SHAKESPEARE ON THE STEPS

On May 6, Masque and Gown staged a play on the terrace of the Walker Art Building, in a very old Bowdoin tradition of Shakespeare on the steps that hasn’t happened in a while. Ymir St. George ’26 plays Malvolio here in the informal outdoor production of Twelfth Night, directed by Francesca Kusserow ’24, a classics major who did theater for the first time last year, when she was in the Masque and Gown production of Much Ado about Nothing In addition to directing, Kusserow served as the artistic director and costume designer, and she was aided by two stage managers. “Shakespeare’s plays are six hundred years old,” she says, “but they are timeless.” The cast of fourteen actors “was so wonderful, so dedicated,” Kusserow added. “They just made it so beautiful.” The weather was warm and sunny the day of the performance, and a crowd of students, faculty, staff, and members of the Brunswick community showed up on the Quad to enjoy the show.

By the Numbers

Dialed In

College radio stations play a soundtrack to such impressionable years that it’s no wonder they occupy an especially nostalgic place in our hearts. WBOR spent its own formative years redefining itself, evolving in the 1940s and ’50s from BOTA and then WBOA (both for Bowdoin on the air) on the AM dial to the call sign it has had since 1957 (for Bowdoin on the radio), when WBOR’s inaugural FM broadcast could first be heard across campus. Previously, the station could only be picked up in first-year dorms within a few hundred feet of the station, which was then in Moulton Union but has been in the basement of the former Dudley Coe Health Center since 1995. WBOR has played host to decades of memorable moments musical and otherwise, perhaps most notably during the sixties. In March 1960, the station recorded a Pete Seeger concert at Pickard Theater. The Smithsonian Institution would later release the entire recording in a two-CD set and on streaming platforms. In May 1964, the station recorded a speech given by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the First Parish Church, and in October 1969, WBOR broadcast all-day coverage of Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam activities. Recently, the station received a gift from Bob Lochte ’72, who remembers fondly his involvement with WBOR and went on to work in radio and television for thirty years, becoming an ardent supporter of nonprofit radio. The station plans to use his contribution to update its equipment.

$4,000