Brian Wagner

[Alice Arabella Alestan]

I dunno if this technically should go here, but really as the people who would understand why this is hilarous are all cast...

I work at the school cafeteria now. So they put me on door friday for dinner, which basically means that I swipe hundreds of student IDs through a card swiper to make sure that they haven't used up all of their meals for the week. It's a rather boring and mindless job. But I was swiping, and a name caught my eye.. I did a double take, snagged the card back, read it, and couldn't help laughing.

That's right folks, we have a Brian Wagner at Ursinus College. Dear gods... that just completely made my day.

[Arthur Pendragon]

LOL! -
I, too, have met a Brian Wagner, back when I was in college.
I'm very glad that my story has been remembered, and brought you some delayed happiness. :-)

Greg
PS - If there is an outcry from the public, I will take the time to type the (long) story out and post it here.

[SwordSchoolGroupie]

Consider this an outcry.... I want to be in the know.

[Arthur Pendragon]

OK so the story goes like this. It's a long one...

Many years ago, when I was still in high school, Ken (one of my best friends) decided to run for president of the student council. Problem was, Ken was not very popular in high school. At all. Outside of our circle of about a dozen friends, he was either not thought of at all, or was actually disliked. Why? Well, he was smart, but he was arrogant too. We called Ken an a**hole magnet - if there was an a**hole in the area, Ken was on their crap list.

Anyway, you have to understand how elections in my high school were run back then. Elections were held in the Spring for all offices for the next school year. First, you had to get 50 names on a petition that said "Yeah, I might vote for this guy for this position." Then, your name went up on a huge sign in the cafeteria that listed everyone running for all the positions. On election day, they would knock out the first two classes of the day, and everyone running for a main office would give a little speech of "vote for me". The minor offices (like class representatives) just had the names of the candidates read off. After the candidates for each office spoke, the students could ask them questions. After that, we all got a ballot as we left the auditorium, and went to the cafeteria to vote and submit our ballots. That was it; no other campaigning, no other chances.

Well, Ken somehow managed to get the 50 names, and was officially a candidate for president. Up went his name on the big cafeteria sign. Being juniors, and knowing how the system worked, and being all pretty smart guys, the dozen of us who were all friends with each other and Ken got together the night before the election. We helped Ken craft a great speech, and grilled him on questions and what the answers should be for best effect. At the end of the night, we all thought he didn't stand a chance in Hades.

You see, Ken's competition was a girl named "Joan" (changed to protect the somewhat innocent). Joan was a pretty, popular, overachieving, cheerleader / lead in school play / in student council since 1st grade type. To add to the drama, Ken had an on-again / off-again unrequited crush on Joan since 7th grade.

The election day finally arrived. The minor offices were first with their speeches/questions, but they were just a build up to the main event. Joan gave her speech first (I think). It was basically a resume, and a "vote for me because I've been doing this for umpteen years". Ken gave his speech next, saying that he didn't have experience but did have ideas and desire, and then went right into questions. He delivered a great performance, and gave thoughtful answers to the questions, as opposed to Joan's fairly "standard" answers. He started out with a very hostile crowd, but from answering the questions the right way, they soon came to his side of things, and turned on Joan. Finally, Joan was asked about "the note". Apparently, Joan had sent a letter to Ken in Chemistry the day before the election, basically saying that he didn't stand a chance, was only running to spite her for not returning his affections, and why don't you just drop out? When asked in front of the whole school about this, Joan started to freeze up. Ken, in one of his classier moments, came up to the mike and basically said "Look, I'm not saying that happened or not. If anything like that were to have happened, it would be a private matter between Joan and I. Regardless, you shouldn't base your vote on anything like that, but rather on who you think will do a better job of representing your interests in Student Council." As we left the auditorium to go vote, there were a lot of shouts of "Hey, I'm voting for Ken, how about you?", "Yep, me too.", "Naw, I'm still voting for Joan." and so on. We (Ken's friends) still didn't think he had a chance in Hades.

The election results were announced during last period, and they said that Joan had won by such-and-such. We, Ken's friends, just accepted it right away. Everyone else in our classes, people who 24 hours prior wouldn't have pushed Ken out of the way of an oncoming truck, immediately became outraged, passing around petitions for a recount, etc. Our friend Scott was the one with the sense to look at the absentee list for the day, do the math, and figure out "Hey, there's too many votes. More votes than people that go to this school." It turned out that a friend of Joan's on student council had stuffed the ballot box in her favor when she saw Joan was losing. So, we had to bring in an actual voting machine from the county, and redo the election a week later. Ken won by a 2-or-3 to 1 margin. He quickly became the hero of all the "unpopular" kids in school, and quite a few besides - a real "Revenge of the Nerds" type thing.

More in post 2...

