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(02/19/15 1:28am)
Middlebury students left the frigid winter temperatures of Vermont and travelled to San Juan, Puerto Rico, to participate in a women’s empowerment MAlt trip over February break. Over the course of the following week, they engaged with an organization known as Iniciativa Comunitaria, or Community Initiative (IC), and worked with women and transgender sex workers to participate in hands-on, alternative approaches seeking to aid Puerto Rico’s prominent drug abuse problem.
Trip leaders Camila Fernandez ’15 and Ryan Coates ’15 originally chose the location due to their interest in Puerto Rico’s rich cultural and political history, and then expanded the trip to focus on their other shared passion of female empowerment and women’s rights.
“Puerto Rico is interesting because it’s part of the United States and Latin America at the same time, and we wanted to see how that played out,” Coates said. “We made an effort to integrate into the Puerto Rican culture to get a better cultural context of the community we were working with.”
During the first few days of their trip, they attended training sessions and cultural competency workshops facilitated by IC, where they were able to speak to many of the volunteers and learn more about what the organization is about.
“Speaking with volunteers was fascinating because these are people from San Juan who wanted to give back to their community,” group member Jiya Pandya ’17 said. “They’re all really passionate about what they’re doing.”
With a slogan that reads “Somos un gran abrazo,” or, “we are a big hug,” IC was founded by a doctor who attended medical school in Puerto Rico and was disappointed by the current solutions to help the social injustices of the community. Through IC, alternative solutions are brought to the table: clean needle exchanges to prevent the spread of infection among drug users, outreach programs to women and transgender sex workers, food, water, and medical supplies offered to homeless populations, and child developmental programs. Some of the most important tenants of their programs are empathy, compassion, and “amor” — love — and they strive to create a happy and healthy community.
After the MAlt group finished their training, they were able to participate directly in the services IC provides. From 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. Friday night, their last night in Puerto Rico, the group split, with the first half working with women and transgender sex workers and the second half engaging in the clean needle exchange program.
Working with the program’s head coordinator Ivana Fred, some of the MAlt trip participants followed Fred’s vehicle as she went to certain areas and neighborhoods of Puerto Rico where many sex workers congregated, giving out baggies of condoms and lubricant and speaking to women and transgender sex workers about the organization. They were surprised to find out that there had been a police raid in that same area the night before.
“Not many transgender [sex workers] were coming to the car … because they [the police] had arrested them the night before. There is a lot of police brutality against them; they cut their hair and hold them down,” Fernandez said. “It’s pretty surprising to see and hear about the direct targeting of transgender women where in a neighborhood two to three blocks away, there’s a very big drug area.”
“[The police] would come dressed as normal people and offer a price [for sex], and a lot of the women caught were put in jail and charged fines of $250 minimum. They can’t afford to pay that,” said Ellen Sartorelli ’17, another participant of the trip.
Other students travelled with IC’s program Operación Compasión, where they drove with fellow volunteers in a truck with food and medical supplies to prominent San Juan homeless communities, distributing food, water, and clean needles to prevent illness, particularly HIV, which in Puerto Rico is spread more commonly through needles than sexual contact.
“Most of what people do who volunteer is talk to the people there, see what they need. It’s really about building relationships and making them feel wanted, included, cared for,” Pandya said.
Pandya explained how she met David, a man suffering from a drug addiction and who had been on the streets for about two months. Any money he earned, however, was spent either to call his family or buy more drugs.
“He told us he knew he could save up money and travel to the drug recovery center that the organization had,” Pandya said, “and he told us that he wanted to, but he couldn’t: he didn’t have the will to do it.”
Another man Pandya encountered had a mosquito bite that he had scratched open, and because he didn’t have access to clean water, it had not healed properly. She had to hold a flashlight as three medical student volunteers peeled off his sock and washed his wound.
“We don’t think twice about those things, but for someone who doesn’t have access [to clean water], that’s a much bigger deal,” Pandya said.
When they were not working with IC, the MAlt trip was exploring Puerto Rico and the cultural community.
“We were experiencing Puerto Rico as a real Puerto Rican would,” Sartorelli said. “We weren’t limited to the organization. We learned about living in Puerto Rico.”
One of the many interesting points the group learned as they experienced life in Puerto Rico was that grocery prices were much higher because Puerto Rico only produces 13 to 15 percent of its own food while the rest is imported because of the limitations of United States trade agreements. Some locals also referred to Puerto Rico as a colony, others as a country: it was never called a territory even though the locals know it is considered part of the United States.
“It was interesting because as you’re driving through there’s Spanish on the radio, on the billboards, and then a Walmart just jumps out at you,” Sartorelli said.
“It’s the United States in some ways and then in other ways it’s not,” Coates said.
A cultural, political, and social immersion into Puerto Rico itself, the San Juan MAlt trip provided for many of its members another look at women’s empowerment as well as a chance for an interactive and collaborative service trip experience.
“I’ve always considered myself passionate about female empowerment,” Sartorelli said, “But now, after doing this, I think I want to get more involved with organizations like WomenSafe or MiddSafe in the future. It was a great opportunity to do work that people always say they’re passionate about.”
(02/18/15 11:33pm)
Amidst the flashy festivities of Winter Carnival, this past weekend marked the second annual performance of The Vagina Monologues in the Hepburn Zoo. An episodic play written in 1996 by Middlebury alum Eve Ensler ’75, the production delves unabashedly into various elements of the female experience, including sex, love, menstruation, masturbation and birth. Proceeds from each sold-out performance Feb. 12 to 14 went toward WomenSafe, a 24-hour hotline dedicated to ending domestic and sexual violence.
Sponsored by the on-campus women’s resources center, Chellis House, and directed by Jiya Pandya ’17 and Sandra Markowitz ’15.5, The Vagina Monologues consisted of “happy facts” and “not-so-happy facts” about vaginas, as well as deeply personal, real-life stories of empowerment, inner turmoil and self-reflection. The heavy monologues came interspersed with moments of humor and warmth, bringing the audience on an emotional journey of sympathy, discomfort, bemusement, joy and everything in between.
While the original, off-Broadway performance featured actresses delivering monologues alone onstage, the College production branched off to include group scenes, interpretive movements and interactive dialogues. The result was a fascinating and elegant narrative on sexuality, female identity and the challenges of womanhood, as performed by a cast of 14 female students.
“These monologues have been done a countless number of times,” explained actress Akhila Khanna ’17. “For more feeling of unity and community, this production incorporated many actors.”
Indeed, in the intimate performing space of the Hepburn Zoo, where the actresses often stood within an arm’s reach of the front row and some audience members sat sprawled on the floor, an overwhelming sense of support and solidarity resonated throughout the performance. Before the opening scene, Pandya and Markowitz led the audience in a rousing chant of “vagina,” explaining that it was crucial that everyone become comfortable with the word before sitting through the highly uncensored 90-minute performance.
If anyone thought that “vagina” was bad, then they certainly must have felt squeamish during the opening scene as the cast named off a rapid-fire list of alternate names for the organ. From “Pussycat” in Great Neck, New York to “twat” in New Jersey to “Pooki” in Westchester, it quickly became clear that the vagina is the bearer of many colorful titles.
Yet, as narrator Jeanette Cortez ’15 noted: “There’s so much darkness and secrecy surrounding [vaginas] – like the Bermuda triangle. Nobody ever reports back from there.”
Building from that, the play proceeded to unravel much of society’s misperceptions surrounding the vagina – what it is like, what it goes through and what it needs. A sense of candid honesty pulsed through the monologues, a few of which ranted furiously against tampons, advocated for a greater love of vaginal hair (described sweetly by Becca Hicks ’15 as “the leaf around the flower, the lawn around the house”) and recounted one woman’s first pleasurable, lesbian experience. In the latter enticing monologue, “The Little Coochi Snorcher That Could,” KJ Davidson-Turner ’17.5 took on a fascinatingly complex character with a traumatic past.
“I realize later [the lady] was my surprising, unexpected and politically incorrect salvation,” Davidson-Turner stated in her vivid closing lines. “She transformed my sorry-ass Coochi Snorcher and raised it into a kind of heaven.”
As the play charged on, the crowd clapped, laughed and snapped appreciatively at each new striking commentary and witty insight. At other moments, when the scenes broached on incredibly dark themes of rape, genital mutilation and abuse, the room fell silent.
“Female genital mutilation has been inflicted on approximately 130 million girls and young women,” narrator Cortez stated at one point. “In the 28 countries where it is practiced, mostly in Africa, about three million young girls a year can expect the knife – or the razor or a glass shard – to cut their clitoris or remove it altogether.”
Like many audience members hearing this fact for the first time, actress Mary Baillie ’18 found it difficult to deal with such heavy material.
“I still can’t listen to that,” she said. “I was really happy because my monologue was right after [the genital mutilation piece], so I could just go to the dressing room and get ready for that. I would just sit there with my ears covered.”
One scene in particular managed to strike a touching balance between deep vulnerability and lightheartedness. Wrapped in a dark red shawl and hunched over on a stool, Michelle Kim ’17 enraptured the audience in a poignant tribute to one elderly woman’s closeted relationship to her “down-there.” Following a nervous sexual encounter in her teens, she now refers to her vagina as damp, clammy, and “closed due to flooding.”
“I haven’t been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with Eisenhower,” she said, prompting giggles from the crowd.
With no theatrics or fellow actresses for onstage support, Kim spoke directly into the audience, putting her earnest storytelling skills and endearing mannerisms on
full display.
While the power of her performance lay in its quiet, thoughtful honesty, another highly impactful scene featured a dynamic self-written monologue by Khanna and Sally Seitz ’17. Hailing respectively from New Delhi, India and Nashville, Tennessee, the two women channeled the strict sexual standards of each of their cultures by preaching impassionately to the audience. Khanna wore Hindu prayer beads around her neck, while Sally donned a large cross necklace.
“Thou shall not touch thyself. Thou shalt have no idea what it looks like down there,” Seitz said.
“Do not sleep around. Bilkul Nahi,” Khanna announced sternly. “We choose your single sexual partner.”
Their lines played off of each other, crafting an intriguing parallel between two seemingly far-removed places. Near the end, their monologues began to intersect even more closely, as both actresses paused and asked simultaneously, “Why do I feel guilty? Is this my fault?”
While the entire show ventured outside normal boundaries of comfort, perhaps the most unforgettably daring moment came down to a scene in which each actress mimicked a certain type of sex moan. The cast arranged themselves in various positions onstage – standing, sprawled out with their legs slightly open, and lying down – and took turns simulating such sounds as the “doggy” moan, the “college” moan (“I should be studying. I should be studying”) and the “tortured Zen” moan, an exaggerated, twisted cry that left the audience in hysterics.
Though Khanna initially felt uneasy about the moaning scene, she eventually came to terms with the bold material.
“The minute you imagine yourself as an advocate for female sexuality and for other people who are as shy and as uncomfortable about the word ‘vagina’ as you are, it’s a lot easier to go onstage,” she said. “You’re representing other people’s stories and hardships.”
With every piece of biting social commentary or provocative phrase uttered onstage, The Vagina Monologues burst open a subject that remains largely untouched in everyday conversation. Through its unapologetic forwardness, the show put on stunning display both the fearlessness of the cast and many inconvenient realities of the female experience. Uncomfortable as some of the topics may be, the messages of empowerment, exploration and acceptance behind the production deserve to be heeded. As such, perhaps it was fitting that this year’s rendition of The Vagina Monologues coincided with Valentine’s Day weekend.
