Major Ragers with Frankie Mizikowski

By: LJ Katch, Contributor

Sitting across from me today is Frankie Mizitkowski, a tall and broad shouldered man squeezed into a small patio chair. You might know him from his run for class representative of 2027, a campaign based on only one promise: more trash cans. It’s possible you’ve seen his fever dream Instagram reels, where he speaks to the camera filming exclusively in .5, pointing at you like a liberal arts Uncle Sam. Or you may just have been greeted by him on the street. You may remember him by his long blonde hair, his rosy button up shirt, or his small round glasses that add a hint of academia to his look. Most likely, you remember his voice, loud and inviting, with a permanent sense of enthusiasm. 

It’s a beautiful fall day, the leaves are just starting to show hints of crimson and it’s warm enough that Frankie and I could be out with our friends at this moment in light sweaters, enjoying the last of the sun’s warmth. Instead we are sitting on opposite ends of a table outside of Kahn Hall, the dorm both of us call home. I can’t help but feel like I’m holding him hostage, even though he willfully agreed to this interview. In fact he agreed more excitedly than you would expect of a man asked to be interrogated on Instagram by someone as good as a stranger. 

He’s telling me about his life at Oberlin, just as I asked. See, I told him he was here because I considered him a celebrity on campus, and I wanted to understand what that meant for him and his experience at Oberlin. In turn, he told me he would do his best to be honest with me, and he seems to be staying true to his world. For all appearances, he rattles every thought in his head off to me like a secretary reading notes. 

I ask him what I’ve been wondering for a while, whether Frankie feels connected to the people around him, whether he feels like they know him. He tells me this: 

“I feel like everybody here is here for a reason, and because I’m here for my reason, and everybody is here for their reason, and somehow we’re connected by that reason. I don’t know if it’s spiritual, mental, physical, whatever the reason be, I feel like I connect here with people. I feel like I’m connecting.”

It would be very heartwarming to hear, except for the fact that I don’t quite believe it. 

I’m not a complete stranger to Frankie, at this point I’ve known him for a little over a month. I actually met Frankie on the first day of my time here at Oberlin. Like many, my first impression of him was his voice. 

“Major rager on the third floor of Kahn right now.” 

This was spoken by him to my neighbors one door down on the second floor of Kahn hall, just as the move in stress had died down and everyone seemed to have all their belongings set in their temporary place. 

My neighbors looked at Frankie incredulously, unabashedly audacious and slightly awkward as he stood in front of them. They were probably wondering who the hell was throwing a party four hours into move-in, but they were also desperate to make new friends. Like Eve in front of the apple, they considered this bizarre temptation from this bizarre man. Frankie was a beacon of confidence on a day of anxiety and unknown. They were just settling in, but Frankie already ruled the school. 

I get the opportunity to experience this event in retrospect with Frankie in our interview. All the major ragers were really just a small get-together in Frankie’s dorm room, with vinyl records playing in the background and a popcorn machine to stave off hunger. 

“I wanted to get people involved and the whole point of the major ragers, well it was kinda ironic, cuz you know ‘major rager’ makes it sound like it was a huge head banging kinda thing. Really the whole vibe was I wanted people to get together and just talk.” 

I’ve been really excited to write this profile, anxious to interview the man who has gained so much popularity over the course of our first month at Oberlin. Many have asked me why I believe Frankie is a celebrity. My first answer would be that many Oberlin students call him the celebrity of campus, including Frankie himself. But this title doesn’t just result from an inflated sense of ego. It comes from the brags I’ve heard from the people who knew him first, the “original Franksters,” as they call themselves, or the people who call out to him in the street, yelling, “that’s my president!” I find proof even in the people who question the title I give Frankie, and roll their eyes to me in the privacy of our conversations about “people like him.” My roommate told me that “everyone has a divisive opinion on Frankie.” It’s the duplicitous side of fame, like tabloids and opinion pieces in the form of cafeteria gossip. Opinions from people who don’t really know him. 

