The Libel Show

A spring tradition when I was in law school at the University of Kentucky, was the Libel Show.  It was generally an excuse by the law students to get drunk as lords and spout off clever, but usually not so clever, lines about the faculty.  My first year libel show experience was a rude awakening.  I was entering the place where it was being held, when a law professor, who will remain unnamed, drunkenly grabbed my boob through the sweatshirt I was wearing, all the while asking about the logo on my sweatshirt. Luckily, I was only an "A" cup, so it was easy to  push his hand away and go in to the show (for the record it was my Lourdes High school track sweatshirt from senior year and it had the Lourdes mascot--an eagle on it).  The only act I remember was a fellow first year student, Charlie Goodman, playing Torts professor, Professor Ashdown, who was called "Professor Assbrown."  It seemed to be the ne plus ultra in humor, especially if you had a number of beers in you, as most of the audience did.

In my second year of law school, the libel show was held at the stockyards in Lexington:

This is current version of  the auditorium of the Lexington stockyards.  I don't recall it being quite so nice, but my judgment was impaired at the time, and thus, so is my memory

This is the stockyards from the outside:

I admit it now, from a distance of 35 years, that I may have contributed in some small part to the mayhem of the evening.  But I had help!  A group of us decided that simply watching other law students mimic and mock law professors was not enough (and being grabbed by them as well).  There had to be audience participation.  So we went out and purchased guns.  Squirt guns.

This was delivered to me surreptitiously at law school, the day of the Libel Show by my classmate, Mark.  There were at least five of us that came armed to the Libel Show.  We also came just a bit snookered.  I remember little of the posing on the stage, but I do recall numerous gun battles,  running up and down the steps in the stockyard auditorium engaging in water fights with my other squirt gun friends. The squirt guns were a real hit.   Those in the audience, who were unarmed, wanted to get involved, particularly when they were hit.  So they used the beer in their cups.  Eventually, so did we when we ran out of water in our squirt guns (just think of what we could have done with today's super soakers!).  It was a huge, wet, smelly, stinky mess throughout the venue, in the end.  And as a result, the law school was barred from holding any libel shows at the stockyards in the future. 

Bet there aren't many other law schools out there who can boast of that feat.