“Everyone should take the time to appreciate the women in their life,” Baillie said. “The power of the female is unstoppable.”
(01/22/15 1:18am)
Early on Tuesday night, when the sun had completely set and the temperature dropping by the minute, the room slowly fills with chattering students. Some sink into beanbags. Others stretch out on one of the many couches in the cozy, lamp-lit space. At first glance, this could just be a get-together of friends about to watch a movie on the pro- jector or the weekly meeting of one of the College numerous clubs. Then Becca Hicks ’15 stands up, smiles and introduces this ses- sion’s topic of conversation.
“We are focusing on female pleasure to- night,” she said.
Clearly this is not just any old gathering.
At 6 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, between twenty and thirty people gather in the Gamut Room to partake in the student-run J-term workshop Cliteracy. Founded by Priscilla Odinmah ’15, Hicks,
Cupcakes decorated with clitoris frosting served at the student-led sex positive workshop.
Stebbins ’14.5’s bread-making process involves more than just dough: it is a craft, a science experiment, a recollection of childhood memories and a basis for friendship.
Cliterary Devices, Rhetorical Phallacy
Jeanette Cortez ’15 and Eriche Sarvay ’15, the program aims to provide a safe space to talk about something considered largely taboo in most cultures today: female sexuality.
“I felt like the conversation was miss- ing at Middlebury,” said Odinmah, explain- ing why she wanted to start Cliteracy, which was inspired by a 12-week long workshop called FemSex at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Occasionally there are cool talks on the subject and they are usually really well- attended, but there’s nothing consistent.” Hicks agrees. “At Middlebury, we’re so good at feeding the mind,” she adds. “But we need to know how to feed the body as well.”
The organizers also cite female empow- erment and discriminatory societal norms as a motive for starting the discussion group.
“Female sexuality is an area in which there is more shame, more taboos and more
compromise than male sexuality or sexuality in general,” says Odinmah.
She further explains that so much of what is talked about in modern culture is about women trying to please their partners, and that girls are taught that sex is something that should be done to them, rather than by them.
The overall goal of the workshop is to cre- ate a safe space for women to discuss subjects that people find uncomfortable or unladylike. In order to do this, the informal sessions con- sist of watching videos, playing ice-breaking games, sharing stories, asking questions and the occasional guest speaker. Each hour-and- a-half meeting focuses dialogue on a different topic. So far the workshop has covered sex myths, anatomy and pleasure and will turn next to periods, followed by language and body language.
Designed as only a J-term workshop, the leaders and participants will use the last meeting to look to the future.
“One of my goals personally is planting a seed,” Odinmah said. “Just hearing the word ‘cliteracy’ roll off the tongue is a big thing for me.” All four of the workshop’s organizers are seniors, but they hope the issue won’t die when they graduate in May.
“The more people know, the more that conversation can be spread,” Hicks said. Hav- ing received strong initial turnout and over- all positive feedback from the mostly-female group of attendees, the leaders want the pro- gram to be expanded in the future.
“My dream is for Cliteracy to exist on the same level as FemSex with a 12-week long syllabus, facilitators and guest speakers,” Odinmah said.
They also express the hope that males on campus would continue to attend.
“The way we envisioned it, it is mainly a female space. But that’s only half the popula- tion,” Hicks said. “Guys refer to a vagina as a sort of fearful black hole, but chances are, you came out of one. Just because you don’t have a clitoris, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know what it is.”
(01/22/15 1:15am)
When puberty comes around, little boys learn about the very rewarding experience of becoming a man. It is the time of muscle building, getting hair on your chest and get- ting a man’s voice. Everything gets bigger and manlier and what’s better than being a man in today’s patriarchy? Nothing. But for the female-bodied folk among us, the pro- cess is very different.
Yes, there’s the womanly figure and the magic of having babies, but puberty is also the time you get your period, affectionately called the curse of all women. (Not to men- tion that giving birth is something we’re taught is terrifying and it isn’t very sensitive to every body type to describe just one as womanly).
Puberty is awful enough, without so- cietal constructs that make you feel shame around your body and it’s functions. Women and men alike are taught to view the period as something dirty and unpleasant. It is pres- ent in multiple aspects of life, from religious conventions and cultural views, to the media.
Am I saying that having your period is an amazing experience? No. I get there’s a struggle. Menstruation is an experience that varies immensely from person to person and for many that includes a rush of hormones, cramps, bloating, etc. in addition to the icon- ic bleeding. However, there’s a big difference between saying that having your period can be unpleasant and saying it’s something dis- gusting. Because when something is disgust- ing, we feel the need to hide it.
Menstruation is something about half of us are familiar with, and from the biological perspective, it’s pretty amazing. I’m sorry but can any other organ cyclically renew its inner lining in preparation for hosting fetal devel- opment? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Does this process come with an influx of hormones? Yes. Does that make me incapable of func- tioning as a rational human being and that you can invalidate my opinion? No.
Most advertisements for feminine hy- giene products feature how worry free and clean you can be using their product. How awful is it to have to be worrying about being seen as ‘clean’ over something you can’t con- trol? When you go to the gym, you sweat and take a shower to clean yourself. Maybe it’s been a hot day so you wash your face and use some deodorant. What do you do that causes your period? Nothing. You exist. There is no ‘dirty’ practice people do in order to get their periods. Yet it’s seen as far less embarrassing to be sweaty or have pit stains than to be on your period or stain a pair of pants.
The difference is we all sweat (or just about everyone at least). Meanwhile not all of us have periods, and empathy is often a crucial ingredient for understanding. This is a man’s world and in a man’s world, wom- en aren’t worth much more than to satisfy straight men, and straight men aren’t inter- ested in having sex with women on their period. No wonder it’s a saying that women don’t poop. Women just aren’t allowed to be gross. Of course this fundamental aspect of the patriarchy isn’t the prime example of ev- eryone’s reality. There are plenty of men who view women as full and complex human be- ings and those guys are awesome! However, the stigma against periods is engrained deep in society.
Being on my period means I can’t have sex. It means I don’t feel sexy, that I can’t wear white pants. I can’t play sports or go swimming. I don’t feel capable. I’m too hor- monal. I don’t feel like I’m good company. I feel people aren’t seeing me as reasonable. All of the sudden having your period goes from being a biological function to being something limiting, dirty, and shameful that we feel a need to hide. But sometimes you can’t hide it and you shouldn’t have to.
If menstruation weren’t seen as such an awful state to be in, maybe little girls wouldn’t be nervous about dealing with the curse when it was that time of the month, and female bodied people could express dis- comfort without feeling embarrassed. Be- cause at the end of the day, despite today’s efforts to be perfect in everyway, it’s impor- tant to keep in mind that we all have bodies just doing body things and there’s nothing wrong with that.
(12/03/14 11:10pm)
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As you walk through the pink saloon-style doors with “And things that buzz in the night” written overhead, you immediately find a display of colorful things that buzz in the night, unpackaged for you to try, and a wall of pleasure products, ranging from lube to vibrators to everything in between.
“Unless I’m missing something, I am Vermont’s first women-centric sex positive store,” Kris Lawson, the owner of Curve Appeal, a romance boutique on Main Street that opened this past July. “Every other store I’ve been to in the state doesn’t do any of this at all.”
Lawson began her career 10 years ago after seeing Katie Couric attend a party on the Today Show.
“I almost dropped my child. I just thought, ‘wow, Katie Couric. If she can do this, I can totally do this,’” Lawson said.
She hit the ground running two weeks later, travelling across the region for pleasure parties, eventually growing to a team of 110 trained party consultants. As she continued to host parties, she built up a loyal customer base, many of whom recommended she open a store so they could bring their friends or their partners. When a vacancy opened up in downtown Middlebury, her neighbors, the owners of Frog Alley Tattoo, called her and told her they were looking for someone to move in next door quickly. Lawson took the plunge.
“It wasn’t a big planned out thing. It was in the back of my mind and all the sudden, it just hit,” she said.
Lawson cashed in her 401k, started the build out and decorating and bought all the products before opening this summer. She styled her shop after other boutiques, aiming to make a store where people, particularly women of all sexualities, felt comfortable. In that vein, she strays from the graphic package and porn star brands that so often dominate sex shops.
“I want something where women could come in,” she said. “I didn’t want to have names like ‘the bend-me-over buttplug.’ One of the men who came back here said, ‘this ain’t no sex boutique’, and I said ‘thank you very much!’ Because that’s exactly what I was going for. I want to reach everybody.”
She has found her best-sellers vary with the demographic, with her clientele ranging from older Vermonters to students at the College, who often come for an overview of toys and other offerings.
“It’s tough for me to grasp that all kids are being taught is don’t have sex, if you do, and you really have to, use a condom, and that’s it. End of story,” she said. “I would really love if every single woman was just empowered.”
She sees a lot of women focused on the mens’ pleasure without taking care of their own, especially younger students with less experience and women in heterosexual relationships.
“I’ve met too many women over the years of all education and all backgrounds who say ‘it’s ok, it doesn’t hurt too much and sometimes we even use lube, and that’s really a lot better.’ But the missing piece is always her pleasure, and that drives me crazy.”
The front room of Curve Appeal is lingerie, with the sex toys in a more private back room. The lingerie section caters to women of all sizes. After hearing that there were not good lingerie stores for women larger than a size 12 or 14, relegating women who needed larger sizes to online shopping, Lawson decided to carry up to size 6x.
“My first sale was a 300ish pound woman who bought a corset in a size 6x, so I felt pretty justified there,” said Lawson.
This setup serves a dual function: privacy for her customers and appeasing Middlebury residents who oppose a sex shop on Main Street. She wanted to shelter people who walked in accidentally or with a child, as well as allow her customers who are shy to warm up by looking at bras before mustering the courage to walk through the swinging doors.
“I heard the same thing over and over again: no drugs, no porn, no pipes,” Lawson said. “These are big things to Middlebury, and I don’t agree with any of those, so that worked out perfect.”
Nevertheless, the store has been met with some opposition.
“The first few months of being an open store is that filtering point where people come in and give you their two cents, and that was really hard because I wasn’t prepared for people to say that out loud,” said Lawson. “Vermont is very frightened of change. People here generally want to know what this is all about before they come in, so they’re waiting for their friends.”
But Lawson’s bubbly personality makes clients immediately comfortable, despite any initial reservations.
“I’m just one of those screaming extroverts that people tell all their stuff to at hello,” she said.
She found these confessions especially skyrocketed once she started having a private order room at her parties. While originally she wanted the order room to keep all the money straight, she found that it opened the floodgates for people’s confessions.
“I think it speaks to the trust, but moreover they don’t have anyone else to talk to. This area, especially this county, is extremely small and very sheltered, so you meet people at parties who all have the same last name. They’re not going to stand up and say ‘here’s what’s going on with my husband’ because their husband is her brother, her brother, her son, her grandson, and it’s horrifying for them,” she said.
This trust has led to a loyal customer base, which, after 10 years doing parties in the area, has helped her store get off the ground.
“Once people tell you their sex abuse stories or their anal sex problems or this one time their husband tried to do this, they’re yours forever,” she said.
