Campus Conversations

Song and Rhyme

On Thursday night at Drew House, students experienced two events showing off the College’s best MCs, freestylers and masters of spoken word. The night opened with “Step to the Mic: A Night of Cultural Expression,” organized by Lynettra D. Artis ’05 and Anderline Bredy ’04 followed by “Mic Domination,” an MC competition organized by Samuel Critchlow ’05.

“The performances could have been anything from singing to playing an instrument, to reading poetry or spoken word. The invitation was for everyone,” Artis commented.

“It was about feeling the ambience of the night. I wanted to transform the common room into a cool lounge so that anyone and everyone would really feel an artistic vibe,” said Brady.

The performances of the evening rose beyond expectations. In particular, “Taharqa Patterson [’05] and Pete Weiss [’05] are a dynamic duo, that blessed the audience with two or three R&B songs that brought tears to my eyes,” said Bredy. Bredy also performed to an enthusiastic audience.

Artis and Bredy were especially pleased with the performance of the Voices for the Voiceless poets. “A silence fell over the audience and people could not speak for about two minutes,” Bredy recalled.

Following the open mic was “Mic Domination,” an MC battle. “Pairs of MCs had a short amount of time each to [improvise] the best verse they could to an instrumental hip-hop beat,” said Critchlow, who hosts a hip-hop radio show at WAMH and DJs at TA. “Judges reward cleverness, delivery, individual style and evidence that the verse is made up on the spot. At stake was a $100 cash prize and perhaps, more importantly, local notoriety.”

With 20 MCs and about 100 people in the audience, Critchlow’s favorite part of the evening was “seeing the crowd react to the MCs. There was so much energy in the room and tension between the two MCs at the mic, the whole crowd hung on their every word.”

This eventful evening of collaboration proved to be enjoyable and moving for all of its participants and viewers.

You’ll never guess

Bring together a threatening, delusional man dressed in army fatigues, a scantily-clad, cookie-loving hippie, a (male) host dressed in purple feathers and hot-pink flares. What do you end up with, after you add an opportunistic writer, a naive Harvard student, a preachy man with car-salesman hair and a husband so obsessed with a book that he dog-ears every page? The result of this crazy combination was Friday night’s Gads’ Murder Mystery.

The actors in this interactive performance invited the audience to solve a murder mystery while the cast provided laughs and entertainment. When the dust cleared, the hippie had been bludgeoned to death, the slow Harvard student turned out to be a remarkably talented investigator and the host in pink revealed his true identity as a squealing dinosaur-and was then quickly killed off by his angered lover.

The cast urged the audience to solve the whodunit; and then assigned rewards for the “most creative,” “most patently wrong” and “most accurate” guesses.

Kit Wallach ’06 solved the mystery and won a special prize. “It was the most meaningful moment in my life. My life is complete now; I’m never going to classes again. I’m just going to stay in my room, not eat or sleep, and play my Mary Kate and Ashley Official Friendship Connections Game,” she avowed.

So, when all was said and done, you might ask, “who was the real culprit?” No, it wasn’t the dinosaur. It was the jealous husband, inspired by a scene in his favorite book, who showed his deadly side and ended his wife’s life.