The next phase of our election campaign was to produce a skit for an
assembly which would showcase our talents. Once again we were
required to write a script, some banal, vanilla, insipid, and
inoffensive tripe, and have it vetted before our performance. I
turned in a skit had it edited and sent back for a re-write and then
resubmitted and approved. We did use that version as a very general
outline of what my friends and I actually did. Some of the unscripted
jokes were purely physical and therefore legitimately unscripted. To
come onto the stage for my skit intro I walked out in a way that
clearly mocked the drill team – back strait, chest out, marching
while slapping my thighs. It got the ball rolling on what many people
was hoping was going to be a more irreverent skit than the others had
been. They were not disappointed. I told them I was the candidate who
warned them against going to porn and a friend of mine walked onto
stage handing out candy from a bucket in a manner very similar to
that of our vice principle during class breaks. He even wore a suit
and his hair style would even seem to evoke the man himself. We
didn't name him as such. When he came by he realized that he needed
to sneeze and pulled out a pillowcase sized handkerchief with “Vote
For Nate” written on it. I joked off script that he was doing an
awesome job tricking the students into liking him by handing out
candy and that our brainwashing plan was working to perfection. We
did some other campy things and jokes but the meat of it was already
passed with that little sequence of jokes. As I was exiting stage
right there was my good friend the vice principle who seemed to have
something on his mind. I gave walking right passed him a shot
pretending I didn't know he was there for me. He grabbed me by the
forearm and walked with me down the hall to his office with a firm
grip and a sense of purpose in his quick pace. He sat me in his
office obviously all a fluster while he tried to get a coherent
reprimand together as we both waited for the real principle to join
us. The real principle was a pretty mellow dude who seemed to like me
personally much more than my captor. The principle said that he was
concerned that we went off script and mocked a school official
because I was running for a position of great influence and they
didn't want to have to constantly deal with stuff like this. I agreed
but I pointed out that I had never mentioned the vice principle by
name and that I was joking in general about using subliminal messages
and candy to buy loyalty and to get votes. I said the joke was not meant
to target anyone in particular but rather to be a funny explicit
statement of what would normally be a covert tactic. I could see that
the vice principal, quite correctly, was skeptical of my explanation
and he asked that I be disqualified from the election. The principal
said he thought I had meant no ham by the jokes and that I would be
allowed to continue. That was quite generous of him but ultimately a
poor choice as this by no means was going to be our last conversation
on the topic of content control.