Carrying the weight of other people’s sex lives, however, can be a heavy burden for Lawson, particularly with stories of sexual abuse. At first, Lawson had no training to deal with these confessions, so she had to compile a resource sheet and find her own counselor to help her process other people’s stories.
“I’d go home at night and be crying on the way home,” she said. “I needed to learn some coping stuff to get rid of that and say that’s their experience, not mine, and tomorrow we’ll meet a whole bunch of new people.”
She particularly relies on mantras and hand washing to help her compartmentalize other people’s stories and not bring them into her personal life.
For anyone who is worried about running into Lawson after telling her secrets about your sex life, fear not.
“This is the whitest, most homogenous state you’ve ever lived in. It’s such a sea of faces at this point” she said, and she is committed to confidentiality.
“Others are much more worried about it than I am,” she said. “I really don’t care that you have your six children, and you just got your first toy. We all know you’re having sex, honey, you have six kids. Secret’s out.”
Lawson also finds herwself teaching men who come into her shop about female pleasure.
“I like the education piece a lot,” she said. “I like that we can joke around about it because it makes people feel a lot more comfortable than if people come at them in a serious or studious way.”
Her big piece of advice for straight men? “The average amount of foreplay a woman needs is 20 to 22 minutes,” she said. “It’s fantastic if her vagina’s wet at hello, but that’s not really saying she’s ready to go. She should be yelling put it in if she’s ready to go.”
A Japanese major in college, Lawson never could have imagined this would be where she ended up.
“This turns out to be what I’m way more passionate about. Although Japanese is a great language, it doesn’t hold a candle to orgasms or keeping couples together.”
Curve Appeal is located at 52 Main Street below Clementine’s and is open 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Lawson offers a five percent “MiddKid” discount to students.
(12/03/14 10:35pm)
On Nov. 20 to 22, the Theatre Department presented its second faculty production of the semester, Englishman Snoo Wilson’s 1973 play, Vampire, in the Seeler Studio Theater.
Vampire is a play about ... well, no one really knows. And indeed, after an hour and a half of brash sexual exploration, one very unexpected satanic baby birthed by Mary (yes, that Mary), a terribly profane talking ox, fights between Karl Jung and Sigmund Freud, a maniacally laughing Charles Dickens and two biker boys in underwear, the majority of the audience walked away from the play with at least one brow raised – or, more likely, furrowed. Forget linear plotting and traditional character development – Vampire spans three time periods and locations, moving from 19th century Wales to World War I era England to a rebellious biker group in 1960’s London.
Over his prolific forty-year career, Wilson wrote plays, screenplays and novels of political farce, the arcane, the occult and the irrational. Vampire is certainly a Gothic example of the last three.
Professor of Theatre Cheryl Faraone has enjoyed a more than 30-year friendship and professional partnership with Wilson, undertaking 10 productions of his plays in that time, many in collaboration with Professor of Theatre Richard Romagnoli.
“The world according to Snoo Wilson is wild, bawdy, fantastical, smart and utterly resilient – this writer does not trade in despair or cynicism,” Faraone said in her Director’s Note. “We need him now.”
It is important to understand that though the term “vampire” may today immediately conjure images of glittering Robert Pattinsons, hunks with fangs or even more traditional visions of Dracula, “vampire” takes on a much deeper and more widely applicable meaning in the context of the play.
“Vampire ... peers at the ways in which various social constructs (religion, psychology, propaganda, fanatic subcultures) indoctrinate, oppress, and turn us into the living dead: ‘vampirization,’” Evann Normandin ’14.5 wrote in her Dramaturge’s Note.
Normandin, who acted in the play as a part of her senior theatre work, also took on the role of a dramaturge, a professional who deals with the research and development of a play for a company.
“I started out in the first weeks doing a lot of research for each period,” she said, “As we went on, I explored a lot of the really smart references that Snoo included in the play. I think we’ve come to as full an understanding as we could have hoped at this point, and if we had kept working on it, we would probably keep finding things out and the exploration could go on forever, which is what’s so cool about it.”
Chelsea Melone ’15 also acted in Vampire as her senior work. In addition to exploring her three main characters, Melone worked with Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre and Guest Artist Bill Army ’07 to develop the four accents needed for her roles, learning the international phonetic alphabet and participating in private sessions with the theatre alumnus as well as larger sessions designed to help the entire cast develop their many accents.
Melone’s characters, all part of a strong female lineage separated by time and place, offered cohesion to the otherwise erratic development of the play’s three acts.
The first character came in the form of Joy, the sexually curious daughter of a staunch evangelical preacher who was played with wit, humor and gravity by Nicholas Hemerling ’14.5. Joy’s desire for independence and her promiscuous behavior lead her to a séance parlor and brothel, where she is a highly sexualized spiritual medium who ultimately services – horror of horrors – her father, who is shot to death in the very coffin in which he is having sex with his daughter.
In the most impressively staged scene of the production, Fight Director Adam Milano ’15 organizes a suspenseful gun battle in which every eclectic character in the brothel scene – the proprietress of the séance room, the Chinese photographer, the innocent soldier - meets their maker, except for Joy, who brushes off the disturbing encounter with her father with little more than a sigh. In the end, she wields the offending pistol in self-defense and casually struts out of the darkened room in the soldier’s uniform and a pair of sunglasses. The scene is carefully staged to maximize tension and visual drama, which heightens as Joy’s father is killed mid-thrust and does not disappear until Joy is the only person still living in the scene.
Though Joy’s granddaughter, Sarah, is alive half a century after her oppressed ancestor, she too faces the restrictions of proper World War I era British society, forced to watch a cricket match in the confines of a tight corset while participating in the proper speech expected of a lady in upper-crust British life. Disturbed by her status as an object better seen then heard, Sarah, too, searches for freedom from her role as a woman through the Suffragette movement.
Faraone asked Resident Scenic and Lighting Designer Hallie Zieselman to include photographs pertaining to each scene flashed on the wall to add extra context to the play. The images provided reference points and additional information about each period, especially to aid comprehension of some of the longer, more complex speeches within the piece. This effect was especially helpful when British propagandist posters appeared above each side of the audience, with phrases like “Your Chums are Fighting - Why Aren’t You?” and “Women of Britain Say Go,” offering a real-world visual reference during Normandin’s impassioned speech as Anthea, a young Englishwoman calling for young men to enlist.
In the final act, Melone portrays the most contemporary descendent of Joy and Sarah, Dwight, who thrives in the anti-establishment of the punk subculture filled with gender subversion, punk-rock music and an emotional and theatrical brand of religion. Dwight’s fearless speech includes snappy one-liners like “Heaven is where the homosexual fascists go for a bit on the side.”
“In theory that should have been the freest period of all, but in fact it’s just as trapping, and in a sense, the entrapment is the supposed freedom,” Faraone said. “We expect the oppression in the beginning, but we don’t necessarily expect it now.”
Melone’s acting soared in this production as she tackled the challenge of portraying three distinct characters in one show. Each was distinctive, engaging and original.
“I think Joy, the first character I play, is the most free,” Melone said. “Dwight definitely uses sex as power, especially with the bikers, but I find that I think she’s more plagued by sex and religion than the other two. It’s more of a burden to her then anything else, so it’s not as freeing as it is with Joy.”
Also tying together the acts of the play were coffins, crafted of different sizes and colors for each scene to further evoke the themes of death and vampirization, especially when famed psychologist Sigmund Freud, played by Hemerling, climbed into his own coffin, closed the lid while still talking, and was only silenced by the stake driven into his death box.
“The fact that Freud’s teachings and words literally get in the coffin and die, sort of leaving Jung to be the new Freud, suggest that this process will happen again,” Thomas Scott ’14.5 said. “It’s a cycle of structures and philosophies rising and then dying. There will always be vampires to take those things away but something else will always replace them, which is the way of life. I think for me that sums up the theme of the show.”
Hemerling deftly tackled his roles, which ranged from a passionate religious man who has sex with his daughter in a brothel to a slightly deranged Sigmund Freud, proving himself as a standout in every scene.
Odd scenes appeared intermittently throughout the play, including a Nativity scene of such vivid imagery that it will be difficult to view the Biblical tale in quite the same way ever again. Switching the donkey with a profane ox, the three Kings with Sigmund Freud and Karl Jung squabbling over psychology and the baby Jesus with a bright red Satan baby, delivered by Jung, I am afraid I cannot try to offer an explanation for this interlude in the middle of the play. Entertaining, yes. Explicable, no. But to try to explain a play like Vampire does not do it justice, because it is not about extracting a plot or “meaning.”
“I don’t think that religion is the butt of any joke, but perhaps ascribing too much meaning to anything is,” Leah Sarbib ’15.5 said. “In the Nativity scene with Freud and Jung you have religion, you have high intellectualism and then you have the ox, who basically thinks that everyone else is super dumb for trying to say that anything really means anything more profound than it is. I don’t think that Snoo would say that religion is meaningless, but that everything is kind of meaningless if you try to ascribe too much meaning to anything. That’s dangerous, and that might be the biggest vampire of all.”
Faraone agreed that Vampire is critical of institutional and societal restraints that stifle originality, expression and personal fulfillment.
“Making anything your God is dangerous,” she said. “Defining yourself by the tenants of any ideology and using that as a straightjacket rather than finding your way through something without losing yourself in the process is sometimes the easier choice. Wilson slashes away the things that we have made vampirize us, because things only have power if you allow them to have power over you.”
As is perhaps now apparent, Vampire is not an easy play to produce. Under the capable direction of Faraone, the phenomenal acting, enticing costumes and thrilling visual drama stood as a testament to the hard work of every member of the cast and crew. Though I may not fully understand the play, I can certainly say that I am still thinking about it days later.
“It’s evocative theatre, it’s not necessarily the kind of theatre where you walk out with answers,” Scott said. “About halfway through I started to embrace that, and even though I didn’t know what it was about, that’s exactly the point.”
(11/12/14 9:53pm)
Sunday, Nov. 9 marked the fifth annual TEDx event at Middlebury College. TED is a non-profit organization that seeks to spark dialogue and spread ideas through talks, touching on anything from science to society to art. Since its inception in 1984, the organization has garnered massive global attention and now hosts an average of nine conferences per day around the world. Time and time again, TED talks have thrilled, captivated and startled audiences by uprooting pre-conceived notions and exposing innovative ideas and creations. With eight dynamic live speakers, two video presentations and an eclectic range of topics, the Middlebury conference proved to be no exception.
Each speaker took a different approach to the theme “Living in the Question: The Ongoing Process of Curiosity.” Will Nash, a Middlebury professor of American Studies, unraveled the importance of curiosity. As he explained, the greatest value lies not in an answer but rather in the continual exploration of a question – “the path around the circuit.”
“Access the path as many ways as possible,” Nash said. “You’ll be richer for it.”
Middlebury alumni Shane Scranton ’12.5 and Nate Beatty ’13.5 demonstrated the power of curiosity through technological experimentation. They showed the audience a prototype of the oculus rift, a lens that allows wearers to access a virtual reality – an image projected onto the lens to encompass the user’s entire field of vision. This type of technology was originally used to create immersive gaming experiences. Scranton and Beatty took it to the next level by developing technology that could transfer 3-D models of real buildings and landscapes to the oculus rift.
“Virtual reality takes away the need for architectural metaphors,” Scranton explained.
