There was a brave party running for President of the United States in the 1992 elections. An independent party, with new innovative ideas, a party that bucked the system. But because of a conspiracy high up the chain of command, you may not have heard of this stalwart group of outsiders. The group was The Tupperware Party, and I was running for President.

More accurately, my best friend Jules Pitt and I were running for president. It was high school, it was a mock election, and it was our chance to throw out hats into the ring.

No mere pranksters, Jules and I were actually both political buffs. We wrote quite a bit in our school paper promoting our choice for Democratic nominee, Paul Tsongas. When he failed to get the party's nomination, we decided to take matters into our own hands.

We learned that our school's 7th grade class was going to be holding a "mock election." The idea was that they would research each of the candidates, learn about the process of election, and then eventually see how our school's votes compared with that of the nation. It sounded like a very interesting, interactive project on democracy.

But the door of democracy swings both ways, and we saw this as our opportunity to sneak in. Sure, we were far too late to get on a state ballot, but we were high school students, and this was our home turf. Surely, it was a battle we could win.

So, after hatching our idea, we approached Ms. Kelly, the teacher overseeing the project, to ask how we could get on the ballot of the mock election.

Ms. Kelly was also the assistant headmaster of the school, and she wasn't too fond of us. We weren't exactly crazy about her either. It may have come from the time when, left in charge as our headmaster was away on vacation, she made ours the only school in the state to remain active during a massive blizzard. Her reciprocal disdain for us may have stemmed from the announcement I made at all school meeting, asking the student body to stand up and applaud her for risking our lives in the name of education.

So there were some hard feelings there. But we knew that Ms. Kelly was the sort who played by the rules. This was her weakness: She loved her position of authority, and all the tendrils of rules and regulations that sprouted from it. Although I never actually heard her do it, I have no doubt she could have quoted exact passages from the student handbook. She was in love with rules. All we were asking was what rules we needed to know.

Ms. Kelly didn't think too much of our request, and told us that if we researched and found out how a person would get on a state ballot, and applied it to the mock election ballot, then we could be part of the process. This was our weakness: work. She knew us to be slackers and geeks, which we were, and knew us to abhor actual work, which we did. We were a group who could have easily had "Not Living Up To Their Potential" stitched on matching jackets, if that task didn't require so much effort. She was certain we wouldn't do the research necessary to pull this off.

But she underestimated us. It was true we hated work... but it depends on what you were going to call work. In our years at that school we probably avoided more homework assignments and papers than all other students combined. But we also wrote several scripts, performed sketches and designed an entire computer game around the local soda delivery man. We hated school work, yes, but only because it detracted us from our larger plans.

We marched straight to the library and found out: it required 1% of the previous year's voter's signatures to get an independent candidate on the state's ballot. At our small, private school, one percent of the total population was only two or three people. We got Tim, Dan, and Alexis to sign a piece of paper, and we gladly turned it in.

Our campaign machine quickly swung into full gear. Having already brainstormed a platform during countless lunch breaks and study halls, we had our positions on issues pretty set. What we needed was a large-scale campaign to get our message out.

Bravely disavowing special interest money (or, at lease, pledging to if any was ever offered to us) we ran our campaign out of our own pocket. We simply used the resources available to us as computer lab geeks to print up dozens of signs. We urged students to "Mock The Vote" and pledge their support for the Tupperware Party.

Mrs. Kelly was none too pleased. We had, however, played by the rules, and she had no way of stopping our campaign.

Then we had our Town Meeting. We noticed that Clinton and Bush were holding a lot of these seemingly unrehearsed question-and-answer periods, so we organized our own. At our school, you could reserve a Thursday morning all-school-meeting to give whatever 10-minute presentation you wished. Mostly, it was outside speakers or one-act plays, but we lay claim to one Thursday for our Town Meeting.

