabic. The admin reached the conclusion that she was a clueless ESL kid who'd picked the poster up off the floor and sent her on her way.
On the fifth day, I got caught.
I was taking a note to the office as a favor for my English teacher, and since the halls were devoid of meddlesome witnesses, I decided it would be a prime opportunity to tack a few posters up. I carried them in my backpack at all times (hey, always be prepared!), so I pulled a few out and began plastering the hallway with them. Naturally, an Assistant Principal chose just this moment to round the corner. Shit. I was caught about as red-handed as can be, and I was already playing the inevitable phonecall home in my head and drafting my will when I realized all hope wasn't lost. Right across the hall from me was the science classroom where I volunteered as a lab assistant 5th period. The lights were off in the room, and since the teacher had a habit of leaving her door open, I figured maybe, just maybe, the fates would smile upon me, I could duck inside, stash the evidence in one of the lab cabinets, and come back for it later. I made my move. The door was unlocked. I darted inside. And I nearly crashed into the teacher. At first, she gave me an extremely confused look, I'm sure wondering why the heck I'd shown up for lab duty two hours early. Then she saw what I had in my arms. Her eyes got huge. Her jaw hung open. And I swear, I'd never heard a teacher laugh that hard in my life. "This is YOU?!" she asked, her voice filled with shock, amusement, and what almost sounded like awe. She didn't wait for me to respond. "Well come on! Give them to me." Wordlessly, I handed them over. She carefully, dare I say respectfully gathered the posters up, carried them into the back storage room, and gingerly laid them across her work table. Then she placed a few benign posters on top of them, illustrating Newton's laws and whatnot. "Do you need a pass?" she asked, still fighting the urge to laugh. I shook my head. She opened the door for me, grinned, and simply told me she'd see me fifth period.
My friends and I had an excellent (if disbelieving!) laugh over the incident at lunch, but the best part of all came when I got home. I was still a bit freaked out by my brush with death, and my mom picked up that something was wrong. She was actually worried about me, which wasn't good, so I figured I might as well spill the beans and hope for the best. I relayed the entire story, complete with various visual aids produced from the depths of my innocent looking Zelda backpack. My mom looked me straight the eye, laughed her ass off, and simply said, "If you get caught, I don't know you."
The next day at school, I walked the hall with my head held a bit higher, my backpack chock full of inappropriate neon fliers, and I feared no cheerleader, no administrator, and no phonecall home.
Okay, I'll wait a second while you recover from the shock.
We good? Awesome, let's continue. Now, I'll be the first to admit that I can get a bit...er...intense when sufficiently provoked (hey! I heard that), but generally speaking, I find practical jokery to be a fine art in which the elements of whimsy, creativity, and downright absurdity are combined in perfect measure. Vandalism, bodily harm, and hardcore criminal activity are cheap shots and therefore disqualifications from the show ring. Ridiculous immature humor can most definitely play a role, but it has to serve a higher purpose, because...well...any dick or turd can make jokes about dicks or turds. However, there is one situation where the crass factor works wonders, and that's when the butt (or butts) of the gag are a bunch of Srs Bznss Killjoys [TM] who take themselves and everything around them ENTIRELY too seriously. Take, for example, the student body of James Morton High School, a festering cesspool of every stereotypical spoiled Southern white kid you could possibly scrounge up. If you need a point of reference - King of the Hill was actually based on the town I grew up in. Yes, really. Football was the official religion, cheerleading was a close second, and there were 900+ kids in my graduating class alone. Our school song honestly should have been "Run through the Jungle."
So let's go back in time to my senior year, which would be the spring of 1999. I was a bit of an odd duck, but I'd moved past my timid nerd stage by this point and sort of gathered a ragtag group of fellow goofball freaks, geeks, and weirdos to pal around with. We were all good students, none of us ever got in any real trouble, but we took great amounts of joy in pranking the school. Usually we just did silly little thing that flew under the radar - advertised meetings for non-existent clubs (the Extraterrestrial Student Alliance actually got a few takers!) spoofed the student newspaper letter head to promote completely fake themed dress-up days (Hawaiian Luau Day was a moderate hit), and hung up some extremely satirical Crime Stoppers posters featuring a cartoon rat in a trench coat encouraging people to "rat out your friends and make a quick buck" after the real campus Crime Stoppers started offering rewards to people who snitched out classmates for stuff like bringing Tylenol on campus or having a pack of cigarettes in their car when it was parked in the student lot. All of this was vaguely amusing to us, but by the time Spring semester rolled around, we'd reached a consensus that dammit, it was our senior year, and we were gonna go out with a bang. We all had similar outlooks on the matter and shared the perspective that stuff like vandalizing the school and doing jerky things to teachers was, at best, incredibly boring and beneath our caliber of pranking, and there's really not a whole lot of satisfaction to be had in being a boring jerk. Besides, the axes we had to grind had nothing to do with the teachers in the school or the bricks that made up the building. Hell, we got along with our teachers better than we got along with most of our classmates, and the school was actually a pretty neat looking place! So what could our silly little group of screwballs do that could possibly be worthy of...
