Tonight's theme was Once Upon a Time, and it was supposed to be an evening for fairy tales. Matt Pyson kicked the meeting off with a Marxist version of Snow White, where he called the dwarves "seven short comrades." I think he got it off the Net, because he was reading it from green-striped computer paper. Nonetheless, it was funny.

I got up next and read the fairy tale I'd written for a Valentine's Day issue of Completely Different a few years ago. At the end some people made comments about it being too depressing. I told them it wasn't, stressing that the last line was: "And they all lived happily ever after."

If they were worrying about depressing fairy tales, they needn't have bothered me. Joe [Foering] got up next and did a very "Uncle Mike" sort of tale about a happy land where rabbits got axed in the head. Jen Hoffman was drafted to play an innocent little girl who wanted to hear a story.

Next on the program was a skit that I think Mark [Sachs] wrote (or maybe Steve Gradess), about "How to Defend Yourself Against Dining Hall Food." I played one of the students in the defense class. Andy, Cathy and Mark were the other students, and Steve was the instructor. The skit ended up being quite chaotic, with people ad-libbing lines. It started when we were listing the things that he'd already gone over, which was just a list of dishes from the dining hall. Andy [Wilson, my brother] started going overboard and listing things that weren't in the script. When we got back on track, I was supposed to be the first one to attack Steve, with a chicken cosmo.

As he was demonstrating, he said, "If you are attacked by a man..."

"Or a woman," I put in.

"Or a homosexual," Andy added.

"Or a bisexual," Cathy chimed in.

"Or a Republican," Mark finished.

Surprisingly, these words were in the script. But what wasn't in the script was our using it, not only throughout the rest of the sketch, but through the rest of the meeting. When somebody said something about a man, or even about an inanimate object, I interjected, "Or a woman." And the rest added the whole series. It was fun and amusing, just like, "The word for the day is... pinhead." [Note: This is another recurring MPS joke, which came from The Late Show with David Letterman, another of our favorite comedians .]

Incidentally, speaking of Republicans, someone came by from the Young Republicans today to have us fill out a student opinion poll. Although the impulse was very strong to be silly about it, I took one and filled it out quite seriously.

Anyway, back to the sketch. I attacked Steve with a chicken cosmo and got shot. Immediately, I clutched my chest and fell down backward. Unfortunately, I then had to lie there for the rest of the sketch. Anyone who had thought this through would not have made the corpse me — I am too likely to try to upstage everyone else, which I did. [Note: Upstaging was a favorite activity among MPS members. The lesson being: never leave too many people on-stage unless they have lines.]

The problem was that after I got shot, they kept saying lines like, "You shot him."

I sat up and said, "Would you stop with the 'him" already?"

Once, Steve leaned over and his hat fell on my face and I sat up immediately, saying, "I'm undead now." I stood up and pretended to choke Steve, but the rest of the actors made me lie down again, so I did.

The skit took about twice the normal running time, but I believe everyone had fun.