School Officials Believe Teen Stole Piercing Equipment

An Ellettsville high school student was suspended last week and may face criminal charges after he allegedly stole piercing equipment from a local tattoo and piercing studio, and pierced several of his fellow students.

The student is suspected of breaking through a window at the Grafik Dragon Tattoo And Piercing Wednesday and stealing more than $8,000 in merchandise, RTV6's Jeremy Brilliant reported.

"The next day I started getting calls from parents about their kids have gotten pierced and one of them implicated me that I did it, and I didn't," the piercing studio's owner, Sonny Cain, said.

Edgewood High School administrators said they tracked the thefts to a teenage student who pierced about a dozen of his friends' eyebrows, lips and tongues, some during school lunch breaks, Brilliant reported.

"You have an unlicensed person using an instrument that could possibly expose kids to HIV, Hepatitis B or C, so obviously the safety and well being of the kids is what our concern is," Richland Bean Blossom Assistant Superintendent James Rubush said.

Lisa Marcum's said her 16-year-old son received an eyebrow piercing from the student. He disputes the school system's claim that around a dozen teens were involved, saying that more than 40 were involved


"I was terrified when I found out it was in school," Lisa Marcum said. "(I'm hoping) that the hepatitis test he's gotten is gonna come out negative, and I hope the AIDS test he's gonna have to take in two weeks is going to come out negative, and I hope that any child that's scared to tell their parents -- I got a piercing at school but took it out -- I hope they tell their parents."

"Ungloved piercing going from one person to the next -- it's just a way to transfer disease," Cain (pictured, right) added.

The student was suspended until the end of the school year and may also face criminal charges for theft and for piercing minors without parental consent, Brilliant reported.

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Thousands of college students in Boston will march down the aisle this month, collect the receipt for four years of higher education, and transfer the tassel from one side of their mortarboard to the other. After 20 years of trying, I will finally be among them tomorrow morning.

The decades in classes with ever-younger students have provided funny anecdotes that I often use as cocktail-hour fodder among my graying peers. As a freshman in 1984, I struggled through ''Mein Kampf" and discussed the Reagan administration. In the past two years, I have had instructors who were in primary school when Reagan was president.

But this isn't some inspirational tale of a busy, working, suburban mother of four finally getting that long-sought degree. It's about how my college experience may end up teaching my children a lot more than it's taught me -- and not in any way I ever expected.

Though I'm hesitant to admit this to friends and neighbors, looking back on my long marinade in academia, I've realized that despite spending $40,000 pursuing higher education, only one class succeeded in really challenging my perspective. It was a creative writing class at Emerson College, cleverly disguised under this title: Comedy.

At first, I thought of Shakespeare's comedies -- witty, intellectual writing that has endured for centuries. But when I learned it was about writing for television sitcoms, my reaction was to reach for a ''drop" slip and find a more erudite course befitting my seniority. That's because I don't watch television, and I couldn't imagine starting -- particularly with sitcoms, which I considered the bottom of the barrel.

As a parent of four impressionable girls, I had long ago shut off the family's access to what I considered mind-numbing prime-time television fare. This battle was one of the most important acts of parenthood, I believed. But after years of fending off their attacks with, ''You'll thank me later," I realize the kids may have been right all along.

I now regard comedy writing as the pinnacle of my many college years. The popular class, taught by a kooky Boston stand-up comic named Mike Bent, was aimed at teaching students how to elicit guffaws from a TV audience. Homework was limited to studying as many prime-time television shows as possible. In the beginning, I was sure I'd fail.

The first thing I noticed about the class was that students actually attended. From my observations, today's college student drinks endless amounts of expensive coffee, may change his hair color mid-week, and participates in intramural body piercing. Attending class is not a big priority.

But in this class, the $3,000 tuition suddenly meant something. Students participated in discussion, believing they could some day get jobs writing cute comebacks for the likes of the little boy in ''Two and a Half Men."

One of them, Andrew Coyle, a soft-spoken junior from Needham, guided me through the early weeks of the class, while I struggled with the shocking reality that sitcoms are America's social currency. He started writing scripts in fourth grade, has encyclopedic knowledge of every gag and deadpan line delivered in the last 15 years, and plans to make a living off our culture's insatiable appetite for more.

While I may be beyond salvaging, having watched only one episode of ''The Simpsons," Coyle offered a cautionary tale about friends who were TV-deprived as children who are now starving for the quips of Ray Romano and the antics of ''Malcolm in the Middle." Your daughters will make up for lost time later by gorging on television, he warned.

For a while, my mind was a jumble of conflicting emotions: Who am I to doubt Andrew's career goals and likely success? After all, the growth of television through cable and satellite has only expanded his career options, while my own, as a journalist, have shrunken along with the number of daily newspaper readers. How can I deny my creative children the opportunity to compete with the Andrew Coyles of the world? It seemed refusing them this potential career path might be more permanently damaging than body piercing after all.

So, as I turn on the set and introduce my family to the foreign landscape of evening television, I'm opening a world of new opportunities for them. Then again, maybe if I tell them it's for their own good, they won't want to watch.

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