[Arthur Pendragon]

So, senior year roles around. Ken is President of Student Council, and doing a good job of it. He institutes a lot of changes - a student council member had to sit in the cafe during lunch each Friday to listen to student complaints and suggestions; one of the student council board had to attend each School Board meeting; money was raised to fix the potholes in the student parking lot; and a bunch of other stuff. Ken isn't popular with several of the "popular" kids on student council, who just want to plan homecoming and prom and that's it. But with most of the other students, Ken is enjoying a level of popularity that he had never seen before. Then, his arrogance came back to haunt him. Ken is one of those people who is *always* late for everything. As a senior, that began to include "tardy to school" just about every day, for which he started to accrue detentions. Then, he was involved in a food fight during lunch. This earned him a lunch suspension. The tardies kept adding up, until finally Ken was suspended from school for 2 days. Soon after he came back, it was very unceremoniously announced that Ken was no longer on student council, and the vice-president, Laurie (who was innocent of all of this by-the-way) was the new president. It seems that student council presidents aren't allowed to get suspended and keep their jobs. So Ken was the first student council president in our district to win by having to have a revote, and also the first to be impeached and kicked out of office.

We (Ken and our buddies) thought this was a bunch of crap, and for a couple of weeks complained about what a corrupt system it is and tossed around ideas for how to "get back" at, well, the school I guess. This was about the time when new elections were gearing up to take place for the next year. Finally, someone said "This school's student council is so bogus, I bet we could get someone who doesn't exist elected." A collective light went off in our heads, and plans were drawn up immediately.

First, the forms for running for office had to be obtained. That was my job, and my only material involvement in the affair. Next we had to come up with a name. Some classic "prank" names were suggested at first, and then some real ones. Scott again infused some common sense, and said "We need a name that is so common that people forget it a minute later." We came up with "Brian Wagner".

The petitions had to be signed by real students though. We (being seniors) went up to a bunch of sophomores and had them sign the forms. Our back story was that Brian was a sophomore and a friend of ours from McDowell (another local school district, but one that is *huge*, so that if anyone asked, it would be possible, if not probable, that they wouldn't know him). He would be moving to our district next year, had been in their student council for a number of years, and wanted to be involved when he moved here. "But have I ever met this guy?" they would ask. "Oh I'm sure you've seen him. He was at our basketball game last night. He's about 5'10", brown hair, brown eyes..." "Oh, yeah, I remember him. He was funny." And then they would sign. Not one person would admit that they hadn't met Brian, or they just didn't care and would have signed if the name at the top was "Adolph Hitler".

We turned in the forms, and the next day, up went his name on the big cafeteria sign. Brian was running against 4 other sophomores for a total of 4 positions as 11th grade class representatives. We then started to do what no one had ever done before - campaign for him. We put up signs, and chatted him up to all the sophomores we could lay hands on. In our straw polls, he would have won by a landslide, even if he didn't show when his name was read on election day.

But then the roof caved in. Another piece of information that you need to know is that all the honors juniors and seniors had Mr. Mahoney for English. Mr. Mahoney was fairly strict, and he actually made us (gasp!) do work. As such, he was not well liked, but to his credit, I was the only guy in my freshman dorm in college who knew how to do note cards and write an actual research paper. Aaron, another of our friends, put up a poster that said "Vote for Brian Wagner, he hates Mr. Mahoney too." Mr. Mahoney saw the poster, and took it to the office and said "I want to talk to this Brian Wagner guy." The secretaries started to frantically look through files and computers, while the vice-principal started to call from room to room on the PA.
"Mr. Brogdon, do you have a Brian Wagner in class?" "Nope, never met him."
"Miss Kelly, do you have a Brian Wagner in class?" "No."
And so on. They tried an all-call on the PA. "Brian Wagner, report to the office immediately." About this time, they must have figured out that he didn't exist. As soon as they figured that, they made another all-call, telling Ken and two of our group (both also in student council) to report to the office. The yelling between Ken and Mr. Steeves (our gym teacher, the advisor for student council, the winning-most wrestling coach in PA history, and a very scary guy) could be heard from the front hall to the back. In the end, they didn't rat out anyone else of our group, not even Aaron. They all got a minor suspension or a detention, but really it was just plain embarrassing for the administration. Brian's name was crossed out on the big banner in the cafeteria with a big black magic marker.

The end result of all of this? The next year they made major changes to how elections and campaigns were run in the school. And from what I'm told, to this day "Brian Wagner" is still an occasional write-in candidate. Oh, and that was the name used for all of the magazine (porn) subscriptions that came to Scott's college dorm. And we have one heck of a story to share about high school.

[Sir Trevor]

Very cool story.

[Lady Catharine]

Oh Duke, I remember hearing that story first hand in the season of 02...

What a great year that was!

Are you or have you auditioned this year?

Yea or Nay?

[Thull]

I remember hearing that story for the first time as well. I was driving you, Emily, Randi, and Corey to Wendy's during a lunch break and you told it to us on the way. That was the summer of 2001, back when I had a car that could fit 5 people comfortably, or a car period...

Tom

[Hephzibah]

What's kindda funny is that I did go to school in Garfield Hts with a kid by the name of Brian Wagner. This was back in the 60's and 70's.

But good prank there