From a friend…

At college a big project I had to work on was “Italian Fashion Show”. Everyone doing my course had to make some Italian fashion and do a catwalk show in front of the dean, guests and parents. It was a big deal and intended to showcase the talent on the course.

I got together with my college mates and plotted what we’d do. We ended up deciding that we’d make a massive plate of spaghetti on a table, that we all get underneath and stick our heads through whilst wearing brown stockings on our heads full of scrumpled up brown paper. We were to be the meatballs. We thought it was an excellent idea.

We spent days building this thing in the college yard cos it was so big, made a table out of cardboard with legs, put a tablecloth over it and had a huge plate on top that we filled with “spaghetti” rolls of paper. It looked proper good but when we had a walk about and looked at what other people had made we had a real “oh my god what the fuck have we done” moment.

So it came to the night of the show and we were a bit embarrassed. We decided to go down into Peckham and get some booze from Crack-a-Jack, the big off-license. We bought two bottles of whiskey, a bottle of blue alchopop stuff and some beer. Bad idea. When it was time to go on stage we were pretty much legless. My friends and I put the stockings on our heads, filled them with brown paper and poked them through the holes in the plate we’d made and walked to the cargo lift. It was too small. There was no way we were going to be able to get it into the building.

We decided to run at it, ripping the sides of the table off and wedging ourselves in the lift. When we got to the floor we were supposed to be going to we fell out of the lift, barged past everyone queuing to go up the catwalk because we couldn’t see what was going on, went up the catwalk, hit the end of the stage and turned round to go back. We missed the catwalk on the way back and fell off the front of the stage and as we did one of my mates puked. Have you ever seen someone with a stocking over his head puke? It’s not a good scene. I crawled out of the hall, out of the door and never went back into college again. Funny thing is is that it turns out they loved it and used photos of us in the prospectus for the next year!