Just as we had seen countless times on television, we dressed in our best Navy blazers and striped ties, keeping one hand casually in our pockets, and one hand dramatically motioning to emphasize key points. We took questions from the audience on our more controversial plans: mandatory casinos for all citizens, a flat tax on 100% of the wealthy's money, and a rotating residence program, where every few months each person would move one house down to the left. We were also asked about our stance on abortion, but we made it clear that since we could make no funny jokes about the subject, it was one we weren't going to touch.

The Town Meeting was a smashing success. Voters of all ages, from seventh grade up to senior, were personally pledging their support. The school began to realize: It wasn't Bush, Clinton or Perot who spoke for their interests! It was a couple of fellow students, students brave enough to bite the hands that fed them, students who bucked the system from within like a particularly overactive fetus.

This did not bode well with the administration. Soon after our Town Meeting, Mrs. Kelly took us aside. With narrowed eyes and a strained smile, she told us she understood how much fun we were having, and was happy to see us doing so well. But she also insisted that the Mock Election was a serious project and that we were throwing off a whole class's study by altering the results. They were studying Bush, Clinton and Perot. The Pitt/Moreschi ticket just didn't mesh with the larger political picture.

We nodded politely and agreed with everything she said. Yes, we knew, we were throwing off an entire class's study. But that wasn't our problem, really. We had played by the rules to get into the race, and we were happy to play it through to the end. If she had a real problem with us joining up, she had ample opportunity to stop us when we first proposed our candidacy. It was too late to turn back now.

And frankly, having been in 7th grade not so long ago ourselves, we really doubted that any members of that class cared too much about comparing their data to the national statistics. In fact, our own Tupperware Party aides on the inside told us that the majority of that key demographic were leaning in our favor.

So we continued to campaign, shaking hands and pledging pretty much anything the voters asked us to. Almost every square inch of our school was covered in our propaganda, and almost every student was primed to vote for us.

And the faculty stepped up their attack. Individually and as a pair, Jules and I were taken aside by every teacher we had ever had at the school, as well as being called in front of the Headmaster. All of them asked us nicely to withdraw from the race, so that the students could do an accurate race. And each time we politely reminded them that we were playing by the rules, and that we had done nothing that was against any specific policy.

We were going for it all. We had our victory party planned: free sodas and oreos in the cafeteria, in what would amount to perhaps our only out-of-pocket expense for the campaign. And we had no doubt we were going to win. Enough people had pledged their support to ensure a landslide.

And there was a feeling of pride as I was my friend Beanie returning from the xerox machine with the ballots in her hand. There, underneath Bush/Quayle, Clinton/Gore and Perot/Stockdale was the Pitt/Moreschi ticket, with a big blank box next to it ready to be ticked off by eager students ready to send a message, if not to Washington, than to the administration of our school.

But every system abhors abnormality. The status quo cannot stand outsiders. And when we went to vote that chilly November morn, we found a smug Mrs. Kelly with ballots that did not contain our names at all. She had thrown out the hundreds of ballots that contained the Tupperware Party, and printed up new ones.

Her official response was that, being under the age of 35, we could not run for president. We made a point early on in the campaign to point out that, under the age of 35 we could not become president, but nothing prevented us from running. But the ballots were printed, and we were no longer part of the process.

We managed to get a respectable 12% of the vote by people who wrote in our names, beating out Perot, but we still faired far behind Clinton or Bush. But the victory, one most note, was not in the election itself, but in the race. We played by the rules. It was the system, the supposedly upstanding ones, who had to break the rules in order to break us.

You know, I'd like to say that I lost my innocence that day. But that would be a complete lie; I often doubt I ever had a shred of innocence to begin with. But I learned that people are willing to sacrfice a lot in order to get their tiny victories, including their own dignity. We had set out to represent, in this tiny race, the slackers, geeks, weirdos, and anybody else at that high school who didn't play by the rules. And we became heros in the school, martyrs even, because of it. We may not have gained higher office in this election. But at least we brought the powers that be down to our level.