The List

When I was in college I graduated with a Fine Arts degree, focusing on theater. Getting cast in plays, which is, after all, the entire point one becomes an actor, is commonly handled very publicly. Throughout campus there were a few locations where theater department notices would be placed. A few days after auditions, the director would post the list of the actors that were cast in the play at these various, pre-defined locations.

In a very Pavlovian way, we became trained to respond to the postings placed there. Only really important things were posted at these locations and we salivated whenever our names were on the list.

My senior year in college, I worked off campus with a fellow actor named Jay. As our senior year neared its end we decide to list those people with which we wanted to keep in touch after graduation. The list was varied and to the untrained eye, nonsensical. It consisted of fellow seniors, teachers, both past and present, current graduate students and others from years gone by, a few freshman, a sprinkling of sophomores, some non-theater students and everyone else in between. When we completed this list we had about 100 names and titled it, appropriately, Jay and Pete's Top 100.

On a lark, we thought, "wouldn't it be funny if we posted these names with the other theater department notices?" We digested that thought for a moment and decided, "You know what would be even better? Let's even make it more vague. Let's remove 'Jay and Pete's Top 100' and just list the names with no other explanation."

A moment of pure, evil genious.

That night, around 3 a.m., Jay and I scampered to the various theater locations and posted our list of names. The next morning we just sat back and watched. By midday a subtle rumbling had begun in the theater department. Something about "a list." After lunch, Jay's girlfriend (and now wife) noticed the font type used on the list and almost spilled the beans in front of everyone. We quickly pulled her outside and let her in on the joke.

By that night, The List was THE topic of conversation. At a local dive called the Winnjammer, where the theater geeks partook of libations, the mystery of The List had completely taken hold of the department. Jay and I sat by, quietly, offering no information about The List, only our quiet dismay at its existence.

By the next morning, Ron, our theater shop Forman had apparently been inundated with questions about The List because he had, in very angry handwriting, written "I don't know anything about the damn list!!!! Ron"

Slowly, the psychology started to take effect. By lunch on the second day, everyone had gathered around The List. Those on The List stood in one corner, happy that they were on it, even though they had no idea what that meant. Those not on The List stood in another corner, angrily trying to convince themselves that it wasn't important that their names weren't on it.

In our weaker moments, when the scuttlebutt about The List started to calm, Jay and I would begin feeding the fires by jokingly giving validity to It. Someone would come up and say "Pete, you want to go to lunch?" I'd smile and say "I don't know, are you on The List?" And that was all it took. They'd quickly respond "Yeah, what about that list! I wonder who put it there! Have you heard anything?" Ahhh, the rumor fire had been effectively stoked and was again fully ablaze.

Soon, others followed suit. If you were on The List, you could do stuff, if you weren't... well... By the end of day three, the Dean of the College had heard ALL ABOUT this list and had them taken down. And therein ended our experiment.

Or did it?

Jay and I mulled our options. "How about making The List suddenly a BAD thing. We'll give it an ominous title and watch the happy turn sad and the sad turn happy?" That would be too complex.

"How about randomly taking some people off The List and then repost it around campus again... we can then watch those removed from The List move from the In Crowd to the Losers, scratching their head at what had caused their erasure from this coveted prize?" That would be too cruel.

In the end, we let the experiment die. We never told a soul.

About ten years later I'm in California visiting Jennifer, one of my old theater buds. As we reminisced about our glory days in college it only took her about ten minutes to ask "And remember that list? Did you ever find out what that was about?" I smiled knowingly and told her Jay and I did it, the back story, everything. "THAT WAS YOU????" and she hit me in the arm, really hard, making me pay for whatever pain I may have caused her.

I don't know what her problem was. After all, she was on The List.