Dance Floor

Lift up your hands

Hedwig and the Angry Inch makes a space in student theater for transgender and nonbinary voices

STORY JUSTIN CURTO // DESIGN AUDREY VALBUENA // PHOTOS YING DAI

Stepping into Shanley Pavilion during the weekend of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, you’d notice the graffiti immediately. Green and blue spray-painted designs and phrases cover the walls – the word “fuck” is prominently displayed. In one corner of the room, the three-pronged transgender symbol rests between the words “Trans Justice.”

Standing 6-foot-8 in high-heeled boots and wearing glam rockinspired blue eyeshadow, Connor MacMillen dances past that symbol throughout the show as they perform as Hedwig, its titular rock star. To them, it’s not just graffiti: It represents the “weight of responsibility” of the show, the first Student Theatre Coalition performance in recent memory by and about transgender people.

“It’s just so important that this show is happening and that we tell it right,” MacMillen says.

From the start, producer Lindsey Weiss and director Adam Orme knew that they wanted to put on a show dealing with gender. They chose Hedwig, a musical by Northwestern alumni John Cameron Mitchell (Speech ‘85) and Stephen Trask that centers on a genderqueer performer who was designated male at birth and experiences a botched sex reassignment surgery. As Hedwig performs a rock concert, she tells the audience her life’s story, accompanied on backup vocals by her husband, Yitzhak. Their relationship is contentious from the start: Hedwig continually abuses and forces Yitzhak to repress his passion for drag performance.

To Weiss, the show doesn’t present “a neat trans narrative” – and that made it all the more appealing for the team. Orme adds that Hedwig “defies definition.”

“That’s what it does both about gender, and also in a broader sense about who we are supposed to be in society and in our relationships,” Orme says. “It is not so easy to slap a label on ourselves, especially for genderqueer people.”

Spectrum Theatre Company, a StuCo board focused on socially and politically important theater, put on the show Oct. 19–21. The board wanted its fall slot to amplify unheard stories – like it did last year with it’s winter mainstage, Water by the Spoonful, written by Latina playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes and starring Latinx actors.

But Hedwig’s unrepresented, transgender-focused storyline almost didn’t happen. Last spring, Weiss and the team intensely pursued the rights to Hedwig, but didn’t hear back because the show was on its national tour. The team didn’t give up that easily, though. It extended its deadline until the last possible minute, noon on the first day of callbacks. In the meantime, Orme had prepared a callback list for a backup play, Where We’re Born, which did not focus on gender identity or feature explicitly transgender characters.

On the day of the deadline, after a morning of phone tag with Hedwig’s licensing company and the tour’s production company, when they found out the national tour would not be extended, Weiss received a call. It was the licensing company’s head of nonprofessional licensing, Craig Pospisil: “Lindsey, guess what, it’s 11:59, they called us back and you got the rights.” Weiss doesn’t remember going to class after that. They just laid on the floor in shock.

The show’s confirmation was great news for Rachel Stamler-Jonas, a senior in the School of Communication. It gave her the opportunity to put on a Croatian accent and five o’clock shadow makeup to play Yitzhak, her dream role ever since she saw the Broadway revival a few years ago. She even tried to get the rights for her own production. Since that fell through, Stamler-Jonas knew she had to be involved with Spectrum’s performance.

“I saw Yitzhak find himself in a way that felt really important to me,” Stamler-Jonas says. “It just feels like I’m watching something that I need to be [on stage].”

Throughout the rehearsal process, Stamler- Jonas and MacMillen worked to remake roles that already had their own histories. Stamler- Jonas felt that Yitzhak needed to be more than a character that “just kind of exists,” as in popular productions; MacMillen wanted to reclaim a genderqueer character known for being played by cisgender men like Mitchell (the playwright) and Neil Patrick Harris. And both actors, who’ve been friends since the first day of freshman year, found their mutual trust invaluable in acting out and understanding the characters’ abusive relationship.

“Rachel and I were talking about how this show is never going to exist again because this Hedwig and this Yitzhak are so uniquely creations of ourselves, more so than almost every other theatrical production I’ve been in,” MacMillen says. “These were our stories we were telling.”

All productions of Hedwig occur in the present day. For the Spectrum production, this meant Hedwig’s concert took place at Northwestern’s “historic” Shanley Pavilion in 2017. The script cleverly referenced Northwestern and current politics throughout the whole show. For the actors, this broke down a wall that exists in many other shows – instead of performing Hedwig, they were living in its world and bringing the audience in, too.

“Obviously there were facts about this character that don’t apply to me, but the person that was up on stage was me the whole time, and that character was freeing in a way that I didn’t expect,” Stamler-Jonas says. “This show, I think, has greater meaning in a larger sense, and also very personal meaning in a very minute sense.”

Beyond addressing issues of representation, Weiss says political art like Hedwig creates “healing and community wellness.” They find that especially important given the absence of an explicitly transgender community at Northwestern.

“This is StuCo’s first shot as getting trans representation right,” Weiss said a few days before Hedwig opened. “Never, as far as I know in StuCo, have trans characters been played by openly trans actors and has that artistic leadership been forefronted by trans people.”

Now, after Hedwig’s five-show run, the team wants its impact to continue. As a junior, Weiss wants to continue promoting transgender and nonbinary representation in theater through their work as co-chair of activism for Lipstick Theatre, a StuCo board focusing on feminist theatre. And this winter, Stamler-Jonas will independently direct a self-written transgender retelling of The Little Mermaid, called The Little Merperson. Together, the team hopes that the show left some thinking about gender identity differently, and others feeling less lost in their own gender identity.

MacMillen performed as Hedwig during the show in front of two of the first people they ever came out to. They sang and cracked jokes, first in Hedwig’s denim dress and fishnets and later in her shimmering evening gown and flowing blond wig.