Frankie feeds me a sweeter tale of his persona.

“I don’t know if I was annoying as a kid, but they always said I was,” Frankie does not tell me who specifically found him annoying, he may be referring to a general atmosphere of dismissal that he implies plagued him for a lot of his childhood. “For me that’s one of my values personally, I never call anyone annoying…As I am now is how I was as a kid. Nothing ever changed, I was always loud, I always talked a lot, I always had a lot to say.”

Fortunately, the story changed when he got to middle school, “Instead of my loud voice being like ‘take it from a two to a zero’ or ‘Frankie’s so annoying, he’s so loud, he talks too much’ it was more like ‘you know maybe that’s a talent you have, maybe talking, that kinda stuff can be used for good’.”

If you haven’t noticed, Frankie would be an excellent motivational speaker. He sits in the chair in front of me in the same electrified upright position he constantly stands in, his blocky hands constantly emphasizing the words he speaks. He also has an interesting habit of saying my name many times throughout the conversation, a technique that could possibly have been picked up on the campaign trail. Whatever he’s doing, it’s wonderfully appealing to listen to. The story he weaves for me is inspiring, the way his eccentricities, which once plagued him, became his greatest strength. 

“I was a celebrity starting in middle school. In music class I made a song called ‘Frankie! Bum Bum Bum Oooo Frankie Frankie!’” He does this a lot, breaking into song. It happens whenever there is a lag in the conversation. “My music teacher recorded me doing it and put it on the board, so ever since sixth grade I was cultivating this image for myself.” 

No one is confounded by Frankie like I am. To everyone around me, Frankie is as he appears, the excited guy who greets everyone he meets. The only people who do question Frankie are the friends of mine who suspect an ulterior motive to the fame: the dreaded attention seeking. But I don’t care if Frankie’s bubbly persona is secretly the result of a desire for attention. No, what I care about is the deep loneliness that comes from the stardom, a symptom of being chronically talked about and never listened to. Because in all honesty, everyone’s opinions on Frankie, positive or negative, require them to take persona at face value and not question what is behind the mask. 

So let’s get one thing straight: Frankie does want attention. When I ask him if he enjoys being a celebrity, he responds immediately. 

“Oh I like it. I really like it. I’m not one of those people who needs attention,” he pauses and tenses up, like a child admitting a secret. “But I do sure like it. So it’s definitely a good feeling. I’m not looking forward to not becoming a celebrity any time soon, so I’m hoping to stay in the spotlight.”

Frankie tells me he’s an open book, and his brazen honesty is fully on display here. But the reason why he isn’t ashamed to admit part of his status comes from a desire for attention is because it goes deeper than that. I ask him if fame has any drawbacks,secretly hoping he’ll reveal some dark truth about the nature of celebrity.

He smiles, “Yeah paparazzi, but that’s every celebrity, you know!” He then admits to me the one actual con: That sometimes people know his name and he doesn’t know theirs. It’s an important thing to him, knowing people’s names. Maybe it’s why he says mine so often.

“That’s why the major ragers were a thing. It wasn’t just for me to make friends, it was for kids in my hall to come and make friends…I left to get popcorn and I came back in and everyone was in a circle talking and I’m like ‘this is the best friggin thing ever.” One other charming detail to note is that Frankie never curses, but instead says “friggin” and “gosh”. In fact, he’s generally incredibly charming, especially when discussing his infamous campaign. 

Something you would not expect of Frankie is his genuine interest in politics. He was involved in the Sunrise Movement back home in Pittsburgh, which for some reason he never brings up in his videos. When I ask him what he wanted to do in politics, he told me he wanted to be president, then edited that to Supreme Court justice, though his intended majors are neuroscience and theater. I don’t tell him in the interview that the biggest critique of his campaign is that it reads as a popularity contest to many, considering his lack of campaign promises and generally nonsensical videos. But Frankie addresses this without prompting. 

