Popular culture. It’s the music we listen to, the movies we watch and, in this media-saturated twenty-first century, it seems to be the very air we breathe. There’s no escaping pop culture — just ask the Middlebury staff.
The Campus recently emailed a selection of staff members, offering each the chance to answer a single question: “What pop culture moment stands out most in your memory?”
As students, we know these individuals as librarians, career advisors and technology specialists, among other roles. But as the responding staff members’ generously enthusiastic answers suggest, they are also concert fanatics, movie buffs and former MTV teens. Here is a glimpse at what pop culture means to the people who make Middlebury run.
Attending a musical performance by a favorite artist is an electrifying experience that cannot truly be described in words. That said, the overwhelming majority of staff respondents who cited a concert as their defining pop culture memory sure took language’s ability to capture the thrill of live music to its compelling limit.
Caroline Crawford, senior writer in the marketing & creative services department, recalled traveling with her older brother and his friends to Giants Stadium for her first concert: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band performing in the rocker’s beloved home state of New Jersey during the iconic 1984 “Born in the U.S.A” tour.
“I was so close to Bruce that I could see him sweating,” Crawford wrote. “The concert lasted 4.5 hours and is still the best concert I’ve ever seen (and I’ve seen a lot).”
The best concert experience of ADA Coordinator Jodi Litchfield’s life was attending a Queen + Adam Lambert concert in London with her friends in June 2022.
“[It was] a huge deal to see Queen in their hometown as a die-hard fan!” Litchfield said.
Arts Events Manager Molly Andres reflected on seeing several leading ’80s musical groups perform live throughout her teenage years, including Tears for Fears, Wham!, Duran Duran and INXS. The show that she seemed to remember most fondly, however, was a concert in her senior year of high school put on by none other than Billy Idol.
“[M]y friends and I … skipped class and queued up early,” Andres wrote. “We had a blast waiting together all day, wrapped in blankets and doing food runs. In the end, we got amazing seats and rocked out to ‘White Wedding.’”
Many years later, Andres is still a frequent concertgoer, now singing along with her 14-year-old daughter to the voices of Noah Kahan and Louis Tomlinson.
“Let’s just say, I’m having fun feeling like a teen again,” she joked.
Associate Director of Career Advising Alicia Gomez also views concerts as opportunities to bond with family. Gomez remembered being in middle school and her dad taking her to New York City to see a performance by the Latin pop star Carlos Vives, whose Colombian heritage was a source of pride for many in attendance.
“My dad is Colombian. When I walked into the concert venue that day, I felt like I was walking into a family reunion,” Gomez wrote. “I saw so many Colombian flags waving in the air, and we all sang along. It is one of my happiest childhood memories.”
Though many would say it’s the best way, going to a concert is not the only way to experience the joys of music. For the responding staff members who came of age in the ’80s, television was a powerful medium for interacting with artists and enjoying their latest hits. No development of the decade was more foundational to this cultural practice than the debut of MTV in August 1981, which a handful of respondents, including Dean of Admissions Nicole Curvin, identified as a core pop culture memory.
“I recall the launch (1981) and impact of MTV — bringing more musical artists into [the] mainstream,” Curvin wrote. “Although MTV was slow to fully embrace diverse and world musicians initially, I appreciated the artistry and storytelling of the music videos they played.”
Curvin specifically remembered one song rising above the rest in the MTV video cycle: “Thriller,” Michael Jackson’s 1982 smash single off the eponymous best-selling album of all time. As she put it, the song “was a big deal at the time.”
It is a testament to how dominant of a cultural force the “King of Pop” was during his reign that Curvin’s was not the only “Thriller”-centric response received by The Campus. Recounting a birthday party at a roller rink that she went to when she was eight, Film and Media Librarian Amy Frazier described how she and the rest of the skating kids screeched to a standstill when a large screen playing music videos flashed to the zombie-themed hit.
“Everyone congregated at the end of the rink, kids even sat on the floor, and we all just watched,” Frazier wrote. “It was Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller,’ and it demanded our undivided attention.”
None of the respondents got the chance to meet Jackson — an encounter that would have almost certainly taken the pop culture memory crown — but there were still some amazing celebrity run-ins reported by Middlebury’s staff. Nate Burt, manager of the IT Service Desk, had such a run-in with another of New Jersey’s hard-rocking sons.
“In April 2009, my family shared a crowded 4 a.m. airport van from a Vegas hotel with Jon Bon Jovi and his band,” Burt wrote. Playing it cool, he and his family went the whole ride without giving anything more than “a few quiet greetings or nods” to the legend behind “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
Director of the Mahaney Arts Center Liza Sacheli had a direct celebrity encounter when she was invited backstage after a 2016 Broadway performance of “Hamilton.”
“We’d brought Daveed Digs (who played Jefferson/Lafayette) to Middlebury for a Performing Arts Series event a couple years prior, and he invited me on-stage after the show. I got to meet Lin-Manuel Miranda!” Sacheli wrote, adding that her moment with the rapping Alexander Hamilton himself occurred just weeks before his musical swept the Tony Awards.
Las Vegas and New York City are ideal settings to bump into the famous, but for Ethan Murphy, audiovisual technical director of the Film and Media Culture department, it wasn’t necessary to step outside his office.
“I’m pretty oblivious when it comes to student last names and try not to get caught up with the idea of celebrity,” Murphy admitted. But when a graduating student came by his office to introduce him to his visiting grandfather, the film enthusiast was “legitimately starstruck” to find himself shaking hands with actor and filmmaker Robert Redford.
Murphy’s brush with Hollywood royalty is a reminder that pop culture is more than music, with that storied SoCal locale serving as a wellspring for many of the most indelible works of mass entertainment. This point is not lost on MIIS Career & Academic Advisor Scott Webb, who as a child got to take two truly once-in-a-lifetime trips to the movie theater.
“I’m a Generation X person, born in 1973 … I saw the original ‘Star Wars’ (‘Episode IV - A New Hope’) in theaters. Also the original ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ (and basically most blockbuster movies of the ’80s),” Webb wrote of his formative filmgoing experiences.
As this memory and many of the others offered by Middlebury’s staff demonstrate, people are most susceptible to singularly meaningful pop culture experiences when they are young. The vividness with which the responding staff narrated their stories, however, proves that the best music, movies and other features of pop culture are often not just life-changing but life-lasting. To all the respondents, thank you for letting the Middlebury community briefly share in these cherished moments.
Jack Torpey '24 (he/him) is an Arts and Culture Editor. He writes film reviews for the Reel Critic column.
Jack is studying English with a minor in Film and Media Culture. Outside The Campus, he works as a peer writing tutor at the Writing Center and is a member of the Middlebury Consulting Group.
