“They threw us a fucking pizza party!” said Duve (not really) with his feminine fingers poking at the air and with hair and eyes ablaze. “We are a proud group of Deaf and Dumb, and goddamn right I capitalize those conditions!” yelled Duve (not really). “We speak to each other, no, we speak to each other and the world, goddamn it, through our fingers, and USU president Stan Albrecht, in all of his barely-lingual brilliance decided to throw us a party made of finger foods! Not a fucking plate or fork in sight! He might as well ask me to drum and sing on Rockband at the same fucking time! Fuck!”

Albrecht responded to these accusations by spitting on his office floor and using the spray to do the universal sign language move where you make your left hand in to a circle and take the index finger of your right and ram it into the opening to simulate intercourse between a woman and a dick.

In an attempt to report in the “raw” we left our translator by a table full of Shasta soda and a bunch of lip-readers to go out and get some unfiltered answers from other members of the ASL team who also received the reward of pizza boxed by a small roman in a orange toga.

The most vocal (not really) mute to comment on the situation (didn’t say a word) was Mattie Ander, who echoed (ha!) President Albrecht’s finger-in-hole motions while she stared reporter Claire Chennault in his weed-lowered eyes and said (no, she didn’t), “We are real people with feelings, and emotions, and the right to be happy without pathetic and shallow people taking us as unfair targets.”

As a staff, we were petty sure she was joking and together we laughed the night away. We learned so much that evening with the hand-whisperers and ate our fill of good pizza. As a matter of fact, we learned everything but how to say “no”, because as the night went on and professional journalism went the way of the eardrum, the last thing we wanted to understand was when the perfect woman who couldn’t speak was telling us to stop.

Additional reporting by Bert

Photo by Bert