The Shadiest Trick You Pulled to Win

This week has been full of drama, and mostly of the shady news variety: on Tuesday’s episode of the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, Lisa Vanderpump, being the manipulative multi-millionaire evil genius that she is, finally got caught in a web of her own design, all but revealing that she planned an attack on good friend and fake Brit Dorit Kemsley. In a much more violent example, on Wednesday, 22-year old American figure skater Mariah Bell was accused of kicking and purposefully slashing the calf of her 16-year-old South Korean competitor Lim Eun-Soo with her skate blade. (That one didn’t work out either: Eun-Soo still competed and kicked Bell’s ass.) Let this be a lesson: trickery never wins… at least, some of the time.

It’s well-documented that rich people are more likely to lie and cheat than other demographics—how do you think they got those things?—but who hasn’t done something kinda sus to get ahead? From white lies and tattle-telling in childhood to, I don’t know, adopting a stupid man voice to get ahead in the medical business, people pull shady tricks to win. And now I want to know what you’ve done.

Drop those stories below, and get a load of last week’s winners. These are the best protests you’ve ever attended:

TheDrDonna turns wine into Clamato found community at the Trans March in San Francisco:

Trans March in San Francisco. Pride is always on a Sunday in June, and these days it’s a super-commercialized parade with little left of the original protest spirit. I mean, it’s hard to really pretend you’re either countercultural or revolutionary when you’re sponsored by Southwest Airlines or Kaiser Permanente.

I had come out a couple of months earlier, and was still a few months from being able to transition. Not to mention, the trans community is fairly diffuse, and usually the only way you have a lot of trans folks together is by prior arrangement. So, it was hugely affirming to see the enormous spectrum of trans folks, from people who had yet to transition like myself, to people who had been post-transition for decades, to folks who weren’t interested in the binary at all. Being in an enormous crowd of people who were all trans, and under no pains to hide or obfuscate that fact, was amazing-not to mention the fact that this still felt like an actual protest. It felt like a defiant act, saying, “we’re here, and we don’t intend to be quiet or invisible”. We walked all the way from Dolores Park in the Mission to Market Street, and from there to the Civic Center, in a crowd large enough to block both sides of the street for a few blocks.

Honestly, I can’t recommend it enough to those who are in the community, especially if you’ve just come out. It’s indescribable to know that, even if you’re in a relatively small town and you don’t really know that many other folks who are trans, there really is this huge, supportive community out there that knows where you’ve been, can show you where you might want to go, and is willing to fight for our rights.

ProudHamerican fought for the right to untuck it:

A local Black Lives Matter rally is my real answer.

My funny answer: I had a 12 person class in middle school (I think there were about 150 kids total in grades k-8 in my catholic school), and we threw protests allllllllllllllll the fucking time. Looking back, they were hilarious, because not everyone participated (4 ringleaders? Tops?) but we would rope in little kids to wave our signs. By far, our most successful protest was the Tuck In Protest, wherein we argued that we had a basic human right NOT to tuck in our uniform shirts.

Anyhow, the scariest teacher in the school lost it, came barging into our classroom, and screamed at us: “RIGHTS? YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS. YOU’RE CHILLLLLLDREN.” And I have never forgotten it, and it never ceases to make me laugh.

LionHeartedGirl hates war and animal abuse:

The biggest and most memorable was the Iraq war protest in NYC on February 15, 2003.

The weirdest was an animal rights protest/action in the middle of nowhere upstate NY around the same time (winter ‘03). The town of Auburn, NY had a crow population double the human population, and I guess the rednecks that live there were sick of crow poop on their trucks because they organized a crow killing competition. They had to get federal permits and everything since crows are covered by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. In the afternoon, we did a run of the mill protest at City Hall with signs and pithy chants. I think there was someone in a crow suit. I vividly remember a protestor getting in a screaming match with a guy with about three teeth.

Before that, in the morning, some of us drove around trying to document and disrupt the hunt. We were trying to capture evidence of illegal baiting and using car speakers or horns to scare the birds off. We also used some non-violent intimidation tactics, such as following hunters around, which was kind of ballsy in retrospect, since they had guns. I attempted an ill-advised 3-point turn in order to start following someone and got my car (a Honda Civic coupe most definitely not made for off-roading) stuck in a snowbank. Good times!

AngryQueerLawyr, thank you for the very necessary school lunch protest story. This blog wouldn’t be complete without it:

One silly story: When I was a senior in high school, circa late 2007, the school lunches SUCKED on Fridays. Think soggy fish or chicken sandwiches with anemic, bland, unsalted potatoes. At the same time, the cafeteria had raised prices for the snack items they also sold. My senior AP English viewed this as a form of price gouging and had the class right before lunch!

So we decided none of us would eat it any more on that day!

Every week the class would get together and decide on a theme for that Friday lunch. Might be Mexican, holiday, or bring a dish that reflects your heritage! Most people brought something, and anyone that couldn’t afford it or was too busy still got to eat, no problem.

As the semester wore on and other classrooms caught word, more did this. And that led to a competitive atmosphere, with dishes sampled from other rooms during passing time, and everyone outdoing each other. The lunch ladies started to grumble about lost revenue, and heard the gossip about the Friday meals.

So finally, right before Thanksgiving, the principal gets annoyed at the complaining and stomps down to the wing of classrooms….

Only to see one of the guys carving a turkey. Yes, you read that right. He cooked an ENTIRE turkey overnight just to spite the terrible lunches. In fact, as our teacher had promised to allow us to just have our fancy lunch for the holiday as long as we also continued our reading of Hamlet (we did it out loud so the teacher could explain), so the ginormous spread took over half the desks while most of us leaned on the makeshift banquet tables or sat on the floor.

Turkey guy had a shit eating grin on his face. And, since my mother taught at my school, I was able to bring her unique family dessert which needed freezing until the last second and was starting to melt already.

So I just said, “The Friday lunches don’t offer us a good value (or taste) for our money. Would you like a piece of [specific dessert]? We have to eat it now or it melts.”