Like the Divine Lord Loki himself had spoken to us, a sign appeared. And I do mean a sign - specifically, a big blue one featuring a glammed out cheerleader fakey-fake smiling for the camera and announcing her candidacy for a Student Council position. Of COURSE. Student Council! Now, this is the motherstone of ridiculous popularity contests at just about any school, but at Morton High, it was just special. You take a bunch of snotty Texas princesses with too much free time and open access to Daddy's bank account, give them an election to compete in, and you end up with a veritable circus of professionally done glamour shots, custom printed flyers, and special order 20-foot banners, all plastering the hallway in gaudy, horrifying splendor. Student Council, goshdarnit, was Serious Business [TM]. And we had just found our mark.
But oh, what to do! Of course, there were the easy, obvious, jerky options: graffiti the pictures, steal the signs, white out the names, boring boring BORING. We were admittedly tempted to pencil some comments onto a few of 'em, but dammit, that's plain ol' vandalism and we were made for better things! So that evening, we went to the craft store, and decided that since we were young adults on the brink of graduating and joining the real world, the only viable and mature option was to abide by the old adage of "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!" In other words, the obvious solution was to make our OWN signs for our OWN candidate. And since we were, however, still actually IN high school and had not yet graduated and crossed that painful threshold into adulthood, we felt perfectly justified in bestowing upon our fake-o candidate the regal, ceremonial name of Mike Hunt. (If you're not groaning and shaking your head already - say the name out loud to yourself and pay close attention to what it sounds like. Rollin your eyes yet? Excellent. Let's move on.) So we labored many hours over neon posterboard, tubes of glitter glue, rainbow sharpies, and a computer with Paint Shop Pro. The end result looked like Beavis and Butthead had joined forces with Punky Brewster to create the most immature and outlandishly colored campaign in the history of the world.
Many of our signs were shaped like male genitalia and sported such classy, subtle slogans as "Size does matter!" and "It's not hard! Vote for Mike!" This worked doubly well for the mammoth-size ones we fashioned from neon poster board. We also had various stacks of computer-generated flyers that ran the gamut from slightly loopy, to massively obscene, to complete non-sequiters. One of them was a faded tan color sporting the text "Mike Hunt: Wanted for indecent relations with your mom" in old Western style font. One had a picture of our school's mascot with a circle and a line through it and boldly declared "Mike Hunt supports pest control." When all was said and done, we had about 10 different varieties of printed fliers and probably about 30 hand made neon signs.
You might think that sneaking these things into the building was difficult, but the key was disguising them as opposed to hiding them. This stack of fliers? Oh yeah, that's just extra computer paper for my comp sci class! Oh, those poster boards? Yeah, it's a science project! Check out this Periodic Table on the top. Student lugging around an oversized art portfolio? Ohhh, she must be in senior level figure drawing! And so on.
Suffice it to say, our installation art caused quite a stir. On the first day, people were talking. On the second day, everyone was talking. On the third day, Crime Stoppers was talking and putting out an APB for whatever hoodlums were hanging "inappropriate and disruptive signs" in the hall. On the fourth day, a member of our group got caught with a poster. However, this particular member of our group happened to be a sweet looking Kuwaiti immigrant girl who was extremely quick on her feet. She immediately handed the poster over to the looming assistant principal, feigned her best deer-in-the-headlights look, and began wildly chattering in Arabic. The admin reached the conclusion that she was a clueless ESL kid who'd picked the poster up off the floor and sent her on her way.
On the fifth day, I got caught.
I was taking a note to the office as a favor for my English teacher, and since the halls were devoid of meddlesome witnesses, I decided it would be a prime opportunity to tack a few posters up. I carried them in my backpack at all times (hey, always be prepared!), so I pulled a few out and began plastering the hallway with them. Naturally, an Assistant Principal chose just this moment to round the corner. Shit. I was caught about as red-handed as can be, and I was already playing the inevitable phonecall home in my head and drafting my will when I realized all hope wasn't lost. Right across the hall from me was the science classroom where I volunteered as a lab assistant 5th period. The lights were off in the room, and since the teacher had a habit of leaving her door open, I figured maybe, just maybe, the fates would smile upon me, I could duck inside, stash the evidence in one of the lab cabinets, and come back for it later. I made my move. The door was unlocked. I darted inside. And I nearly crashed into the teacher. At first, she gave me an extremely confused look, I'm sure wondering why the heck I'd shown up for lab duty two hours early. Then she saw what I had in my arms. Her eyes got huge. Her jaw hung open. And I swear, I'd never heard a teacher laugh that hard in my life. "This is YOU?!" she asked, her voice filled with shock, amusement, and what almost sounded like awe. She didn't wait for me to respond. "Well come on! Give them to me." Wordlessly, I handed them over. She carefully, dare I say respectfully gathered the posters up, carried them into the back storage room, and gingerly laid them across her work table. Then she placed a few benign posters on top of them, illustrating Newton's laws and whatnot. "Do you need a pass?" she asked, still fighting the urge to laugh. I shook my head. She opened the door for me, grinned, and simply told me she'd see me fifth period.
My friends and I had an excellent (if disbelieving!) laugh over the incident at lunch, but the best part of all came when I got home. I was still a bit freaked out by my brush with death, and my mom picked up that something was wrong. She was actually worried about me, which wasn't good, so I figured I might as well spill the beans and hope for the best. I relayed the entire story, complete with various visual aids produced from the depths of my innocent looking Zelda backpack. My mom looked me straight the eye, laughed her ass off, and simply said, "If you get caught, I don't know you."
The next day at school, I walked the hall with my head held a bit higher, my backpack chock full of inappropriate neon fliers, and I feared no cheerleader, no administrator, and no phonecall home.