As Hedwig came to terms with herself at the end of the show, MacMillen stood vulnerable at the edge of the stage. They had ripped off Hedwig’s dress, smudged her makeup and given her wig to Yitzhak.

In a pair of black booty shorts and some leftover eyeshadow, MacMillen kneeled in front of the audience of friends, peers and strangers as they sang the show’s final song, “Midnight Radio.” When they stood back up, Stamler-Jonas returned to the stage wearing the wig and flowers as Yitzhak in full drag. Together, the two – channeling their own experiences – preached self-discovery to everyone, singing the show’s final request: “Lift up your hands!”

Students create a directory of women-owned businesses in Chicago

THEY KNEW WHAT FEMALE BUSINESS OWNERS STRUGGLED WITH: FOR EVERY $1 A WOMAN RECEIVES IN SMALL BUSINESS LOANS, A MAN RECEIVES $23.

In July of 2017, Isabel Benatar and Sam Letscher sat in Evanston’s NorthShore hospital, tapping away on their devices. Benatar was perched on a chair next to the bed where Letscher reclined, foot bundled in white gauze. Letscher’s toe was throbbing, but there was an even more intense pressure in the room: the impending launch of BOSSY, a directory of women-owned businesses in the Chicago area.

Earlier that day, Letscher had pulled a glass door directly onto her big toenail. But the Northwestern seniors wanted to release the directory within the next 24 hours before leaving town for vacations to Colorado and California. Benatar grabbed a sandwich for Letscher and sat in a waiting room chair to finish inputting the last few businesses into the directory. The next day, BOSSY Chicago went online and Chicagoland residents gained the ability to look up women-owned businesses in their area on BossyChicago.com.

Benatar and Letscher put the directory together in just three days during Wildfire, a summer program at the Northwestern Garage that pushes NU students to develop and launch a startup in 10 weeks with $10,000. From the start, Benatar and Letscher knew they wanted to support ethical spending in light of the 2016 election, but they weren’t sure how. “This was around the time when everybody was boycotting Uber and boycotting companies that sold Trump products, and there was a lot of discussion about where we’re putting our money,” Letscher says. “But there seemed like there could be something more.”

During the first three weeks of Wildfire, Benatar and Letscher continued what they had been doing since spring quarter: interviewing women-owned businesses from Andersonville to Evanston and all the ‘L’ stops in between.

They knew what female business owners struggled with: for every $1 a woman receives in small business loans, a man receives $23. This initial discrimination in capital means their businesses will, on average, be smaller than male-owned businesses. Female business owners are often overcharged by repairmen, who assume they don’t understand the physical structure of their shop. Customers frequently mistake younger, male employees for the owner.

Back in the Garage, they cycled through ideas to bring customers to woman-owned businesses — should they start a magazine? A blog of their interviews and a newsletter? Potential project ideas swirled around them, scrawled in red Expo marker on whiteboardplastered walls. “I was wishing there was a clear right answer, or someone could just swoop in and be like, ‘that’s the right choice,” Benatar says. On Monday of week four, Letscher and Benatar went in for their weekly meeting with their mentors Neal Sales-Griffin and Billy Banks. They discussed the idea of the directory, and the advisors gave them their favorite piece of advice: just start. They launched BOSSY that Thursday.

Friday morning, the Women and Children First bookstore shared the directory on their Facebook page. BOSSY exploded. The Chicago Reader reached out for an interview; consumers commented on the local bookstore’s post and recommended women-owned businesses; users messaged BOSSY with statements of support. Letscher woke up that morning in Colorado under an avalanche of social media buzz. Alone, toe throbbing, with her family off hiking in the Rockies, Letscher replied to comments and furiously added businesses to the directory.

BOSSY Chicago has evolved since the hectic week of the directory launch. Benatar and Letscher are now building their team and recruiting social media directors and writers. The founders hope new members will allow them to focus on BOSSY’s other challenges: creating a more navigable directory, building a sustainable revenue model and highlighting the difficulties women face at the intersection of various identities.

“If they’re truly dedicated to supporting women’s businesses,” says Zoe Johnson, a Medill sophomore, “and really spend time advertising the work of trans women, women of color, women of all socioeconomic classes, queer women, disabled women – they will be providing an amazing resource for the Chicago community.”

Sydney Monroe, another user, says she connected with BOSSY’s name. “It reminds me of when I was young and people would call me or other girls who were louder or took initiative [bossy],” she says.

The directory serves the Chicago area, but Benatar and Letscher think it has the potential to go nationwide as the next TripAdvisor or Yelp for women-owned businesses. At the end of Wildfire, the team presented to the Garage community at “Demo Day.” The team showed a graphic of a map with hundreds of pins that represent potential cites to feature on the BOSSY website, and with it, the opportunity to promote thousands of women-owned businesses.

“[The presentation] just encapsulated the point of like, ‘We’re nowhere near the end,’” Banks says. “‘We are just beginning and are going to really have impact and an impact at a big scale.’”

Michael Itter, more commonly known as “Big Mike”, weaves his way through the maze of heavy, plastic boxing bags hanging from the ceiling of TITLE Boxing Club. As Evanston locals and Northwestern students swing their sweaty, limp fists at the targets, he jumps from bag to bag, yelling encouragements and dancing. “Welcome to the best 45 minutes of your day!” he shouts. “Aren’t you glad you get to spend it with me?”

Big Mike lives up to his nickname. He’s sturdy, with 185 pounds of lean muscle spread over his 5’8 frame. On B!G his tan face, a set of intense, blue eyes sit above a set of huge, bleached white teeth. He has a permanent five-o’clock shadow that he scratches when he’s pensive. You’ll likely find Mike strolling around wearing a snapback and an allblack tracksuit, even off the clock.

When Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” starts booming through the loudspeaker, Mike casually drops that he first heard the song on a bootlegged CD during his first tour in Afghanistan. He enlisted in the military after 9/11 when he was 17. During his two tours in Iraq and two tours in Afghanistan, he served in the infantry, front line and ranger battalion, leading over 500 patrols overseas.

When Mike was 15, he was placed in the state foster care system in Aurora, Illinois. Among the “angsty bullies” in the group homes and foster homes where he stayed, Mike learned how to fight.

He recalls his first fistfight with a local kid from high school, someone who was supposed to be this “real tough guy, but he was obviously just running his mouth,” Mike says. He thought he ended the fight with a knockout punch, but not quite. “The kid came to, grabbed a log from his front yard, and hit me

How veteran Michael Itter inspires budding Evanston boxers in the forehead so hard I passed out.” When Mike woke up, he says, “my face was legit fucking destroyed. My buddy just laughed when he saw me and said ‘dude, your nose is crooked!’” But he credits the loss to the log – not the bully. “It would take a real bad motherfucker to whoop my ass just with their hands,” Mike says.

For Mike, fighting was a way to survive in the foster care system, but he also came to appreciate the shuffle as an art. One of his foster care fathers owned old black-and-white tapes of Muhammad Ali, and would ask Mike to commentate Ali’s fights with him while knocking back beers in a plaid Lazy Boy. “Watching such a phenomenal fighter with someone who was so enthusiastic about it… boxing just soaked into my mind,” Mike remembers. Joseph Fitter became friends with Mike during their first tour in Iraq. Along with other soldiers in their unit, the two men put together a makeshift gym at their base with donated exercise equipment. “Mike was still a dedicated, hard-working dude, but he was about half the person he is now [literally] – he was 145 pounds,” Fitter recalls.

Mike began his winding fitness career as a strength and conditioning coach for high school athletes after completing his second tour in Iraq. He met his current fiancée, Diana Lilliebridge, when he worked at Pro Gym in Oswego, Illinois five years ago. In a unique version of a fairytale gym romance, Mike was a personal trainer and Diana worked at the front desk. He played it cool at first, abrasively handing Diana a piece of paper for her to write her number down and then tucking it in his back pocket. But his soft side came out very quickly. “When we began dating, he would do all my work chores for me – take out the garbage, leave small presents like flowers with a card in the breakroom or balloons with stuffed animals on the car,” Diana says. Soon, Mike moved up to manage different fitness gyms across Chicago, including XSports Fitness and Club Pilates. Each move, Diana came with him.

Mike found his way to Evanston last September when he accepted a general manager position at the new TITLE Boxing Club on Davis Street. The gym’s owner, Paige Hopkins fixated on Mike’s application. “Mike’s success factor is his personality and passion for what he’s doing,” Hopkins says. “He’s got that magnetic personality that everyone likes being around - I’m touched by his commitment to the people who come to TITLE.”

His 8 a.m. and noon boxing classes are almost always full. They usually start a couple minutes late because Mike is busy wrapping new members’ hands, queuing up the rap playlist that dominates his classes and making sure everyone has water. Attendees line up at his desk after class, asking questions about technique, wanting to see photos of his son, Mike Jr., or just chat about their days.

Northwestern junior Lela Johnson worked closely with Mike on TITLE’s PR team when the location first opened, and became a member of the gym soon after. “Mike is by far one of the most energetic and passionate members of the team,” she says. “[He] keeps the energy high, which is crucial for interval workouts.”

The kid came to, grabbed a log from his front yard, and hit me in the forehead so hard I passed out.

Your grandparents’ house is getting a makeover. At least, that’s the goal for House By Northwestern (HBN). This team of Northwestern students competed in the University’s first U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon in October, designing and building a sustainable house that homebuyers would actually purchase in today’s market. HBN decided to pitch its design to a slightly unusual demographic for sustainable spaces: Baby Boomers.

“The majority of Baby Boomers want to age in place, but only 1 percent of the U.S. housing market is suitable for aging in place,” says Vivien Ng, the interior design lead for the project. “We really wanted to serve our community and it is an unaddressed issue in Evanston.”

Since 2015, 51 students have worked together to plan and construct a house that Baby Boomers could call home in their later years. Like most undergraduate students at Northwestern, HBN’s members don’t moonlight as construction workers – they had to pick up design, sustainability and product expertise as they went, which added to the time commitment. Ng estimates she spent at least 10 to 15 hours a week working on the project in the months leading up to the competition.

In early October, students flew to Denver where they assembled the house to present it to the competition juries and the public. The team took first place in market potential and communications and third place in engineering, finishing in sixth place overall.

HBN combined two key words – energized and adaptable – to name their house “Enable.” The final design focused on these attributes to create an energyefficient, attractive house that is also completely ADA accessible. Thanks to more than 100 hours Ng and others spent talking to the target population, the house not only includes sustainable features but also a sense of “home.” With everything from a practically laid-out kitchen with top-notch, energy-efficient appliances to an entertaining area on the porch, chances are your grandparents will feel quite comfortable in their future house.

Home sweet (GREEN) home

MAJOR FEATURES

Even the kitchen countertop is sustainable – and local. All the products for the recycled glass countertop come from the Chicago area including the waste glass – which could have previously been anything from handblown fixtures to oven doors. Finished with epoxy resin, the countertop can withstand any of the typical tasks of preparing a meal.

The house is truly green inside and out with special “living walls.” Walter Herbst, a professor for Northwestern’s Master of Product Design and Development program sketched them. The greenery puffs out from the wall, drawing visitors’ eyes to the house’s flora. “I wanted to convey a message about sustainability, living with nature,” Ng says.