Renderings, 2-D images that Scranton referred to as “extrapolations of space,” require the brain to fill in the surroundings, whereas virtual reality allows architects to inhabit their own designs.
While Scranton and Beatty’s presentation dealt with innovative ways of using space, a talk delivered by Mordecai-Mark Mac Low, a curator of astrophysics at the American Museum of National History in New York, addressed physical reality on a much grander scale: the expanding universe. In his fascinating narrative, he explained that visible light has been traveling and stretching through the universe since the Big Bang. Scientists attribute the accelerating rate of expansion to a mysterious, hypothetical force known as dark energy, perfectly exemplifying that even within the realm of physics, uncertainty can still reign supreme.
Other talks from the conference challenged societal norms by addressing issues of sexuality and gender. Lourdes Ashley Hunter captivated the audience with her riveting stage presence and powerful rhetoric on the transgender community, particularly transgender women of color. A healer, orator and academic, she expressed the hope for a reconstruction of the gender binary that would eradicate oppression against transgender individuals.
“From birth, kids are indoctrinated to prescribed gender norms,” Hunter said. “[But] gender is an explosion of expression,” existing on a spectrum rather than in black-and-white terms.
Her riveting oratory resonated strongly with the audience, and provided an empowering voice to the trans-color movement.
Similarly, Rachel Liddell ’15 received an enthusiastic reception from her peers during her talk on sex, politics and power. Beginning with the story of a “dickish doodler” who vandalized one of her campaign posters, Liddell went on to challenge society’s tendency to sexualize women in power. From naked depictions of Cleopatra’s death to the media’s fixation on Hillary Clinton’s appearance, Liddell pointed out that we subject women to treatment that undermines female authority and disregards their pluri-potentiality as individuals.
Liddell’s grace, humor and charisma shined through in her speech, particularly during her analysis of the public’s obsession with Clinton’s pantsuits. Furthermore, her words provoked deep introspection within the room, as she challenged her peers to not fall into the same patterns of judgment that have long disadvantaged women and hindered societal progress.
Meanwhile, author Jack Hitt offered an insightful commentary on the changing societal attitudes toward legalizing marijuana in the United States. Engaging the audience with his easygoing but magnetic speaking style, he noted a dichotomy between “information you say you believe” and “information you’ll act on.” The latter, which leads to more widespread acceptance, is gained through everyday conversations.
“Revolutions don’t happen on election day,” Hitt said. “[Instead,] local cohorts show us the reality of lived life.”
In other words, interactions with normal people who happen to smoke pot subvert the negative stereotype of “loser stoners,” thus increasing societal acceptance of pot legalization.
By far the most visually enthralling presentation was choreographer and Assistant Professor of Dance Christal Brown’s beautifully improvised dance, which exhibited movement as a powerful medium of expression. For the first part, a screen behind Brown channeled her inner monologue. “Dance is my truest form of communication,” the opening line read. “Which is ironic because you have no idea what I’m trying to say, lol.” However, the audience soon came to understand her fluid movements as physical manifestations of her subconscious impulses.
“I speak volumes without saying anything,” Brown said after she had finished dancing.
Brown encouraged the audience to engage in new forms of expression, leaving them with the advice, “Before you think, respond with anything you have at your disposal.”
The TEDx Middlebury conference showcased a fascinating range of ideas that stretched the audience’s minds from the Big Bang to the Roman Empire, from virgin lovers to dark energy and from inside the clunky lens of an oculus rift to the far-reaching ends of the galaxy. Each talk was delivered in a uniquely resounding manner, creating a diverse panel of voices from which to draw inspiration and insight. Above all, however, the TEDx talks served to unite the Middlebury community through a tremendously significant idea – that it is not about having the right answer, but rather about asking the right questions.
(11/12/14 7:12pm)
There is much hypocrisy in politics, but after the midterm elections last week, one point bothers me more than ever: the glaring contradiction between Republicans’ founding mantra and their current values.
In its 2012 platform, the GOP reaffirms its support for small government. It states, “This platform affirms that America has always been a place of grand dreams and even grander realities; and so it will be again, if we return government to its proper role, making it smaller ... If we keep taxation, litigation, and regulation to a minimum.”
While the platform names small government as an ideal, Republican policies around gay marriage and abortion say otherwise. You know all that jazz about individual freedom? Yeah, yeah, yeah — it’s great, but it can go on the back burner for those issues.
So what is going on? The short answer: a merger of religion and politics.
Before the 1970s, Republicans recruited from a small pool — mainly White Anglo Saxon Protestants. The tone shifted with Richard Nixon, however, when he hardened his stance on abortion so as to entice blue-collar, catholic workers to the GOP. Soon after, Evangelicals and Catholics teamed up to man the Moral Majority, a political organization that worked with the Republican Party and opposed issues like abortion and gay rights.
Thus, the GOP slowly incorporated faith into its policies, contextualizing the hypocritical nature we see today, most notably in the Tea Party.
According to 2010 Pew Research Center data, 88 percent of Tea Party voters prefer small government (compared to 56 percent of all registered voters). 64 percent of Tea Party voters oppose same-sex marriage (compared to 49 percent of all registered voters) and 59 percent of Tea Party voters believe that abortion should be illegal in all/most cases (compared to 42 percent of all registered voters). About half of Tea Party supporters said that their religious beliefs (mainly evangelical and catholic) were the most important influence on their views of gay marriage and abortion.
With the Tea Party playing an increasingly large role in American politics, these opinions are significant. In total, there are an estimated 513,702 members registered with the Tea Party, and in the 2010 midterms the Tea Party made up 41 percent of the electorate, 86 percent of whom voted for Republican House candidates.
All that makes me wonder about voters who are not Tea Party Republicans, but moderate Republicans instead. We hear it all the time — those people who claim to be “liberal on social issues, but fiscally conservative.” They voted for Mitt Romney because they agreed with his economic policy, but don’t get them wrong, they support gay marriage and/or abortion rights!
While I do not doubt these folks, I have to challenge them. They might support small government when it comes to the economy, but they have to realize that with the bond between the GOP and these religious groups, the other 75 percent of their vote is going towards hypocritical (and in my opinion harmful) action on social issues. A vote for Mitt Romney didn’t just mean lowering taxes; it meant halting gay rights and limiting abortion access too.
For some people, the current Republican combo might be a win-win — those who support laissez-faire economic policy and also oppose gay marriage and abortion (whether it be from religion or not). For others, however, it is more of a zero-sum game when they vote Republican — they totally sacrifice their interests in social issues to achieve their ideal fiscal code. My points are that 1. Being Republican was not always this way — it was the marriage of faith and the GOP that made it so, and 2. What is given up in the zero-sum game, social justice, is significant. Voters need to take these two points into account before elections; doing so will keep them clear-minded, a much-needed trait when it comes to today’s national politics.
Artwork by WIN HOMER
(10/30/14 2:57am)
During intimacy, when does sex officially start? Chances are you’re about to say something along the lines of sex beginning when the penis is inserted into the vagina (or other orifice). But what about lesbians? Is a lesbian who’s never had sex with a man a virgin? The concept of female sexuality, especially lesbian sex, is heavily unexplored and misunderstood by society. In terms of lesbian sex, we may not be experts or have a lot of experience, but like we said in our first article: we’re not experts, we just like bringing up topics we think are important.
We see heterosexual erotica in the media all over. Even every now and then we’ll see the occasional homoerotic male advertisement or fashion photo shoot. But lesbian erotica is rarely displayed and when it is, it’s very misrepresentative.
In order to understand how the public sees lesbian sex, we have go to where society learns about sex in general. Unfortunately, sex is still a taboo subject in the American education system, which means most people are likely to turn to porn for further … education. Since most of porn is consumed by and advertised to men, it would only make sense that porn and the media feature rough, penetrative, finger-sucking foreplay between women as “lesbian sex.”
Why isn’t there a bigger uproar over how lesbian sexuality is portrayed if it’s so wrong? Partially because lesbians generally have a small voice in society, especially in how they are portrayed. Secondly, because the people to whom lesbian porn is marketed (men) and people outside of the loop (straight women/gay men) have no idea and put no thought into what lesbian sex is supposed to be like. Why? Frankly, it’s because people don’t care and aren’t interested, and that’s wrong. When asked about what lesbian sex is, most students on campus came up with terms like “intense scissoring?” and “a lot of oral?” Obviously Middlebury is weak on the queer-lady knowledge.
Like we said in our last article, society loves penis. So if there’s no penis, it can’t even be called sex. Well maybe if there’s a dildo or something, it’s kind of sex, right? But if sex is about penetration, then why don’t men have to be penetrated to lose their virginities? Is it about the orgasm then? Men don’t have to be penetrated when they lose their virginities, but they do orgasm.
But this is also wrong, because it’s focused on the penis. Sure, he ejaculated, but did the woman have a good time? Did you educate yourself on the clitoris? Probably not. There are various sexual activities partners can partake in. Oral, anal, fondling, … the list goes on and we all have our boundaries of when we feel we’ve lost our virginities. Yet lesbians are still often told, they’ve never had ‘real sex.’
That’s because people don’t care about female sexuality. If you ask us, two women being with each other in a sexual act where they make a connection, is a lot more valid than a man penetrating a woman for two minutes without even thinking about her pain or enjoyment in the process.
In the patriarchy of today’s society, the place of a woman is to please a man. So when you’re a lesbian, you’re either going to be fetishized in porn for straight men or simply ignored. The consequences go beyond the extent of people’s understanding of your sex life being a silly little hand gesture. Many lesbians are raped or harassed, under the philosophy that they can be ‘fixed’ once they know what ‘real sex’ is like.
The way our society misunderstands lesbian sex reflects our poor and dangerous understanding of sex in general. Women are human beings and deserve to have proper and enjoyable sexual experiences when they want to (with or without men). And sex is so much more than one part going into another and making babies. It is an experience. And this is why lesbian sex is so wonderful, because despite all the misconceptions, lesbians didn’t learn sex from what porn or the media taught them. It’s an experience of intimacy and discovery, much like all sex should be. Also, we hear the clitoris is lovely.
(10/29/14 8:40pm)
Despite a lack of advertising, the Hepburn Zoo hosted a full audience for the Drama Lab on Friday, Oct. 24, presenting six student-written ten-minute plays. Featuring topics ranging from abortion to drug use to death to insanity, the plays demonstrated an impressive level of skill in playwriting, performance and production and delighted the audience with their unique wit, innovation, gravity and humor.
Katy Svec ’15 oversaw the event’s conception and production, working in the span of only three weeks to coordinate the final performance of each play.
“I wanted there to be an opportunity to get involved with theater in a smaller time commitment rather than leaping into a semester-long production, because not everybody has the time for that, and I really think that theatre should be accessible and open for people to try new things,” Svec said.
The evening began with The Trunk by Win Homer ’16, a play extremely powerful in its simplicity. Sam, played by Steven Medina ’17, and Mike, acted by Steven Zatarain ’15, are faced with a trunk left to them by a man who gave them money and told them to dispose of it right away. The imaginations of the men run wild as they envision increasingly outrageous contents of the trunk like a dead body or, even worse, a live person. Medina and Zatarain engaged in tightly choreographed physical blocking under the direction of Sally Seitz ’17, participating in multiple fight scenes with skill and emotion. Though it is only an unopened trunk, its possibilities tear the men apart, culminating in Sam’s vicious shovel attack on Mike and subsequent fit of rage against the trunk as he froths at the mouth in his desire to discover the contents. Though it is somewhat of a relief to the audience that the trunk only holds women’s clothing, the final scene, in which Medina looks to the sky yelling “Leave me alone” to the unknown voice in his head, proves a chilling psychological twist to the tale.