“The way I connect to people is through my humor. That’s why my videos are funny…everybody’s so used to ‘I’m gonna work for you’ and ‘I care for you’…So much of it, especially with first year representative is the same old stuff just recycled with a new mask. My humor shows I actually care about people.

“I want people to come up to me and say ‘Frankie, there’s not enough trash cans.’ That’s actually how I got ‘not enough trash cans’. I didn’t come up with that myself. Somebody was walking by and they said, ‘gosh I really wish there were more trash cans here.’...Right then and there I’m like ‘I’m gonna honestly listen to what people say.’ Maybe my campaign is ‘no bugs, more trash cans’ but those all came from hearing what people around me said. My campaign is whatever people are saying to me.” 

It’s a brilliant strategy, to have no campaign talking points or goals because his only goal is to do what you want done, whatever it may be. I could read this like the cynic in me wants to: he’s selling our needs back to us. But the thing that is hardest to convey over writing is that as much as the words he speaks can sound like a cop out, in real life Frankie exudes an overwhelming earnestness that I find it increasingly difficult to attribute to a false persona. More likely than a brilliant con artist, I’m talking to a guy who values community and acceptance because he’s been denied it before, and who wants to be rep because he loves this place that he feels loved by. 

“That’s another reason why I want to be rep, is I want to build community…It’s so scary to meet new people. And you see people who haven’t found their people yet…I wanna appeal to those people…The people who might be scared to go to a major rager. The people who might be scared to get out there and connect. And I wanna say ‘it’s okay, this is home, this is gonna be home for the next four years, and five years for some of us.’ I wanna help everybody get together.”

Our interview ends at around the fifty minute mark, with Frankie telling me he has another interview to get to. This one isn’t a joke, which makes it even funnier. It’s been incredibly exciting to talk to him, but as we part in the Kahn common room, I feel slightly empty. I want the interview to bring us closer in some way, so I can understand him in a way the others don’t. But there is something still keeping me from the truth. 

Here’s another story: 

Frankie didn’t end up winning his campaign, which could be attributed to that same false love all celebrities experience: the validation of a crowd who has no real loyalty to him. But the day after he lost, I saw Frankie out on the town, with the same friends he told me might stick with him for a lifetime. I didn’t believe him at the time, I don’t know if I do now. 

Let me tell you one more: 

On the first day of my life at Oberlin, I was aimlessly wandering around my sterile dorm room when I heard Frankie’s voice coming from outside the door I had propped open, hoping someone would wander in. I watched him talk to my neighbors, my head peaked into the hall like a baby bird waiting to jump. I smiled at the thought of a ‘major rager’ on day one of college, and at the strange charm of Frankie’s bustling, slightly awkward persona. 

I didn’t take the leap that day, instead I stayed in my room and waited for my nerves to cool. I’ve gained a lot of confidence here since and I’ve met a lot of people that might stick for a lifetime, but I only have a handful of friends in Kahn. I wonder if I’d have more if I went with him. 

Part of me wants to be like Frankie, the other part of me knows I am not him, and that it’s not something I can control. I am a person who takes time to make friends where Frankie does not; I collect a few close friends where Frankie collects many. Maybe if Frankie had confessed to me that he was indeed deeply lonely, it would have vindicated my way of functioning. But why would he confess that to a stranger anyway?

I have no idea how Frankie does it, how he can be fulfilled and stretched so thin across so many people. But I think believing Frankie can be known makes me feel slightly more hopeful that I can be known. It’s the best I can do to balance on that suspension of disbelief. 

Consider this an epilogue: 

About a week after the interview, the form went out to the school to vote for student representative of 2027. Noah ended up winning, probably due to the numerous posters up around the school that demonstrated actual campaign promises. At least that’s what the people who voted for him tell me. And I’ll admit, it was a good campaign strategy. But when the day came, I voted for Frankie. I voted for him because I felt like I knew him the most.