To make the grandparents’ lives a little easier and healthier, HBN sprayed the windows with PURETi. It prevents rain stains and reduces the amount of toxins in the indoor air. Cigarette smoke amd paint are blocked by agents in PURETi, which ensures safer air is safer and cleaner windows.

Rather than purchasing typical solar panels to sit on top of the roof, HBN selected panels that also served as the roof for a sleeker finish. Plus, thanks to the panels, the house will eventually generate more electricity than it needs, according to Manasi Kaushik, a member of HBN’s communications team.

The dinner table, essential to Thanksgiving festivities and bridge club, is perfectly suited by Ng’s design. “The dining table took me forever to find,” she says. “We were trying to find a dining table that... [could] expand to seat eight people somehow.” A Canadian manufacturer provided the perfect table for around $2,000.

House by Northwestern helps Baby Boomers go green with the smart home of the future

THE PROCESS

House by Northwestern’s first step was choosing its audience. Then came a lot of research – students had to scrutinize decathlon requirements for the structure and interview Baby Boomers to make a starting list of criteria, according to Gordan Kucan, lead architect on the project. They looked at building codes and studied successful solar houses and typical Denver and Chicago homes to determine the best interior design. When they had the inside squared away, the team designed the exterior shape and nailed down details for materials, colors, structures and systems in the house.

Initial construction took place over the summer. “The building of the house all happened in front of me,” says Manasi Kaushik, a member of the communications team who joined HBN in June. ”It was incredible to just see an entire house standing within that period of time.” After finishing, they had to deconstruct the house to ship it to Denver for the competition.

Once onsite, the team reassembled the home. Team members gave tours and showed the sustainable features in a series of contests. Following the decathalon’s conclusion, they disassembled the house once more to send it back to Evanston and Jerry Brennan, its new owner. He has agreed to continue to show the house to the public on select dates.

THE BIG

With fading funds, Studio 22 looks to reinvent itself

Since its birth in 1979, Studio 22 has taken creative risks on wild ideas and somehow managed to turn them into actual films. Originally filled with early video pioneers looking to push the boundaries of the film industry, the student film production group was known for its short flims.

In 1981, The Love Project was a mockumentary-style musical, chronicling a television station’s quest to create a documentary about love. Decades later, through digital ink and paint animation, Bystander told the story of a single father who moved to New York. Today, undergraduates still consider Studio 22 an outlet where they can experiment with cutting-edge techniques while gaining professional experience. But budget cuts have jeopardized the group’s potential as a place for unrelenting creativity.

During Fall Quarter 2016, Studio 22’s student film grant program was dismantled. The Radio/TV/Film (RTVF) department’s Media Arts Grant (MAG) program gobbled up its thousands of dollars of funding, undercutting the group’s autonomy.

The MAG program funds student filmmakers for projects that take up almost the whole school year. Before MAG, the Studio 22 executive board of RTVF undergraduates evaluated pitches in the fall, giving students a chance to present their screenplays. Studio 22 then selected around 10 films a year to grant funding, which generally received between $1,000 and $4,000.

Today, Studio 22 picks and funds just two films a year. Each gets a $4,000 grant, backed by an annual $7,500 donation from Northwestern alumnus Bill Bindley (Speech ‘84) and $500 from the RTVF department.

Studio 22 co-President Megan Ballew says there are two main issues with the transition to the MAG system: the new system doesn’t hold students accountable for their projects, and Studio 22 can only consider projects that MAG already backs when it chooses who to give the rest of its $500 “plus up” mini grants.

After receiving a Bindley grant from Studio 22, senior Erin Gregory spent the 2016-2017 academic year refining the script, thinking about character development and refining technical skills for shooting her original film, The Creature Without a Name. While she had worked on sets for other Studio 22 projects and unsuccessfully pitched in the past, developing her own film made Gregory think more seriously about the logistics and creativity behind filmmaking. She can’t imagine completing the project without Studio 22’s support.

“They’re so involved with it the whole way,” Gregory says. “It’s not just getting a grant – it’s getting a support system that comes with the grant.”

Studio 22’s other co-president, Tyler Gould, says that when Studio 22 takes pitches, it looks at more than just the idea, which is the biggest component of the MAG application process. They want a unique story and a film with high production feasibility, but they also take the student directors’ and producers’ experience into account.

MAG recipients don’t have the same expectations; all students have an adviser, but the projects don’t have deadlines or offer extra resources like the script rewrites and contract advice Studio 22 provides. Ballew says some past MAG recipients haven’t even completed their projects. This is likely because the MAG system is not meant to give students support – its purpose is purely financial.

“There’s not that accountability,” she says. “If someone’s not sitting there holding them accountable, [the project] is not going to happen.”

While Studio 22 has lost its funding, the group has found alternative ways to continue helping student projects. By meeting with potential filmmakers before MAG pitches are due, Studio 22 can pick a group of projects it sees potential in and help each film through the MAG application process – refining scripts, tightening pitches and supporting potential writers, directors and producers.

“The scary thing,” Ballew says, “is that we might get an applicant who pitches to us, we help them with their MAG application, it doesn’t get a MAG and therefore it can’t be made.”

Studio 22 no longer has as much influence over which student films get made, but the group’s reach has expanded on campus. They now host industryspecific speakers and organize panels and script writing contests. Last spring, the group screened La La Land and brought the producer, RTVF alumnus Jordan Horowitz (Comm ‘02), back to campus for a moderated talk following the Best Picture mix up at the Oscars.

As students across campus cram for finals, Studio 22 filmmakers and executive board members prepare for a winter quarter jam-packed with shooting. The five Studio 22 projects – including its two Bindley films Crush and Men of Clay – will make final script tweaks with the Studio 22 script development chairs. The rest of the board will look ahead at bringing an industry speaker during winter quarter, a more general speaker in the spring and producing a film screening premiere at the end of the school year.