Involvement to participate was open to any students interested in the theatre community, though all of the playwrights have taken or are currently enrolled in Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre Dana’s Yeaton’s Playwriting I course.
In Chocolate Cake by Marium Sultan ’16, Chelsea Melone ’15’s acting was particularly strong as a Eureka, a young and perhaps overzealous missionary who uses chocolate cake as a bribe to convert an unsuspecting passerby from the darkness to the Prophet Irake. Paul, acted by Connor Pisano ’18, is one such passerby, on his way to his “well-lit frat house.” The battle of conversion that ensues brims with humor as Paul tries to convert Eureka to the ways of physical love through a kiss and Eureka worries that she will fail her first ever attempted salvation. In the end, the two realize that they are unwilling to compromise to join the other’s world, and the final scene fades on the two in an embrace and Eureka’s exclamation of her own name. It is not difficult to extrapolate the scenario of Eureka and Paul to larger conflicts of conversion, religious or otherwise, in the world, and the relatively easy realization and respect of differences shown by the youth in the play is certainly a lesson in understanding and the best example of the night of how a seemingly light-hearted subject can be crafted to represent more difficult issues.
The most clever play of the night, primarily due to its subtly, was, in my opinion, Snow Day by Erica Furgiuele ’15. The emotion of the piece built on an immediately established sense of conflict when the father, played by Sebastian Zavoico ’17.5, deletes a voicemail from a girl named Lily before she is able to state her business. A scene of conversation between the father and his son, Jacob, played by Josh Goldenberg ’18, distracts from any foreboding before Jacob prompts his father to open the door upon Lily’s insistent knocking. The father’s avoidance of Lily clearly denotes an ominous event, especially when the girl, played with increasingly honest emotion by Maggie Cochrane ’16, somberly returns a box of belongings to the father. It is clear that somebody has died, but as Lily continues to ignore Jacob’s presence in the room and finally references the boy in the third person, little gasps of surprise throughout the audience indicated that the character on stage speaking to his father was deceased. The poignancy of the script lay in the shocking revelation halfway through the work, coupled with Cochrane’s depiction of the emotional anguish of living with trauma and Goldenberg’s portrayal of Jacob’s calm wisdom from the afterlife. Zavoico could, only one or two times, have benefited from clearer diction, but the emotional pull between his character’s dead son and the living girl in front of him was always apparent on his face.
Svec emphasized her desire to make the production one of open access.
“During the casting process we tried to give people chances who had never acted before,” she said. “We sat outside Proctor for some auditions and asked students if they wanted to read a part, and I think that allowed for a great diversity in the casting.”
Seitz’s Over the Line featured some of the most natural acting of the evening with Caitlyn Meagher ’17 and Mary Baillie ’18 accurately portraying the late night party talk of girlfriends without simply acting like stereotypically overemotional and physically obsessed twenty-something females. As Katie and Rachel stumble into a bathroom at a party to discuss Katie’s decision of whether to accept a line of cocaine, their discussion escalates from girl talk to an argument over the girls’ increasingly dysfunctional friendship and the weight of each friend’s respective ‘problems.’
The simple set design, excellently chosen by director Vivian Sabla ’17 and stage manager Avery Travis ’18, allowed Katie and Rachel to be visible on one side of a closed door while Katie’s on-again, off-again flame, Matt, played by Austin Stevens ’18, made a drunken appearance on the other side, granting a comedy that nicely balanced the increasing severity of Rachel’s apparent cocaine and emotional issues. Entering in a lacrosse pinny, sideways baseball cap and continual smirk, he played the role of intoxicated ‘bro’ to the audience’s delight, delivering minimal dialogue with excellent timing and tone. In addition, his performance was primarily physical, consisting of just the right amount of stumbling, fumbling and eventual dejection as he slid to a sitting position that turned to a full body crawl away from the scene. The smart visualization allowed by the door in the middle of the stage added to the juxtaposition of humor and depth, yet the ending of the work felt a little abrupt and may have benefited from additional drama besides the apparent shattering of the girls’ friendship.
The variety of roles available allowed students a unique exploratory experience.
“For actors, playwrights, stage managers and directors to get involved and figure out what theater is and what they want to do with it is a just a great chance to play,” Svec said.
Emma Eastwood-Paticchio ’15's Sleep Talk engaged the audience with serious intensity from the beginning, despite some comedic elements. Katie Mayopoulos ’18 played Lyd, a woman whose midnight sleeptalking alerts her husband, Tim, played by August Rosenthal ’17, to her emotional fragility as she prepares for an important meeting the next day. The couple’s confrontational conversation leads to the climax of the play, in which Lyd admits that she got an abortion without telling her husband. The play’s strength is the nuanced layering of Lyd’s dissatisfaction with the expectations on her sex, as she guiltily reflects on life decisions and countless examples of female coworkers she has watched fall down the corporate ladder after having children. Lyd’s guilt for making a personal decision is pervasive and avoids falling into clichés about women choosing between a family and a career, and Mayopoulos and Rosenthal maintained a high level of performance throughout the piece, never wavering in their emotional charged performances as each of their characters experienced their own disappointments and frustrations.
The last play of the evening, Dead Dennis by Nicholas Hemerling ’14.5, showcased the most effective combination of humor and gravity as well as the best acting partnership in Lee Garcia Jimenez ’18 and Spencer Watson ’18. Playing Phil and Bernie, respectively, the two men quarreled over whether to bury or cremate the dead man on the side of the highway, whom Bernie has named Dennis in honor of the pair’s deceased cat. In the course of their argument, they grapple with larger questions of their own desires after death and who is granted the choice of making after-death decisions for a man who can no longer express his own wishes. Confusion and hilarity ensued when Dennis slowly awakened and fled from the scene while Bernie slept and Phil gathered cremation materials from the nearby materials. The strength in Jimenez and Watson’s performances stemmed from their collaborative ease, switching smoothly between natural comedic banter and more serious, but still humorously tinged, musings on the journey of a body after death.
Svec emphasized the benefits of having a variety of theatre events throughout the year to showcase a wide spectrum of student work.
“I think a free theatre event is unique, as the process of obtaining a ticket often discourages people from coming out,” she said. “This format openly invites people to drop by and see really exciting work that’s happening at the student level.”
All six plays possessed their own strengths that made for a fresh and exciting presentation enjoyed equally by students and families in the audience. In all, 35 students showcased their budding skills in writing, producing or acting, and the polished pieces of work that made it to the performance felt more professional than student-driven, displaying the great potential and artistry of students in all stages of their student careers.
Upcoming productions at the Hepburn Zoo include a show by Iron Eyes Cody on Oct. 30 and Getting Out, a play directed by Rebecca Coates-Finke ’16.5 from Nov. 6 to 8.
(10/29/14 8:30pm)
No one but Jonathan Safran Foer – who spoke at the Middlebury College Commencement in 2013 – could have written Everything Is Illuminated. Of course, this is true to a degree of any piece of writing, but one can imagine that if another author was, for example, given the outline of an Agatha Christie novel and asked to write it, the story would remain intact. Not so with Everything Is Illuminated. Foer’s unique, extraordinary style is integral to the novel at every level, clear in the plot, the characterization, the emotional investment and the terribly beautiful series of climaxes. Foer’s writing shapes them all.
It is not a comfortable novel to read. If you are new to Foer, I would recommend possibly starting with his other famous novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Although the writing in the latter is not by any means conventional, the plot and the general sense of the novel are far more straightforward. In Everything Is Illuminated, Foer never lets you rest. It stretches across time, from the crash of a wagon in a tiny unnamed town in the middle of Ukraine in 1791 to the troubled family life of a teenage boy in modern-day Odessa. The novel will jump ahead of itself, flashback, flash forward, scrounge up scraps of the past and leave you dizzy wondering what year it is, or if it even really matters. That which is comic Foer turns poignant, and that which is odd Foer makes comic, with moments of drama appearing when you least expect them. The reader careens from one emotion to the next, never entirely sure what the experience is or should be and eventually coming out the other side confused but not untouched. The semi-memoir, semi-fictional quality of the book, too, leaves one unsteady. Was it real? Was it fiction? Or both? Or perhaps it is fiction, but what is important is the greater literary truth that it expresses.
On the surface, the story does not seem all that complicated. A young American man named, coincidentally, Jonathan Safran Foer, comes to the Ukraine with an old photograph searching for the woman he believes saved his grandfather from the Nazi’s. It has the potential for a satisfying and moving tale, laced with the humor of the difficulty of finding vegetarian meals in Eastern Europe and the slightly inept translator coping with his cranky grandfather as chauffeur and the clueless American client. Foer, however, makes this story far, far more.
No sooner do you open the book than you are greeted with “An Overture to the Commencement of a Very Rigid Journey,” an introductory chapter that begins with “My legal name is Alexander Perchov. But all of my many friends dub me Alex, because that is a more flaccid-to-utter version of my legal name.” Roughly half of the novel is told from the perspective of Alex, who is the occasionally incompetent translator mentioned above. All of his sections are similar to those first few lines. His English is awkward at best, at times downright wrong and confusing at its worst. Yet Foer’s genius shines through as he uses his narrator’s language to communicate tone and feeling in a way not possible with traditional, proper English. Alex’s stilted repetition of the translations between Ukrainians and the “hero,” Jonathan Safran Foer, conveys the confusion and awkwardness of the back-and-forth better than any description could do. His gradual loss of punctuation, paragraph breaks, and even indications of who is speaking catches the reader in the stream of action so that one is as much in the moment as the characters. Foer’s use of language transcends its normal confinements to communicate in ways we encounter when speaking in everyday life, but do not expect to find in a novel.
Alternating with Alex’s chapters are those written in Foer’s voice. In these, he does use proper grammar and vocabulary, but his style is still far from traditional. His story ranges from the mundane to the almost fantastical, from passages of farcical characterization to strange and beautiful descriptions of love and painted hands and sex and dreams and death. Through it all, the novel maintains the ability to surprise. The present and recent and distant pasts interweave in ways one does not expect, but Foer is not one to tie everything together with a neat bow. The ending does not leave everything resolved or even trace each character succinctly back to his or her roots. Instead, I think Foer captures something much more truthful, beautiful and sad about the past. There are connections where one does not expect them, and there are none where one hopes to find them. The resolutions the “hero” wanted to find are not there, but other ones are.
Everything Is Illuminated is, above everything, hard to pin down. It is difficult to know what is truth or fiction, whether to laugh or cry, what is past or present and even who the characters are. Its title is misleading. Yet it is precisely because of its ambiguity that this novel can capture you, whisk you away to Ukraine, and leave you moved by its passion and beauty.
(10/29/14 6:01pm)
I hope I will not appear as too much of a nerd by assuming you know about the world famous Italian plumber Mario. Mario spends his time jumping on turtles and saving Princess Peach in the aptly named “Super Mario” video games. By today’s standards Super Mario is a quaint game as it contains no guns, no real violence or realistic blood splatters. Cartoon characters make funny noises when you jump on their heads and the whole premise is outlandish and whimsical. Mario saves the princess and that’s all there is too it.
