For no obvious reason, my professor for MGMT 654 — Managing People at Work — requires groups of students to devise and perform skits in every class. The skits are meant to dramatize some workplace issue for class discussion, and we business school students approach these assignments with the same gusto that we reserve for anything that provides distraction from our soul-crushing accounting homework.
You can imagine how hideously bad many of these skits are. You don’t need me to tell you that it is just an eye-gougingly painful thing to have to watch a group of MBAs hammily enacting an assembly line in Toyota’s widely admired NUMMI production facility; or Nordstrom’s salesforce incentive system; or Cisco’s corporate acquisition process. But I’m going to anyway.
The early skits relied heavily on obvious and cruel jokes about the foibles of our classmates and professors. These jokes were very cheap and frequently funny. Soon that well ran dry, and the skits devolved into a series of increasingly bizarre burlesques, usually involving cross-dressing, heavy abuse of the the classroom’s fancy multimedia capabilities, and crude sexual puns. For example, recently I watched five of my classmates perform an ’80s-style rap about defunct low-cost airline PeoplExpress, after which Jagadish writhed his way through a surprisingly skillful stiptease to the tune of “I’m Too Sexy.” These inexplicable displays are sometimes funny, particularly in an isn’t-it-funny-I’m-paying-$120,000-for-this kind of way.
My team’s skit was a few weeks ago. The professor asked us to dramatize the corporate culture of the Mary Kay cosmetics company, which is pretty much a lay-up of an assignment. Concocting a rap about airline deregulation is much harder than wringing laughs out of a salesforce of 30,000 bleached blonde “beauty consultants” who compete for prizes of pink Cadillacs and display a disturbing propensity to see the handiwork of Jesus in their climbing sales figures.
Of course we dressed up in drag. Mark Kay almost exclusively employs women, so really we didn’t have any choice in the matter. Also, cross-dressing is the second cheapest form of laugh-getting, right after cruel mockery of peers.
My performance in the skit has been much remarked upon for reasons that weren’t part of my original design. I don’t want to belabor this part of the story. Let’s just say that I didn’t get my hands on the borrowed dress until about an hour before class started. Let’s also say that the first time I tried the dress on was thirty seconds before the curtain went up. Let’s further acknowledge that the dress was tight in all the wrong places. Let us finally admit that my new nickname at Wharton is “lunchpack.”
My friend Jeff raced over after class to inform me that I “needed a bigger handbag.” He was referring to the handbag that I awkwardly clutched in front of my crotch for the duration of the performance. I have received several comments on my, um, display, but Jeff’s is the one that fills me with the most dread. As editor of class newsletter, Jeff delights in plucking the humiliating moments from the quotidian, stashing them away in his secret evil database, and revisiting them in lurid detail months after the fact.
I have attempted to impose a unilateral ban on lunchpack references in the upcoming newsletter, but I’m dealing from a weak hand. Jeff refuses to accept a post facto lunchpack ban, insisting that any lunchpack embargo apply on a going-forward basis only. I insist that I would really just greatly prefer not to read about my lunckpack in a publication distributed widely among my peers. Jeff irrelevantly points out that no one forced me to put on the lunchpack-revealing dress.
So we’ve reached an impasse. The lunchpack remains on the table. When the newsletter does finally come out, just remember, you read it here first.