“Moving forward, we’re just really trying to focus on how to better support the filmmaking community throughout this transition because it’s hard on all of us,” Gould says. “It’s hard on the department. It’s hard on the student groups. It’s hard on the students themselves.”

One writer reflects on her last name, affirmative action and the myth of meritocracy

Rethinking the “Latina” card

When the four smartest white kids in my junior year English class banded together and called themselves the Snow Leopards, I knew that things would get ugly. They formed their unfortunately named group in response to our teacher’s decision to include a unit on race in America. (The Black Panthers would be so disappointed.) They went on the defensive. They argued that Irish immigrants faced racism comparable to Black people. They were dubious about the invisible knapsack of white privilege thing. And they really hated affirmative action.

“It’s just not fair,” one of them said during a particularly dramatic class discussion on racism in the education system. “It’s not my fault that I was born white and now I’ve worked my butt off to go to a good college, but I won’t get in because I’m white.” She was later recruited to one of the best schools in the country for rowing.

I should say that, at this time, the Snow Leopards were my friends. Not my close friends, but the kind of classmates who Facebook messaged me for homework help or contributed to a group study guide for a test. They didn’t hate Black and Brown people, so they didn’t want to be held responsible for white supremacy. They said these things in front of me all the time.

At the time, I wondered what they would say if I reminded them that I would ostensibly benefit from the thing they hated so much. To get the acceptances they didn’t think I deserved.

I had become good at camouflaging; white people say things to me about people of color as if I am just like them. The Snow Leopards saw me as white because I went to an Irish Catholic school and didn’t have an accent. But if I reminded them of my last name, I knew the jig would be up. The racism that they thought would be okay to spew in front of me would no longer be okay.

When it was reported in August that the Department of Justice would begin investigating university affirmative action policies, I remembered that Snow Leopards grow up and become politicians. They want to make sure that admissions policies don’t discriminate against white applicants. I remember the Snow Leopards who were afraid of the “reverse racism” that might, for once, not benefit them.

Escobar, I want to scream. Why are you so scared of my name?

My last name is a gift. It’s a clue for people who cannot make sense of the racial patchwork that is my body: my Polish mother’s freckled cheeks, my Salvadoran father’s tanned skin, my aunt’s stick-straight hair, my tias’ thick eyebrows and upper-lip hair. It’s a piece of El Salvador that I get to keep with me, a piece that proves I am my father’s daughter even though I can’t speak his first language.

It’s a ticket, I am told, to the college of my dreams, to the jobs I want, to the awards I might receive for my work. These are things, white classmates will tell me, that white people cannot get because they are not one-sixteenth Native American and “nothing bad has ever happened to them.” This is supposed to evoke sympathy.

I went to a college preparatory high school, meaning that we were led by guidance counselors who desperately wanted us to reach our full potential. (read: apply to elite, selective schools). Here, I learn that “Escobar” opens doors for me. (Never mind that future coworkers will unironically ask if I am related to Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.) “Escobar” means that I can go wherever I want for college. (Never mind that my father, who bequeathed me this name, will not set foot in Evanston until my graduation.)

My teachers’ faces lit up when I told them my test scores. “With those scores and your last name,” one said, “you should be applying to Ivies!” I did not apply to Ivies because none of them had journalism programs. My guidance counselor reminded me to list “Latina” on all of my applications. She was well-meaning. In her mind, this would get me into college.

In 2017, we make up 12 percent of Northwestern’s undergraduate student body. In 2000, it was 4 percent, a whopping total of 321 bodies in chairs tasked with the implicit duty of teaching their white classmates about Latinidad by osmosis. This is progress. And still, 48 percent of the student body is white.

Every time I check a box for Latino/a , I think of the Snow Leopards. I wonder if they thought I mostly got into Northwestern because of my name. I wonder if my teachers think this too, even though they’re the ones who told me to pull out Latina when I needed it. Still, I mark the box because it is true, not because I think it’ll make me a shoe-in. Sometimes, though, I hope it will.

What if the race card really worked like that? Wouldn’t life be so much easier if I got to use “Escobar” the way that someone’s wealthy white father could call in a favor with his old buddy to get his kid a job? What if “Escobar” became a substitute for generational wealth that let me take unpaid internships without a second thought? What if “Escobar” became white?

Instead, my race card works like this: my mother incredulously asks me why I’ve started calling myself “a woman of color” in college because she’s never considered me a Latina. Every white guy I’ve ever dated has spoken better Spanish than me. My sixth grade seat partner tells me that he’s going to buy me a razor for my birthday so I can shave off my upper lip hair, the dark mustache I’ve inherited from my Tia Aracely. I write letters to get my cousin out of an immigration detention center.

I got into Northwestern because my Catholic school kindergarten teacher pulled me out of class to read chapter books since I had already learned how to read. I had parents who had the time to read to me before bed, to take me to zoos and museums and sign me up for violin lessons. I had access to a public library within walking distance of my house, where 10-year-old me checked out 10 books a week and read all of them. I went to a Catholic high school where counselors and teachers had the time to mentor me, which gave me a scholarship to attend Medill’s high school journalism program. I’ve been lucky for reasons that have nothing to do with my name.

And hell, I might have gotten in because of my last name. But why does that matter? I shouldn’t have to prove that I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps to get into an elite institution. I shouldn’t have to prove that I got in on my own merit because meritocracies are bullshit. No one gets into college just because they’re smart. That’s not how it works. They get in because they know how to play the game of test scores, recommendation letters and alumni interviews. They get in because of legacy, because their dad knows a guy, because they were able to play an expensive club sport to get recruited. Sometimes, they get in because of affirmative action.