Why is this children’s (or college student’s) game of any consequence? Having two older brothers and a grandmother that liked to dote on us, video games were a fixture in my childhood. For that matter, some of the easiest stories to understand were things like Dr. Seuss and Mario saving a princess. What I did not know was even at that time I was beginning to form my conceptions on how men interact with women.
One of the real tragedies of male adolescence is that these unsaid messages begin to manifest. I’m not going to blame it all on Mario, movies and books did a lot of it too, but certainly I began to think that nice guys always got the girl. That if you persisted long enough in being nice she would eventually give in. In so much of our dialogue concerning sexism and sexual assault we assume a dramatic aggression on the part of male figures. We give little thought to obsessive, perhaps under-developed, not so popular boys who too are putting together a system for how they will later interact with women.
This of course is not something new. After all, how many little girls want to dress up as princesses? How many men grow up expecting a devoted sexual partner? This particular narrative is at once dangerous and disturbing. Yes, society has a clear interest in subduing aggression in the male population, but what do we replace it with? The not so subtle replacement is merely reward for good behavior. The villains will never win and the “good guy,” the one who was there for her when she cried, who offered to beat up the guy who made her cry, the one who sat on the phone for her for hours, will naturally end up with her. If we follow this logic through we end up in distressingly familiar territory, men believing they deserve sex as a reward for their good behavior.
If we could solve this problem it would go a long way towards creating healthier, more stable relationships. No matter how hard we scream, or perhaps how many op-eds we write, simply launching anger will not effectively change the way male self-esteem is formed. It is a far more difficult thing to raise our sons to be courteous, temperate and patient for their own sake, with no reward in mind. This is something churches and governments struggle with, let alone parents. The stories we have told children for hundreds of years enforce men as agents, deserving reward. So what if we just started telling different stories? Would my toddler self enjoy a game about Princess Peach? Maybe we could have fantasy novels with sincere heroines and not sexual caricatures?
It Happens Here is on Nov. 10 and if things repeat themselves, we’ll hear a lot of powerful, often emotionally difficult stories of sexual assault. For those of you that go, ask yourself this: would these situations have been avoided if men had a better image of how they see themselves? I am convinced that if we removed sexuality from what it colloquially means to “be a man,” we would take an enormous step in solving the problem of sexual assault. Keep in mind too that direct sexual assault and violence is one thing, the less obvious issue is the quiet young man believing he will one day be rewarded for his good behavior.
To redeem the video game industry a little, I have to admit that while it is still a male dominated industry, great strides have been made. The ability to play as male, female, gay or straight has become a recurring trend in many games. So it’s not all Mario and the princess. We can tell better stories as students and as a culture. We can tell stories about heroines with normal sized breasts who fight crime, we can tell stories about men who don’t need a woman’s affection to still consider himself a man. Maybe, the Princess got sick of waiting in her tower and maybe the handsome Prince simply helped her down and proceeded to go about his business without thinking much of it.
Artwork by NOLAN ELLSWORTH
(10/23/14 12:51am)
It doesn’t take long to find thousands of pages online relating to how size doesn’t matter. You can find articles about how the most sensitive areas in the vagina are only in the first two inches, about how it’s girth not length, about how large penises are unappealing, or any other of the many reasons size doesn’t matter. But size matters, a lot.
We aren’t here to shame penises less than eight inches or tell you to take penis growth pills. But we have to admit that our society is obsessed with penises and penis size. It’s not about what size is better. If we really didn’t care about penis size, there wouldn’t be so much conversation about it. However, the reason penis size is so important is not because of the actual physical sensation a penis provides. It’s about power.
As two gay men, we can’t deny that we like penises. But society as a whole loves it on a whole new level, and the phallo-centric system we have set up is an unhealthy one that leaves many people self-conscious. What’s especially odd is that even the “well-endowed” aren’t exempt from this stress. In fact, on average, men who are larger than 6 inches when erect feel much more anxiety about their size then men under 5 inches.
For some people, it’s really hard to understand the pressure of having a large penis, especially if they don’t have one. Some like to compare it to the pressure of having large breasts or being skinny. The difference is that penis size is much more private than being skinny or big boobs. While there are some people who hide their figure more than others and some men who wear some particularly tight jeans, penis size is just something you really don’t know until you’re looking at someone head to head. It’s that privacy that makes it such a power struggle, because it’s taking something private about your value as a person and sharing that information with someone in an intimate setting. You can know a lot about a person. He’s perfect and sensitive, with washboard abs, but what is he packing underneath? If he’s packing light, then society says he’s weaker than the guy next door, even though he had no control over the situation.
The stress is even more so for queer men. Because when it’s time to be naked and show what you got, someone is going to win. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve waited, who’s in better shape or how much you know the person, because the competition of having a big penis is drilled into all of us from the moment we hit puberty, and you’re going to take note of who is bigger.
But why are people so proud? There’s definitely a limit of being too big. After a certain size, it’s impractical and painful. But that doesn’t prevent us from thinking bigger is better. From the receiving perspective, we can tell you when you look at someone and they are simply too big, when you say “It’s gonna hurt” we mean it in a good way. Why? We know why men want to be big: to be bigger than the next guy. But why are women and queer men searching for their partners to be large?
Really it’s not about the actual physical part of sex, because sex is all about the psychology. Men are happy to have a large member because they were told it makes them a valuable person, and their partners like to take it because it gives a sense of pride. Not only did you manage to find someone who is big, but you had the physical capacity to bite the pillow and take it. And if you can’t take it like a champ, then you’re no good. The whole system is built around shame.
People and relationships are so much more than genitals and sex. Talking about penis size is about comforting people who are too small or even too big or too average. And it’s rarely ever talked about because it’s so private. People don’t want to talk about penis size because you don’t know the size of the guy sitting next to you, or worse, what if people get a sense of your size from the conversation? But that’s not what it should be about. Talking about penis size should be about dismantling the phallo-centric transphobic system of reducing people to their genitals and have meaningful relationships.
(10/08/14 11:39pm)
use of gay dating apps such as Grindr and Scruff has changed how people interact and form romantic relationships in the technological world. While many make the argument that the use of these apps helps connect and strengthen the gay community, the insidious effects of commoditizing sex and labeling for the purpose of sexual selection are worth considering.
Launched in 2009, Grindr quickly became the most sensational app for the gay male community. It’s orange glow design, with seemingly endless amounts of headless torsos from ages “twink” to “daddy” won the fickle hearts of gay men around the world. Grindr adequately addresses some of the challenges gay men have with finding other gay men in a heteronormative society, such as location and guessing whether or not the guy next door is gay. It has opened up the doors and closets of gay men in need of affection and it did so by effectively marketing consumers to each other. The app’s simple way of linking the mostly sexual but also non-sexual desires of gays — networking, friendships, or “gym-buddies” — has altered the way gay men see relationships within the gay community.
Realistically speaking, most people who have Grindr or other similar dating apps use them to find the nearest casual hook-up. We would like to make it clear that some people on Grindr aren’t just there for the potential sexual experiences, but for also the great emotions that come along with friendly cyber relationships.
But for the sake of highlighting some of the toxicity that comes along with using these types of apps, we will assume that the vast majority of Grindr users are looking for hook-ups. The purpose of acknowledging this fact is not to “slut-shame” or decide whether the use of Grindr is bad or good for the gay community, but rather to comment on the implications at hand. It is simply important to look at the issues with the commoditization of sex and what behaviors may follow as a result. Even though instant sex sounds like the best thing on earth (and it can be), it would be ludicrous to ignore the relationship between on demand sex and the way we value or devalue intimacy.
One of the more unfortunate things Grindr does is play into the stereotypes and labeling of queer men as a way to promote them to one another. The app even has a “tribe” system that encourages users to label themselves under one of the twelve names such as Bear and Discreet. In an attempt to make it easier for gay men to find and select each other, this aspect of Grindr hinders the diversity that the gay community offers and puts consumption of other gay bodies as the central motivation for interaction. This method also allows gay men to carry through with their own guilt and blindly engage in discrimination against other body types and even races. It is not very rare to find a profile that says “Whites Only!” or “No fatties or femmes” or, our personal favorite, “Masc for Masc.” We understand that everyone is entitled to a sexual preference but at what point does the labeling used to help find potential mates become a mechanism to discriminate against other gays?
What we have noticed is that those that are being shamed for their race body, type and fabulous femme personalities are the ones that don’t typically fall within the margins of how the “ideal” gay man should look like or act. Consequently, the behaviors used in Grindr give in to the creation of a superiority complex within the gay community that is counter to the whole overarching purpose of creating some basic level of solidarity.
To end, we pose this question “Is Grindr simply reflecting the systematic flaws in how society wishes to see gay people or is Grindr enabling gay men to lead their lives clouded by labels and blind discrimination?”
(10/01/14 11:47pm)
Hey everyone! We are Lee Michael Garcia Jimenez and Rubby Valentin Paulino and we are two gay men on campus looking to facilitate sustainable conversations about gender and sexuality.
While we’re hoping to discuss matters that range from lesbianism to the patriarchy, we acknowledge the fact that we are not professionals. This column is just as much as a learning experience for us, as we hope it’ll be for you. Blatantly put, we’re two queers who like talking about queer things, and we hope that our words lead to discussion and hopefully some understanding.
To start off the year, we thought it’d be nice to bring up one of the first big queer events to happen this school year (and we don’t mean the Q&A Party). Sept. 23 was Bisexuality Day, also known as Bi Pride Day.
Unsurprisingly, the event brought about some cheap media coverage online and was successful at putting together slideshows of the (in)famous bisexual celebrities of our time. The way Bisexuality Day was being managed by large media companies helped us raise many questions about the way we see bisexuality. Most importantly we wanted to know how we could share “bisexual day” with you in a way that would underline “the struggle” or social stigma that pins the freedom of bisexuals around the world.
When asking around about the number of bisexuals people knew on campus, the largest answer we got was three. Where are the bisexual people on campus? And does their lack of presence in the community reflect some deeper issues? Of course!
For many people, it’s hard to think of bisexuality as legitimate. For instance, you’ll notice that from the mass of celebrity “coming out stories”, the vast majority are about celebrities being gay. Now let’s ignore the fact that the media is involved with the coming out or outing of celebrities or even the fact that there’s a need to come out. Let’s just focus on the vast underrepresentation of bisexuality in our community (not to mention asexuals, genderqueers, and all the other sexual and gender minorities. Even among the few openly bisexual people we’ve began to see as time goes on, it’s almost always women. Why is that?
GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, defines bisexuality as a sexual orientation in which a person is not limited to one gender in their attraction.
While labels vary in meaning for every individual, this provides a broad understanding of the term bisexuality but it’s always fine to ask someone what their label means to them, especially if you don’t understand. Too often, people simply assume a lot about someone’s sexual experience. And while we’re not saying everyone should go around talking about sex (unless you want to), when those assumptions harm a community, it’s best to address them.
That’s why we see more bisexual women in the media than bisexual men: because people make assumptions and have a double standard for men and women when it comes to bisexuality. Often bisexuality is thought of as being “half-straight”, a 50/50 divide on your attraction split between men and women. However, this has a different definition for each gender.
