Art and Sausages go together hand in hand . . . .*

As at many universities, the University of Texas holds its student government/students’ association election every spring.  Most years the election is ignored by most students, except for the deadly-earnest politicos-in-training and the resumé-padders, who cover the West Campus area in posters and signs.  It’s the years that the students don’t ignore the elections that things get amusing.

In the spring of 1976, a bunch of anarchist hippie weirdos living at the 21st Street Co-op decided that student government was a joke, so they might as well treat it as one.  Over several weeks, and lots of beer and joints, they came up with the Art & Sausages party, running on an absurdo-anarchist ticket whose platform included such planks as changing the motto on the front of the main building from “You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” to something more straightforward, like “Money talks,” and requiring all Student Senators to communicate during meetings only by farting and tap-dancing.

Any good act swings, and Art & Sausages were good.  They understood the basic show business principle that to interest an apathetic crowd you need a good come-on, and their street-theater sensibility was custom-made for jaded students.  Which is why, to the university’s great surprise, Art & Sausages pulled a plurality in a crowded field of candidates, leading to a run-off.  Their opposition was a Terribly Earnest pair of fraternity brothers who tried to Rise Above the circus and Talk About the Issues.  Not that there were any substantive issues, but they puffed and pontificated a lot.

On the day of the run-off, the Art & Sausages gang held hourly campaign Spectacles on the Main Mall to entice the studentry to go vote.  Some dressed up in vegetable costumes (an ear of corn, a mushroom, a pumpkin), some wore get-ups suggestive of mid-Sixties San Francisco, the presidential candidate (Jay Adkins, now an Austin attorney) wore a borrowed leather top hat, the vice presidential candidate (Skip Slyfield) copped to an aviator’s helmet liner, a lab coat, and a stethoscope.  The problem was that, being a bunch of students, they all kept having to go off to boring ol’ class, and about two-fifteen, the guy who’d been the pumpkin took off his costume and split, leaving them one cast member short.

I’d been standing and watching since about one-thirty, wearing dark sunglasses and an old T-shirt that read “Last of the Big-Time Freaks.”  (While that had been true by Comanche’s standards, in Austin I didn’t even begin to budge the weirdness meter.)  Skip turned around, spotted me and my shirt, and demanded, “Hey, you wanna be a pumpkin?”  Nonplused, I said, “I dunno, do I?”  “Sure you do, c’mere!” he replied, and in a few minutes I was also wearing an enormous orange cloth and chicken-wire ball and a mortar board.  I marched up and down the West Mall, shouting campaign slogans like “Put two vegetables in office!  Vote for Adkins and Slyfield!” and “Vote Art & Sausages, men of vision making spectacles of themselves!”

At three o’clock, the gang gathered up for the final spectacle before the polls closed.  Somebody had me kneel so I could be the spectacle’s “centerpiece” while improvisatory zaniness went on around me for ten minutes or so.  It was only some time later that I realized, “Wow . . . there were photographers in the crowd taking pictures . . . what if one of them was from The Daily Texan?  OhMyGod, what if one of them WAS from the Texan and my picture gets in the paper??  I am gonna be so dead . . . .”  You see, my mother subscribed to the Texan, so anything they ran she’d see, and I was pretty sure she wasn’t ready to see me in the middle of a bunch of hippie weirdos.

The street-theater campaign worked.  Art & Sausages blew their opponents out of the water.  Next morning I came down to breakfast at my boarding house (you didn’t know those still existed, did you?  They did in my day, and I lived my freshman year in one), opened the Texan . . . and found a picture of Jay and Skip counting the take after they’d passed the hat for campaign donations.  I decided some god must have smiled on me, and I’d dodged the danger.

I should have known better.  The next morning I came down to breakfast, opened the paper . . . and found, on Page 1, a follow-up think piece on the election featuring a three-column by three-inch photo of the spectacle with me front and center.  It was an “OhMyGodWhatDoIDoNow” moment.  There was no way to explain this away.  However, I sure wasn’t gonna bring it up on my own.  Let mother bring it up.

And she did.  When I next called home, she wanted to know “what in the world”—and then told me she was jealous, because in three years at UT she’d never gotten her picture in the paper at all, and I managed to get on the front page in my second semester!  Sometimes there’s no explaining parents.

* The first line of the A&S campaign song, which was sung to a tune resembling the Fascist anthem, “Avanti il Popolo.”

The Dada checkbook ornaments a cast-iron powder horn.  Fnord.