My mom went to college, so I’m not a first-generation student. Still, I think of my father. He barely graduated high school. After fleeing El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s as a teenager, he learned English from watching children’s television. I think of watching PBS documentaries with him and seeing him research the Big Bang on Wikipedia. I think of him naming all the different types of trees when we go north of San Francisco to the Redwoods. I call him after my Latino Studies classes to talk about the theoretical frameworks of migration that match up with his lived experiences of crawling through pipes to get to the U.S. I send him books on California mission architecture that my Latin American art history professor recommends to me; he tells me his father never went to college, either.

I can’t go back in time and get my father a better education, but I’m getting mine now, and my children can, too. I’ve had access to resources my tios and primos never had in El Salvador, and I feel the urge to pay it forward somehow – making their resumes, sharing things I’ve learned in my classes, reporting on the immigration policy that’s determined so much of their lives.

Sometimes, though, thinking about my dad on graduation day is all I need. “You keep on putting me on the clouds,” he texted me the other day after I sent him a story I had written. “I couldn’t be more proud.”

Sam Schumacher

http://www.shortlistphoto.com/

PHILOSOPHY

“I love every form of photography that is about people. When I first started, it was really just about the art, just playing with your cameras. Now I enjoy the social challenge of photography. Taking a portrait of somebody is an interesting psychological battle – your photo is only as good as how the person likes it. If they don’t like how they look or they were not comfortable, the photos are pointless. It’s fun to make people laugh. It’s fun to make people smile.

MY ADVICE “Don’t buy anything new. Everything I have I bought used. Also don’t be afraid of flash.

Sean Su

https://seansuphotography.wixsite.com/

PHILOSOPHY “The most interesting subject that is available to me are people, so I started to request people give me a few minutes so I can take their photos when I meet some interesting character on the street. I try to make people look as genuinely beautiful as they are and use colors and different techniques to make the image they deserve. You try to understand the people in front of you, and you try best to convey that understanding through the image.

MY ADVICE “Just fail as much as you can, because you only learn from failure. Photography is not a subject you can learn from lectures; it is something you should learn by practice. You will see yourself develop when you fail.

Just try your best, try everything and don’t be afraid of failure.”

Faces

Behind the flash

You have have probably seen them at formals, events and football games... and they probably also took your best friend’s profile picture. NBN chatted with four of Northwestern’s most well-known photographers to discuss their philosophies and offer advice for every camera owner.

Editor’s note: These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Alaura Hernandez

PHILOSOPHY “I believe in every photo. It should capture realities at the best angle. I really like playing to my subjects’ strengths. What really gets me excited is particularly vintage stylist shoots. I am very aesthetically driven; I wouldn’t put my name on something that isn’t what I perceived to be fully gorgeous.

MY ADVICE “Really get your feet wet and try a bunch of different things. You can’t be shy. You really have to put yourself out there. Your subjects probably feel more uncomfortable than you do: the more you can loosen up, the more they will loosen up. Be loud, be talkative and get people to talk to you.”

Justin Barbin

http://justin-barbin.com/

PHILOSOPHY “I’ve been photographing at Northwestern since I was a prospie, so it’s been over a decade. For me, it’s not about brand, it’s more about the communities that I’m involved in. There are so many parts of Northwestern that I am so grateful to experience, from the theater department, to Greek life, to the South Asian Student Association and the dance groups. I have friends from the Class of 2008 to 2021 now.

MY ADVICE “It is astounding how many photographers there are, and it’s incredible to see the community grow. I think they’re doing the right thing in just photographing and keeping up with what they’re loving and following what really inspires them. For me, it was about continuing to do what made me happy and what fulfilled me. And from one project to another, it kind of guided itself in that sense.”

Hello, Wisconsin!

Enjoy brats, brie and the Black River on a road trip to Milwaukee

STORY AUDREY VALBUENA and LAURA ZORNOSA DESIGN RACHEL HAWLEY // PHOTOS AUDREY VALBUENA

To those from outside the Midwest, Wisconsin is the land of Milwaukee, beer and cheese – nothing more, nothing less. But even Packer country can seem like an oasis when the quarter system gets you down. If you’re in need of a break from the constant midterm cycle, look no further: follow the yellow cheese road to Milwaukee, a city of adventures and comfortable Midwest charm.

Round-trip, this journey takes 10-12 hours. Aside from driving, the day costs about $40, and the car sharing service Turo offers a viable transportation option if you don’t have a car on campus. Sign up online, book your dream affordable minivan and you’re “On the Road Again” (ft. Willie Nelson) for as low as $49 per day,* or even cheaper if you split the cost with a friend.

*A round trip to Milwaukee may be a bit over Turo’s 200 mile daily limit, but it’s well worth the additional 35¢ per mile!

The Mars Cheese Castle Is there anything more Wisconsin?

The first stop on the road to Milwaukee is the Mars Cheese Castle. Behind the drawbridge door (yes, a real drawbridge door) rests a single aisle of cheese. Every type of cheese curd lies in wait in this most glorious aisle: jalapeño, pepper jack and even pumpkin.

The castle is full of unnecessary oddities ranging from Packers gear and cheese hats to a full throne room, complete with a reindeer chandelier. While kitschy at its core, the Mars Cheese Castle is a stop that can’t be missed. It’s free, and there are samples, so as a welcome to Wisconsin, enjoy your first minutes in Dairyland embracing the state’s namesake.

The Mars Cheese Castle is located at 2800 W. Frontage Road in Kenosha, WI. It’s about a 53 minute drive from school, and entry is free.

Kohler Only the sweetest of small towns On a tight college budget, a picnic provides a cheap alternative to dining alongside middle-aged wine connoisseurs. Arrange your picnic goods carefully on the round stone patio behind Kohler’s Shops at Woodlake, and pour your drinks – definitely not alcoholic beverages of the cheap wine variety – and take in your surroundings. Cheese curds are also in order, hopefully straight out of the Mars Cheese Castle. seems like it’s straight out of an episode of Gilmore Girls.

