The slightest complaint...

You can't even put on a play anymore...

The saddest lad in the class of 2005 at a Los Angeles high school may be the student who got his way.

El Camino Real is the Woodland Hills high school that collects national academic decathlon titles the way Rupert Murdoch collects television stations. Its big student play was to premiere Wednesday night, a satiric stage piece written back when most of the students were still gumming their lunch, that is, the 1990s: "The Complete History of America (Abridged)."

The play's original jacket showed George Washington as Groucho Marx. The drama students' updated poster for the play subbed out Washington for George Bush - likewise tricked out in Groucho's horn-rimmed glasses with a stogie and a Saddam Hussein-sized mustache.

The student in question complained about the poster. The 'stache, he told the school paper, made Bush look "like a Middle Eastern person." It savaged the student's sensibilities so deeply that he went to the principal, who went to the school district lawyers, who, shopping for a way out of this, found one more: The cigar endorses smoking. Take the thing down. Score one for the phylum invertebra academia.