Women who are half-straight are seen as sexy since they satisfy the porn culture-induced fantasy of men watching girls get it on with the ability to join the action. This definition of bisexuality for a woman doesn’t even consider a woman’s personal sexual desire or pleasure but rather her ability to satisfy the man. And how does a bisexual woman satisfy a man? Threesomes.
On the other hand, it’s not entirely socially acceptable for men to be bisexual. Because being half-straight means you’re half-gay, and that one half of gayness taints the straight. Furthermore, we are dealing with sexism that says that a gay man isn’t a real man or is no better than a woman.
Our experience in the “oh so marvelous” queer community — especially among gay men — reflects that being “half-straight” means you’ll never be satisfied and thus you’ll never be faithful. This leaves bisexuals stigmatized as being dirty and promiscuous. You’re probably just a straight person experimenting anyway, unless of course you act gay. Then you’re just a gay person who can’t admit it.
In retrospect, being bisexual isn’t being half-straight (Eureka!). Sexuality is fluid and can be thought of as existing on a spectrum. While some homosexuals go through a period of identifying identify as a bisexual, it’s simply people exploring different labels as they learn more about who they are. Bisexuality is legitimate, and it isn’t a sexuality that leaves people incapable of monogamy. A person’s gender is just one out of many characteristics of a person, and just because you find multiple aspects attractive, it doesn’t mean you’ll never be satisfied unless you have them all.
Maybe you like redheads and brunettes, or you like both cat-people and dog-people. If you settle down and marry a redheaded cat-person, does that mean you’re going to need to go and have sex with a brunette and play with her dog in secret? Of course not, that’s absurd. Similarly, bisexuals are capable of being in committed relationships with either a man or woman (What?!).
And because of the myths and stigmas around bisexuality and prejudice from both the queer and straight communities, many bisexuals remain in the closet, despite the fact that they are the vast majority of the queer community. And that’s why we need a day to celebrate bisexuality and be aware of the challenges bisexual people face.
We hope you have a very gay week! Whether that means happy or homosexual is up to your interpretation (but we suggest both).
(10/01/14 10:38pm)
On Tuesday, Sept. 30th, thirteen students gathered in Crossroads Cafe to compete in the TEDxMiddlebury Student Speaker Competition, in which participants delivered four-minute pitches to a panel of judges on an idea they wanted to further explore and share through a full TED talk. Rachel Liddell ’15 was the winner of the competition and will therefore be this year’s student speaker at the fifth annual TEDxMiddlebury Conference, which is currently set to be held on Sunday, Nov. 9th with the theme, “Living in the Question.”
Liddell’s pitch was titled “Sex, Power, and Politics: How and Why We Sexualize Powerful Women.”
She said, “I’m hoping students will gain a little insight into our own community at a micro level. At a macro level, I hope we all start thinking about how we act as voters and judgers of the people around us, and how we include the sexuality of women in our perception of women’s skill in a variety of areas including politics, art, history, anything.”
Liddell’s topic was inspired by her experiences running for and serving as the President of the Student Government Association (SGA).
“The way I felt perceived by my community was not always positive,” said Liddell. “Specifically, during my campaign, someone defaced one of my posters to make it sexually explicit. This experience was incredibly hurtful at the time, but over time, I’ve recognized it as part of a pattern in society at large. Discussing how powerful women are sexualized will address this pattern, and hopefully disrupt it.”
Founded in 1984, TED is a nonprofit devoted to the sharing of ideas in the form of talks lasting no longer than eighteen minutes.
“The TEDx program is a branch of TED that supports communities around the world to host their own TED-like events,” said Josh Swartz ’14.5, one of the chief organizers and board members for TEDxMiddlebury.
TEDxMiddlebury was founded under the Programs for Creativity and Innovation (PCI) and held its inaugural conference in 2009 for an audience of approximately one-hundred people. Since then, the conference has expanded to host 400 people in the Middlebury Center for the Arts (MCA) Concert Hall.
Notable guest speakers from past conferences include spoken word artist Big Poppa E from HBO’s “Def Poetry” series and Emmy Award winning director of NBC News Washington Jeffrey Blount.
“[The conference] has grown quite a bit,” said Swartz. “We professionally record all our talks and upload them to our YouTube channel. Our most popular talk from last year was queer and trans activist Alok Vaid-Menon’s, whose talk ‘We are nothing (and that is beautiful)’ was an editor’s pick on the TED website just this month and has been watched over 80,000 times.”
“This year, for the first time actually, the Middlebury Oratory Society partnered with TEDx and hosted a prep session [for participants] before the Student Speaker Competition,” said Swartz. This session was held on Monday, Sept. 29th.
Among the many changes over the years for TEDxMiddlebury was the inclusion of the student speaker. Ryan Kim ’14 spoke in the 2012 conference, and Alec Macmillan ’14 spoke in the 2013 conference.
“Having a student speaker has helped us further engage the student body,” said Swartz. “This is always an ongoing goal for TEDxMiddlebury.”
Ryan Kim ’14 and Alec Macmillan ’14 were the first student speakers for TEDxMiddlebury. Kim spoke in the 2012 conference, and Macmillan in the 2013 conference.
Swartz stated that between twelve and sixteen students deliver pitches in the Student Speaker Competition each year.
“Anyone can pitch. They have four minutes, and we try to limit their use of visual aids and multimedia, so the judges can focus on the presence of the person and their idea, which will ultimately become the foundation for a longer eighteen-minute talk” said Swartz.
With Liddell set to be this year’s speaker, Swartz and the other organizers for TEDxMiddlebury will focus their efforts exclusively on the November 9th conference.
Swartz said, “It’s motivating to be part of a team that works so actively to make each event better than the last — to work towards building something that is both inspiring for the student body and that represents and values many different identities, experiences, and ideas.”
Meanwhile, Liddell will be working with MiddCORE Instructor in Persuasive Communication Mike Kiernan to develop her winning pitch into a full eighteen-minute TED talk for the conference.
“I am so excited and honored to have the opportunity to speak at TEDxMiddlebury,” said Liddell. “Hopefully, I’ll influence the way people think, and I definitely plan on having fun. I am very grateful to talk about an issue for which I care deeply.”
(09/18/14 12:59am)
The first round of class assignments and some surprisingly brisk weather have ushered in the fall semester more quickly than many of us would have liked. However, before you send a fifth email to that professor who won’t let you into their class or get geared up to find new ways to procrastinate (read: finding new ways to procrastinate is procrastinating), take a few minutes to read about my favorite movie of the summer season. **Spoiler alert** It’s not Sex Tape.
Summer 2014 was marked by blockbuster sequels (22 Jump Street, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), epic indies (Snowpiercer, Boyhood), and a standout performance from a beloved actor gone too soon (Philip Seymour Hoffman in A Most Wanted Man). In spite of all these notable flicks, my favorite of the summer received half the buzz, in part because of its late August 22nd release, and boasts a total of three onscreen acting credits. Despite its late release and small cast, The One I Love, director Charlie McDowell’s debut feature, is a smartly stylized and consistently surprising 91 minute gem and my favorite movie of the summer.
I was drawn to the film mostly because I’ve been bingeing on Mad Men and would have been excited to watch anything with actress Elizabeth Moss’s name attached to it. The fact that it was being pegged as a romantic comedy-science fiction-mystery-drama had me even more intrigued. It’s a hard film to go into detail about without ruining the ‘twist,’ so bear with me and really just go see the damn thing (it’s streaming on Amazon and iTunes).
The film opens with Ethan (Mark Duplass) in voiceover describing “the greatest night of his life.” His story involves an impulsive first date with wife-to-be spent pool-hopping and falling in love. As we listen, we watch the couple on-screen driving at night and sneaking around the outside of a house, presumably acting out the events of the narrated story. However, the eerie visual tone, with an emphasis on emptiness and shadows that will become recurring motifs throughout, seems incongruous with the magical spontaneity of the couple’s recited origin story. It turns out the onscreen couple is acting out the narrated story - just not in the way you immediately think.
Longtime couple Ethan and Sophie (Elizabeth Moss) are actually in marriage counseling telling this story to their therapist (Ted Danson, who happens to be Director McDowell’s stepdad). We learn that the Ethan and Sophie we saw sneaking through the bushes were attempting, and failing, to recreate a moment in their relationship from long ago when they were truly happy. As if the uncomfortably long time the camera stays on the couple treading water in their reenactment isn’t enough, we get a few unnecessary lines like “it’s a little colder than I remember” in reference to the pool water, and “happy anniversary anyway,” to really hammer home just how far this relationship has fallen.
I love this opening sequence because by the time the movie title appears on screen just two minutes and eighteen seconds in, we already know everything necessary about Ethan and Sophie’s relationship. For the rest of the film you don’t learn much else. Sure, you find out that Ethan cheated on Sophie and that they once did ecstasy at Lollapalooza, but as movie-goers and human beings we are so familiar with the trajectory of this relationship that any new information we learn about it is perfunctory. The familiarity of the The One I Love’s central relationship allows the film to explore its central question more effectively: what happens to an ordinary relationship when tested under remarkable circumstances?
The tired circumstances that lead Ethan and Sophie to take their therapist’s advice and go on a retreat to a secluded vacation home elevate the impact of the surreal, Charlie Kaufman-esque plot elements that threaten to fracture their bond once on the retreat. We have seen these characters and this relationship before, just not under these circumstances.
Yet nothing is taken as a given. Moss and Duplass shine in their roles as bewildered husband and wife trying to figure out what is going on while simultaneously trying to repair their relationship. They serve as believable proxies for viewers’ own investigations of the plot. Thankfully, the film’s surreal plot-devices are only ever relevant to the extent that they allow Sophie and Ethan to develop as characters. And as far as character driven films go, screenwriter Justin Lader gives this one a great sense of forward motion. It never feels dull or circular - an accomplishment considering how many times the characters enter and exit the same sets.
At times The One I Love felt like a horror movie due to the film’s use of obstructed perspective shots and the prominence of empty spaces. Other times Moss and Duplass provide welcome comedic relief. The genre-bending film is a perfect balance of the familiar and the unknown, both from stylistic and narrative perspectives, and the product is a work that seems both emotionally authentic and technically fresh. Everything from performance down to set design seems absolutely essential to the narrative. While Boyhood was impressive in scope and ultra-relevant (especially to us college kids), no film accomplished so much with so little this past summer as did The One I Love.
(09/17/14 9:12pm)
You have probably heard of the rapper Gucci Mane. You might have a song or two of his. Or you remember his cameo in 2013’s Spring Breakers, in which he played Big Arch (and actually fell asleep while filming a sex scene). Perhaps you’ve seen his Bart Simpson chain or his ice cream cone tattoo with lightning bolts coming out of it. The one on his face.
What you might not know is that Gucci Mane, the man they call Guwop, is currently on the most prolific run of record releases in the history of music.
Gucci, who is from Alabama, started his rap career in 2005 with the self-released album Trap House, followed by a handful of mixtapes, which are essentially less polished albums that rappers release between albums. Between that first album and signing with Warner Bros. in mid-2009, Guwop released five albums and 14 mixtapes. His popularity quickly expanded outside the South, and he was able to release his music through his own record label.
