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Our Story

It all began on the second day of the 2002 Spring semester...

No, earlier than that.

We were three friends, just three innocent college students wanting to take a class together. We planned it the semester before, sprawled on a bedroom floor watching Saturday Night Live and looking at the new university class schedule.

"Here," someone said, "this looks good: a freshman level course called 'Print Media in Society.'"

It was about books, magazines, newspapers and stuff like that. We could all use it for an elective and it fit into our schedules, so we all signed up.

We were such fools.

First of all, it was an 8:00am class, twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We were hesitant to schedule a class so early, but we were fairly certain of our ability to attend, at least most of the time. Besides, we agreed, there aren't any more parking spaces left after 8:30 anyway.

So, back to the second day of the 2002 Spring semester. We were all there on time and picked seats together in the middle of the room. The professor came in, handed out the syllabus, and started talking. He talked and talked. Throughout the entire semester, he talked. There was no class discussion. We quickly lost interest in what he was talking about when it became apparent that his lecture and his test came almost verbatim from the textbook. Laurie was the only one who had gotten the book, so she sat between Justin and Michael and they all looked at it together during class.

Note-taking became optional. There wasn't any point in it. In fact, the only things that we usually wrote down were the things the professor said that could be taken as sexual innuendo, e.g. "I picked up some fruits at the store," and "two inches is too short and twenty inches is too long, but six inches is an average size." We forgot what he was actually talking about when he said that last comment, but it wasn't what you would think.

The class was hellishly boring. However, we didn't dare to skip because absences were punished with a lesser grade, and tests were only announced one day in advance. We became very resentful of having to attend, especially when the time came to do a special project where we planned the mayoral campaign of our local town. We had to form a group of six students, pick a candidate, prepare promotional materials, and do a presentation on the last day of class.

No, it didn't have much to do with Print Media. The project belonged in a public relations class. The presentation day was horrible. Groups trashed the other groups' candidates and insulted their presentations as if it really mattered. We hated it.

When we got back our promotional materials, we all agreed that we never wanted to see the stuff again.

That's when the idea came to us -- we should just have ourselves a little barbecue.

So, one afternoon at the end of finals week, we gathered in Laurie's backyard, fired up the grill, and burned every last bit of paraphernalia from the class. We burned the textbook, our notes (what little there were), and all of the campaign materials including a poster, tshirt, visor, bumper stickers, buttons, etcetera. We even stole some of the other groups' stuff and burnt that too.

And when we were done, we roasted hotdogs and marshmallows over the charred remnants of our terrible class.

They tasted pretty darned good.

Our ceremony was photographed by Laurie's mom, and the pictures she took are available here on our web page.

Enjoy, because we sure did.