Party Out of Bounds by Rodger Lyle Brown

Author:Rodger Lyle Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 1991-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The girls in the subbasement were explosive, waiting for ignition. Kathleen O’Brien, who would later make the crucial introductions that would lead to the formation of R.E.M., grew pot on her bottom bunk after her roommate dropped out; her botany teacher gave her the seeds for an experiment in phototropism. Sandi and Kathy were taking the highly touted course in the history department on Maoism, and while they struggled in the hallway with their research papers, Carol Levy, who feared a recurrence of the Holocaust in the rising conservative trend then coming up in America (Reagan would be elected in two years) set a backdrop by scrawling in Magic Marker in the stairwell a misquoted line from the Rolling Stones, “Now is the Time for Violent Revolution.”

The girls knocked out ceiling panels just to see the dust fly. They broke windows to hear the glass shatter. To offend any hapless and genteel innocent who came by, they posted a sign on their bathroom door: “Where Women Pee and Bathe.” Mark Cline, who would form the band Love Tractor, lived on the fourth floor of Reed, and when he came down to the subbasement, he and the girls pasted pornography on the walls and sat smoking cigarettes, carving genitalia into Barbie dolls. The girls were impressed with Mark because he knew how to play “Rock Lobster” on the guitar and they thought that was just so cool. They played The B-52’s single twenty times in a night.

None of them had ever seen The B-52’s before, so when the band played at Memorial Hall that November 1978, everybody went.

Also that year, as The B-52’s set a trend for lunacy in Athens, a student inspired by The Unknown Comic, a semi-cult figure of the late seventies from Chuck Barris’ original Gong Show, put a bag over his head and ran for president of the student government at UGA. It was a sign of the times: a symptom of the craziness. He called himself The Unknown Candidate. He won. In January 1979, Esquire magazine included him in their annual Dubious Achievement Awards.

During the student government elections of 1979, the year after The Unknown Candidate was elected, a student ran for president on the Abolitionist ticket. He claimed student government was a charade, a resume-packing romp for overachievers. He promised to abolish student government if elected.

And elected he was. And he kept his promise. And the University of Georgia was without student government for nearly ten years after that. Following the election of 1979 and the abolition of student government, the successful candidate shifted the energies of his political machine to an even more important campaign, one that everybody could support: to get beer sold on campus.

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