At this point, it is probably necessary to spend a little time describing Gucci’s music to those who aren’t familiar. Gucci is considered one of the modern fathers of the sub-genre of hip-hop known as Trap, the combination of a hazy, promethazene-addled rapping style with snare and bass heavy beats. His lyrics, like most within the genre, are highly violent, depict heavy weed, molly, and cough syrup consumption and contain relentless misogyny. If you agree with literally any of the common criticisms of rap, you will probably dislike Gucci Mane’s music. Hold that thought.
Gucci’s 1017 Brick Squad label (the name is a reference to his grandfather’s Bessemer, Alabama address, and a kilo, aka. a brick, of cocaine) continued its success. However, by the fall of 2013 Gucci’s life was in shambles. In a span of 15 days, Gucci launched a Twitter tirade aimed at dozens of artists, including Waka Flocka Flame, Nicki Minaj, Drake and countless others with whom he had repeatedly collaborated, was revealed to have defrauded several 1017 rappers and was accused of murdering yet another. After initially claiming that a former manager hacked his Twitter, he went on to admit he sent the messages and revealed that he was struggling with an addiction to codeine cough syrup.
Allow me a quick aside: I was following this story every day as it happened last fall, and I honestly don’t remember experiencing anything like it. We’re used to watching the lives of public figures from Charlie Sheen to Mike Vick to Tiger Woods crumble. There’s nothing unique about that. But in those cases, one event revealed a past of wildly destructive behavior. What set this apart was that we were watching this dude, in real time, act out similar behavior in a manner that was so insanely self-sabotaging and nonsensical that it defied all understanding. It was like watching a car crash in slow motion, only if the driver was purposefully ramming into every object in sight while dousing himself in gasoline.
The fallout? Gucci Mane is currently in jail, after pleading guilty to firearm possession by a convicted felon. He will be out in either 2015 or 2016, depending on if you believe him or the government. He is reportedly attending rehab in jail. And somehow, unbelievably, Gucci is putting out more music than ever before.
Since going to jail on May 13, 2014, Gucci has released six mixtapes and five albums. Read that sentence again. Going back to the beginning of 2013, the total is seventeen and seven. That rate is pretty much consistent dating back three years. Even though all the material was pre-recorded, it is hard to imagine that this level of output has ever been reached before.
But what is equally amazing is the undying popularity of his music. All of his mixtapes achieve hundreds of thousands of downloads, despite the fact that all of his songs are more or less the same. Which brings us back to the earlier point about his lyrical content. Gucci Mane embodies, and advocates for, most everything that is popularly disliked about hip-hop, even by its listeners. However, he is in some senses the most popular individual currently practicing the art, adored by fans who unquestioningly love most everything about hip-hop. As Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber winkingly adapt pieces of hip-hop culture and whitewash them for mass consumption, Gucci has targeted a decidedly non-mainstream audience. He is considered by most casual music fans to be somewhat of a joke, known for his drug and legal problems and that bizarre face tattoo (seriously, google it). But to write him off as such misses the fact that no artist has better employed the Internet as a means to reach a massive audience and that his 1017 label continues to produce popular artists. He has essentially ignored the standard rules of the industry, and as a result, he deliberately operates out of the sights of America’s consuming class. Gucci’s historic run is proof that there are pockets of hip-hop culture that Miley Cyrus and the mainstream have yet to claim for their own.
LUKE SMITH-STEVES '14 is from New York, N.Y.
(05/08/14 12:32am)
On Tuesday, May 13 the faculty will vote on a motion to sever the College’s ties with K12, Inc., the corporation that the College has partnered with to create Middlebury Interactive Languages (MIL), a foreign language education program for K-12 students. While the motion carries no weight — only the Board of Trustees has the power to sever ties with K12 — it is the most salient push back to one of President of the College Ronald D. Liebowitz’s efforts.
“The business practices of K12, Inc. are at odds with the integrity, reputation, and educational mission of the College,” said the motion, which was obtained by the Campus. French Professor Paula Schwartz submitted the motion.
In an email to the entire faculty on May 2 — also obtained by the Campus — Schwartz summarized the accusations into three categories, urging her colleagues to vote in favor of the motion.
The first was that K12, Inc. had been sued by a number of states for false claims and dubious practices. Secondly, that MIL’s product had been censored by K12, removing reference to same-sex relationships and unmarried couples in order to conform to Texas Board of Education standards. Thirdly, the email noted that K12, Inc. had come under fire for factual errors that were recently discovered in MIL’s Latin program.
Vice President for Communications Bill Burger and Vice President for Pedagogical Development for MIL Aline Germain-Rutherford both denied any allegations that MIL censored content.
“We have never been asked to censor, change edit or delete any material from any of our courses by a state or locality as part of some political agenda,” Germain-Rutherford said. “K12 Inc. has never tried to influence our course content. MIL has always been in charge of the content.”
Burger echoed Germain-Rutherford, calling Schwartz’s censorship claims a “total falsehood.”
“I want to emphasize what I believe is the central narrative of this story: a group of faculty are seeking to end our relationship with MIL. They have made some very serious accusations. We categorically deny those assertions and to my knowledge they have no evidence to support them.”
However, Burger did acknowledge that the Latin department did experience issues with MIL.
“It was brought to the attention of a faculty member at Middlebury College earlier this year that there were a number of errors in one of the Latin language course marketed and sold by MIL,” he said. “This course was created prior to the joint venture with Middlebury and MIL. An investigation into these course materials confirmed that there were, indeed, a number of errors.”
But Burger said that the errors were “quickly corrected,” and that the Latin courses will no longer be marketed as MIL courses.
The College first went into partnership with K12 in 2010 and has since created videos for the K-12 market in five languages: Spanish, French, Chinese, German and Arabic. Liebowitz has championed MIL since its creation as an important investment for the College’s brand.
“We pursued the initiative for three reasons,” Liebowitz told the faculty at its meeting on April 28. “First, we wanted to retain out leadership in the languages. Our reputation as leaders in teaching languages began 100 years ago with the intensive, immersion Language schools, which introduced a totally new way to teach languages ... The second reason was and is to expand access to language courses for pre-college students. And third, we recognized, especially during the recession, that in order for the College to protect what it valued so much about its residential liberal arts offerings here on campus … we need, eventually, to find ways to increase overall revenue,” concluded Liebowitz.
But many faculty members do not buy the College’s explanations. Associate Professor of Education Studies Jonathan Miller-Lane said that he was originally supportive of the College leveraging its language expertise to open new revenue streams.
“Why should we not try and leverage our strengths?” he said. “However, given what we now know is happening it turns out to be a poorly executed plan. By far, this is the most appalling thing that I have heard regarding MIL and K-12 Inc. and it leads me to now support the effort to sever all connections with K-12, Inc.”
According to Burger, one of the root issues is the reluctance of some faculty to accept that MIL should have a role in Middlebury’s future.
But Associate Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies Laurie Essig said that she was indeed worried about MIL’s relationship with K-12, Inc.
“It is not in Middlebury’s interest as an institution of higher learning to be so closely allied with a business that is far less interested in education than it is the replacement of face to face learning with online ‘learning,’” she said. “Their unproved record as educators, their for profit motive and their highly politicized agenda ought to give us pause — but because it hurts learning. And Middlebury is dedicated to just that.”
Miller-Lane called the idea that we need to “face the facts” of K-12 market “specious.”
“We are doing this to make a buck, period. We are choosing to enter this market and we can choose to leave. We must now make clear what our standards are.”
(05/07/14 8:04pm)
At intermission of the opening night of “In the Next Room” (or “The Vibrator Play”), the audience of the packed Seeler Studio Theater collectively sighed with relief upon realizing that despite it’s name, Sarah Ruhl’s Tony Award-nominated play was far from vulgar. Gathering from the chatter of the elderly men seated behind me (who remarked approvingly, “very well done — not scandalized”) and the female students to my right (who nodded in agreement that the show was “tasteful”), it seems audience members came to the production with some reservations regarding its subtitle.
On this point, the name was not misleading; vibrators were in fact central to the plot, as was female masturbation, and orgasms were frequent throughout the show. But perhaps what people were responding to most, as it seemed to me during intermission, was the unexpected level of comfort present in the face of these usually awkward subjects.
This was, in part, crafted by director Claudio Medieros’s ’90 choice of a small, intimate space, the actors’ incredible skill and professionalism and the humor and naiveté scripted for the characters.
The vibrator was treated as a medical device, which contributed in a big way to making the play feel less erotic.
Celia Watson ’17, who attended Wednesday’s opening, said, “The acting was my favorite part of the show. What was interesting was that while the characters’ orgasms seemed very natural and realistic, you never forgot that they were still inside a doctor’s office.”
The major player behind the audience’s ease, in my opinion, was the play’s confrontation of the taboo of female sexuality, and its overriding message that sexual intimacy is a healthy and fulfilling part of life, and should be seen that way, rather than in the harsh light of shame or disgust typically attached to it.
Yet, the fact that students and town residents alike walked into the play bracing themselves for vulgarity speaks to our attitudes toward sexuality, specifically towards the private sexual lives of women. While science has come a long way in understanding the female orgasm since the late nineteenth century — in which the play is set — confusion and silence still rule the masses.
“I think that female sexuality is very much a black box to a lot of people—men and women,” said stage manager Gabrielle Owens ’17.
When I asked a group of male friends how many girls they thought masturbated, estimations ranged from 70 to 98 percent. More telling, however, was that the girls I talked to were just as, if not more, uncertain. Even those more brazen on the topic admitted to feeling a lack of solidarity in their conversations with others.
“In our friend group, I like to think we’re open-minded and it’s true that we do talk about these things,” said Emily Bogin ’16. “But when we talk about female masturbation, there’s definitely a layer of self-awareness that we’re talking about something taboo. This makes it even funnier to talk about, but it also engages the fact that it’s not socially acceptable.”
“And it just isn’t,” she added. “I don’t think that it is socially acceptable in Middlebury or in the world at large or anywhere. It’s sort of just accepted that women aren’t supposed to masturbate.”
This of course, brings up the rift between the general acceptance of male masturbation as a common practice and the resistance to the thought that female masturbation is essentially the same thing. When it comes to male sexuality, the world seems, for lack of a better term, desensitized. But flip the coin in calling the subject a woman, and masturbation holds immense shock value.
This is what Erin Ried ’16 found when testing a female version of an all too common phrase.
“The world seems so focused on penises. My friends and I are tired of hearing ‘suck my dick’ all the time. Nobody goes around saying, ‘lick my clit.’ And if they tried, it wouldn’t go over; it sounds way more vulgar somehow, way less acceptable.”
The world is certainly advancing in its recognition of female sexuality. And while “The Vagina Monologues” and events like this play are opening space for dialogue on our campus, we still have long way to go before male and female sexual experiences are viewed in the same light.
“It seems like a cultural hangover,” said Owens. “For most of the Western world, we’ve gotten past the idea that women aren’t allowed to enjoy sex. But we’re still stuck in this place where we don’t really want to know about them enjoying sex. If you watch commercials and things like that on TV, you see all these women acting sexy, but they’re doing it all for men, basically. I think that’s still a huge issue — that when women enjoy sex, they enjoy it for other people, not for themselves.”
“In the Next Room” presented sexuality as a potential unifier, something with the power to connect groups across different socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds, as well as individuals, both homo and heterosexual. It showed sexuality as a basic human quality, a shared experience that, like others, should have a voice and a discourse.
So in the spirit of the play, let’s talk about it.