Enter Woodlake Road into the GPS to find the best place to picnic in Kohler. This stop is about an hour and 20 minutes away from the Mars Cheese Castle.

Kohler-Andrae State Park Beauty to behold

After lunch, it’s time to hit the road for rugged beauty and unparalleled peace. No other place (within Dairy State borders or elsewhere) shares this park’s geographical smorgasbord. The 2.5 mile-long Black River Trail snakes through open fields of wildflowers while the Marsh Trail winds through wetland flora and fauna for half a mile. Walk the Wes Anderson walk and talk the soul-searching talk implied by “likes: long walks on the beach.”

By the time you crest the top of a dune on your way back into the parking lot, you’ll be cold enough to move on to your next stop, but filled with fuzzy memories of Kohler-Andrae.

The park is open year-round from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., and costs $11 for out-of-state license plate entry. It’s best in afternoon hours, from 1-5 p.m.

Benelux More than beer & brats

The end of your journey brings you to Wisconsin’s claim to fame, the largest city in the state. In the middle of Milwaukee’s historic Third Ward, an area known for its artsy and indie boutiques, rests an array of restaurants lined with lights and young folk. Visit Benelux: a modern tavern that is chic, hip and lined with biker motifs. It still has typical wood and brick walls, but serves everything from tater tots and beer to jicama and kale artichoke dip.

With meals ranging from $10– 23, Benelux’s atmosphere gives a modern twist to what would otherwise be just another beer and brat tavern. The modernity of its menu and healthy options, not usually found in such restaurants, are surprising and delicious.

Benelux is located at 346 N. Broadway, Milwaukee, WI, and is 53 minutes from Kohler-Andrae State Park. It is open from 7 a.m. until midnight.

Colectivo The perfect Joe to go

Along the waterfront, Colectivo, a Wisconsin brand, calls out to young coffee-lovers. Rife with a Frida-Kahlo-esque aesthetic, Colectivo embraces Latinx heritage right in the middle of Milwaukee. Coffee is sourced from all across Latin America: Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Pops of color enhance the low lighting of the facility and make you forget it was once a flushing station.

Colectivo’s drinks are reasonably priced, ranging between $3 and $7. The coffee is of superior quality, and each drink has just the right amount of sweetness. The atmosphere is welcoming and cozy, but if you’re in a hurry, the flashy Colectivo cups make this place perfect for drinks to take on the go.

Colectivo Coffee’s Lakefront Cafe is located at 1701 N. Lincoln Memorial Drive, Milwaukee, WI. It takes about 1 hour and 20 minutes to drive back to campus.

James Roberts’ photos offer a glimpse into an era when University Library was cutting-edge, the Lakefill was muddy and barren, and bootcut jeans ruled student fashion. This year, he donated his collection of over 3,700 negatives portraying Northwestern student life to the University Archives. They depict the mundane as well as the extraordinary moments in the life of an undergraduate student between 1968 and 1972.

As a photographer and editor for the Syllabus Yearbook, James Roberts (Weinberg ‘72) used his camera to capture students’ interactions, lifestyles and fashion. He learned the art of documentary photography from fellow student photographers and studied the ways in which he could best capture the moments he witnessed in Evanston, Chicago and on a study abroad trip to Mexico.

“The yearbooks were becoming at that time sort of documentary photography annuals. The groups that I got to know ahead of me were increasingly providing a kind of visual social history of the campus and the campus environment,” Roberts says. “It was less focused on some of the traditional campus activities like homecoming and games and fraternities and sororities . . . There was an interest in photography or documentary photography for its own sake.”

University Archives undertook the massive project of digitizing the thousands of images, which are available online. They portray a university charged with political action in the midst of the Vietnam War. Roberts, who is now executive vice provost for Finance and Administration at Duke University, did not continue with a career in documentary photography, but applauds the students he worked with who did.

“I feel that was sort of a historic era,” Roberts says. “What I had documented . . . was a legacy I didn’t want to just throw in the trash.”

College campuses across the U.S. were hotbeds of politically charged activism during the long ‘60s, as students protested U.S. military presence in Vietnam. Anti-war demonstrations at Northwestern included student strikes and large gatherings on Deering Meadow, which attracted participants from across Evanston.

Although he was a supporter of the demonstrations, Roberts preferred to remain a “participant observer,” documenting the action without being an active organizer.

“Some pretty big issues were on the table and were being discussed in aways that didn’t seem to have much precedent, so it seemed like a very significant departure in public life,” Roberts says. “And of course when the country is at war and the goals and the possibilities of success were unclear, it certainly mobilized a lot of energy in society on all sides.”

A crowd of students listened to comedian Groucho Marx as he spoke at Northwestern. Roberts documented visits by public figures such as Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern and boxer Muhammad Ali.

Lonely by design

In 1980, students didn’t refer to the Foster-Walker Undergraduate Housing Complex as Plex. They called it Suicide Hall.

Foster-Walker was only a year old when the first residents asked to move out in 1973, complaining of loneliness and isolation.

It was five years old when 20-yearold resident Jane Mitrenga killed herself in her car in the front parking lot of the building.

Plex was six years old when, in response to Mitrenga’s suicide, local PBS journalist Michael Hirsh featured the residence hall in his film College Can Be Killing. In it, he claimed the dorm had a reputation for contributing to students’ emotional problems and depression.

“A [HOUSING LOTTERY]

NUMBER CAN KIND OF SCREW YOU OVER FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR. WHO KNOWS HOW MUCH THAT ONE NUMBER WILL CONTRIBUTE TO YOUR

DEPRESSION?” –LEXY PRAEGER

The building was seven when residents jokingly offered “special suicide rates” to a group of high school seniors visiting Plex on a tour, according to a 1980 Daily Northwestern article.

