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February 07, 2006
Crusty Punks and the Age of Consent pt 2
My roommate was a design major, so he didn't just make a flyer announcing our first meeting - he designed it. And, since it was designed by a design major the flyer immediately brought the readers attention to the most important thing about our new student organization's first meeting -- the FREE PIZZA!
We put "free pizza" in huge letters on our flyer with the hopes that it would bring more of the fat, lazy students to our meeting. We thought they were the type of people most likely never to come back to our meetings, which was what we wanted. We only wanted their names and other information so we could claim them as members.
See, we also put "new student organization" on the flyer, so we'd automatically get the "joiner" students. You know, the ones that join every single group and try to get themselves voted in as president so they can put it down on their job applications. We were going to get their names too, but knew they'd never some back either when they found out we really weren't an officially recognized student organization.
That was a risky move, because the joiners might actually object to us calling them members. It was possible they'd find out we were using their names too, with them being in every single organization. The pizza eating kids were a safer bet for us.
So, we had our first meeting. As we expected, we got a bunch of joiners. They left when they found out we weren't a real student organization and they wouldn't be able to count their membership in any grad school application.
We got the pizza eaters too. They left when the pizza was gone.
That left just the few of us that organized the meeting and a couple new people actually interested in what we were doing. "Yeah, man. I'm in a two-man punk band, can I play?"
"OK. As long as you're not like Local H"
"No. We play really heavy shit. but we've never gotten paid before. Will we get paid?"
"Sure. ... Wait. Do we want to pay him? We have to take a vote. ... OK, we'll pay you."
We also had a couple other orders of business to take care of. We had already determined our moves, but voting on them after we'd chased away the people that wouldn't vote our way gave our moves much more legitimacy.
We voted to count everyone who ever came to a meeting as a member. We voted to count everyone we could think of that wouldn't care if we counted them as a member as a member. We voted to give everyone at the meeting an official sounding position, like Supreme Dictator, Führer, Minister of Mis-Information, etc. If I remember correctly we also had an apptly titled "Chief Embezzling Officer" position.
Then we went to faculty member designated to oversee student activities and organizations -- the student that couldn't stand to leave school after graduating and begged for a position at the school. We argued that we had a huge membership roster, we had very important sounding positions, we had done some voting and we wanted to be a student organization.
He told us that the student council had to vote to accept our charter.
"Our charter?"
"Your charter. The document that defines your group."
We got working on one of those. We wrote down our important sounding positions, how we determined our membership and crafted a convoluted, and for all practical purposes impossible, way to remove us from our important sounding positions. Then we submitted it to the student organizations guy.
"This looks good. Now we have to take you to a vote."
The next week we went to the student council meeting. All the joiners were there. All the frat boys were there too. It turns out all the frats were student organizations too.
Knowing the joiners and the frat boys might be hostile to a student organization of punks trying to get money for concerts none of them would ever attend we took a quick vote. "How badly do you think we can lie? I say we go all out."
"What do you mean. Like tell them we're going to get Creed here or something?"
"Yeah. Except, maybe not as big. Like, um, Veruca Salt or something. They all know them, right?"
"Yeah, probably. They're from Chicago, too. That's a good one. And 'dance music' we can say that. It's pretty open-ended."
Things looked like they were going pretty well until a frat boy that organized the Thursday night cover-band series at the bar on campus spoke up. "We already have something like this. Every Thursday night we have bands at 'the Bog' why don't you guys just go to 'the Bog' on Thursday?"
One of the angstier members of our group, the Emperor, perhaps, stood up and shouted back, "Yeah, but we're going to have original bands."
We all urged him to sit down, to give it up. The room was full of frat boys that loved cover bands, after all. I remembered going to see a ska band that must have been mistaken booked at the Bog a couple months back. The crowd heckled them and drunkenly demanded they go back to "Canada, or where ever this crap is from."
The frat boy was looking for a fight, however. "The bands we have are original. Last week we had an oldies cover band. Tomorrow night we have a classic rock band. They play Zepplin, GnR and stuff like that. Every week its something new."
"All we want to do is enhance the social life here on campus. We want to give people something to do on every night of the week; to make this campus a little more fun. You can't be against that, can you?" I answered back in an attempt to end debate. After all, what frat wants to be known as the house that hates fun?
Our charter came to a vote. About half the room voted to approve us. The Bog guy and his friend sitting next to him voted against us. the rest of the room kept on talking.
We started a student organization. The money was going to start pouring in. We could feel it.
Posted by calculatoronfire at February 7, 2006 02:53 PM
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