Tuesday, October 04, 2005

Memories of inadvertant collegiate troublemaking

So I was reminiscing the other day with a college professor friend from undergrad (a very amusing man himself, check him out here) and I mentioned the time a poster I had put up for a theatre group I was in (everyone's favorite No Shame Theatre) which was semi-controversial. I don't exactly remember what it was (I made a ton of posters for No Shame) but I'm pretty sure it was the one in which I had a poorly drawn stick-figure Jesus on the cross with a very bloddy face and the caption read "No Shame: Christ it's good!" which I thought was pretty clever.

Anyway, somehow a state representative who happened to be on campus happened to see it, and set up a metting with the dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts (whom he mistakenly thought had somehting to do with No Shame) and himself and several other senators demanding that the person responsible for this (me) be removed from the school and severley disciplined.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I don't seek out trouble. It just finds me.

Anyway, then Doug reminded me of an incident I'd largely forgotten. A long time ago, the improv troupe I was in was taking publicity photos. We took one of those "for fun" photos (you know, where the camera person says "Oh, gee, you're all such a fun group. Why don't you take a funny picture?" as if it's an extremely novel concept to photograph people in humorous poses)and seeing as I figured it would never see the light of day, I whipped out the ol' finger penis. The finger penis, of course, is when one puts their hand down their pants and puts their index finger through the fly of their pants so it looks like their penis is sticking out.

How was I supposed to know that was the picture the school newspaper would use to accompany an article about the troupe?

Well, again, the shit hit the fan, the newspaper got in trouble, the director got in trouble, the theater manager got in trouble, and sevreal others. I, of course, did not, but I prefer to see myself as more of a victim in this case anyway.

Incidentally, the picture is still up on the newspaper's website for some reason. Check out my finger penis.


Humorous post-script: Awhile back, I was at the home of one of the other members of the troupe, and he had an article cut out of the paper where they used the same picture again. However, this time, the headshots of folks were cut out and put into their own little squares to make it look like they were pictures taken individually. So in the picture of the girl in front of me in the group photo, you could just see her face and a weird dangling object in front of it.

And as always, "I'm not making this up!™"

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