By 1981, the residence hall had come to “represent all that was grim and cheerless about Northwestern life,” said student Carl Briggs in a 1981 Daily editorial. It wasn’t even 10 years old.

Still, 60 students were on the waitlist for a room in Plex that year. Indeed, the University has never struggled to fill space since Plex’s opening, and while it may be the least desirable housing option for many upperclassmen today, it still accommodates about 475 students – 85 percent of its 560-person capacity.

While no longer nicknamed “Suicide Hall,” Plex still has a reputation for exacerbating – and in some cases causing – mental health issues. The exclusively single-style living, lack of community engagement and architectural structure work together to create, for a small number residents, a truly nightmarish, isolating living experience. For too many students, it is a bleak spot in their time at Northwestern; an experience they just need to get through.

Senior Lexy Praeger and her friends were not happy when they realized their priority numbers landed them in a suite on the third floor in Plex for their sophomore years, rather than in Kemper as they had hoped. They’d heard the rumors: Plex was depressing, filled with antisocial people who didn’t have anywhere else to go.

It helped to spend as much time as possible away from the residence hall, and gather in one of their rooms when they had to be home. But the single rooms still sometimes pulled them into solitude.

“If you get into kind of a bad cycle where if you’re upset or kind of depressed about something, it doesn’t force you to get out of that environment at all,” Praeger says. “It kind of just pushes you farther into it.”

Praeger felt trapped and cheated, especially because her and her friends’ placement in the residence hall was entirely out of their control.

“A number can kind of screw you over for an entire year,” she says. “Who knows how much that one number will contribute to your depression?”

At Plex, suite-style living means around five students share one bathroom, but otherwise have individual spaces. Each floor shares two lounges in opposite corners of the building. This encourages limited contact with other students, especially when a resident does not live near friends. But Plex was not originally planned this way.

As undergraduate enrollment grew in the early 1960s, the University needed to accommodate a growing demand for on-campus housing. A committee proposed a mid-campus “living-learning environment” with a rich community and diverse housing options from singles to quads. But a high demand for single-occupancy housing prompted the design of a complex with entirely single rooms.

Initial proposals in 1964 planned for the complex to be two quads surrounded by four smaller “houses.” The houses would be separate, connected only on the first floor. The “vertical integration” would promote smaller, more intimate living communities.

A $2 million cost overrun led the University to alter its plans. The proposed nearly-separate houses became connected on every floor. The result – two large structures with 582 single rooms – promoted anonymity, rather than community, even though elements of the eight-house structure were preserved.

Paul Warschauer (Speech ‘76) was one of the first residents to move into the dorm in 1972. He and the other residents were thrilled to have access to all the amenities the ‘70s had to offer. Considered one of the “lucky ones,” Warschauer jumped into the social life of House Three: As secretary treasurer, he created programming that included a cabaret show and house outings to Chicago.

Other houses weren’t so lucky. After just a year, many students in other houses requested to move to House Three or out of Plex entirely. “If you were not an A personality you were in trouble,” Warschauer says. “You had to make your own way because the only contact that you had was with somebody else who was sharing your bathroom.”

Today, just as it was in the 1970s, individual experience largely depends on what students make of it – even though Residential Services now works to provide community-building programming. Among residential assistants, it’s understood that those who choose to live in Plex may not be receptive to this type of social activity.

Plex can be the perfect place for people who have established social groups outside the building who don’t necessarily want the space where they live to double as their social space, says Huy Do, a residential assistant in the building for the 2016-17 school year.

For less gregarious students, the lack of community, strictly single-style rooms and shortage of common spaces can pose a problem. The structure of Plex allows students to enter, climb the stairs and walk to their rooms without passing a common area – or even a single person.

Structurally, the University has not significantly altered Plex since it was built 45 years ago, according to Paul Weller, director of planning at Northwestern Facilities Management.

But, per Northwestern’s Housing Master Plan, Plex is scheduled for renovation in 2022-23. While Plex renovation plans are not close to solidified, the University has budgeted $85 million to $90 million for the project, out of the $500 million allotted to the Master Plan as a whole.

Paul Riel, assistant vice president of residential and dining services in the Office of Student Affairs, oversees the Master Plan and its overarching goal of community formation. With “bold ideas,” Riel envisions Plex as a space based entirely around community, similar to what the University created in 560 Lincoln and the Mid-Quads. The building will likely remain single-occupancy, but more common areas on each floor aim to boost social contact.

Renovations may also include adding a fifth floor, enclosing the courtyards and making the first floor an entirely communal space. Riel proposes spaces like multipurpose classrooms, a cafe and a fitness center. These spaces, in addition to Plex’s mid-campus location, could drive more student traffic through the building.

“[These renovations] really are about community, and you need to bang into people and bump into people and trip over people in order to make that happen,” Riel says.

Still, changes to Foster-Walker are far from the implementation stage. The University needs to finish planned renovations at 1835 Hinman so that students can move there during Plex’s renovation. For now, Riel says Plex’s facelift is on schedule, but Hinman’s construction has already hit delays.

By 2023, Plex may be one of the best places to live on campus. But for the last 45 years, it has negatively impacted the experiences of countless students. For those residents, and students living there in the next few years, it stands unchanged, the same structure once dubbed “Suicide Hall.”

At the time of Plex’s construction, new fire codes called for increased points of exit, which forced an entrance and exit structure that deterrs social contact between residents. Residents can enter the building, walk straight up a staircase and into their room, often never seeing another person.

Student Affairs’ ideas for Foster-Walker’s renovations include adding a fifth floor, enclosing the courtyards and making the first floor a communal space.