The College Hill Independent V.29 N.7

the college hill A BROWN/RISD WEEKLY OCTOBER 31, 2014 | V29 N7

independent

MANAGING EDITORS Alex Sammon, Lili Rosenkranz, Greg Nissan NEWS Sebastian Clark, Kyle Giddon, Elias Bresnick METRO Rick Salamé, Sophie Kasakove, Cherise Morris ARTS Lisa Borst, Eli Pitegoff, Erin Schwartz FEATURES Matt Marsico, Sara Winnick TECHNOLOGY Patrick McMenamin SPORTS Zeve Sanderson SCIENCE Connor Mcguigan FOOD Sam Bresnick LITERARY Kim Sarnoff, Leah Steinberg EPHEMERA Mark Benz X Layla Ehsan, Sara Khan, Pierie Korostoff LIST Polina Godz, Megan Hauptman DESIGN + ILLUSTRATION Casey Friedman, Ming Zhen COVER EDITOR Jade Donaldson SENIOR EDITORS Tristan Rodman STAFF WRITERS Mika Kligler, Will Fesperman, Stephanie Hayes, Jamie Packs, Dash Elhauge STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Andres Chang, Caroline Brewer, Brielle Curvey WEB Edward Friedman COPY Mary Frances Gallagher BUSINESS Haley Adams COVER ART Jade Donaldson MVP Pierie Korostoff

VOLUME 29 | ISSUE 7

NEWS 2 Week in Review

elias bresnick, sebastian clark, & kyle giddon

3 Ebol-aaah!

sebastian clark & elias bresnick

METRO 5 The Miseducation of College Hill sophie kasakove

7 Spooky Providence mika kligler

FEATURES 13 Health Careless Jennifer Tsai

FOOD 9 More Please stephanie hayes

SPORTS 11 Return of the King zeve sanderson

EPHEMERA 12 Fritters nana

VISUAL 8 Crunch-o’-yer-feet andres chang

LIT 15 Kingdom of God matthew marsico

17 Marble Throat sara winnick

X

FROM THE EDITOR S Restaurant closures of a certain type can cause a rupture in memory. It’s hard to feel sad for a white-tablecloth restaurant called [Chez something? –TR] that closes after being bought up, [this sucks, I need a better image here – TR] or [help some a dude out – TR]. But losing a neighborhood standby, a place that’s family-run, and a place in which one has shared many meals and conversations is a loss deeply felt [too cloying? Delete if you want – TR].

East Side Creamery, an Ives Street diner, closed its doors this past week. For many, East Side was a place with potable, endless coffee and a breakfast of scrambled eggs [I’m more of a sunny-side up guy – TR], potatoes, and toast that ran $3.50. They served dinner, too, though that was inconsequential [hope they don’t take this as in insult – TR], and ice cream that was way better than it needed to be.

I never knew the owners personally [In a dream, they spelled a poem out in dogs for me, wrote it down in the morning– TR], or even established status as a regular. I went in frequently enough to know that they were husband and wife, and that they did not get upset with me when I ordered the most inexpensive item on the menu every time.

I have been told they will re-open for a farewell tour in the month of November, but this I cannot confirm. When I called to inquire, the phone rang indefinitely. [haven’t done this, imagine it would happen? – TR] –TR

18 Clean Sheets layla ehsan, sara khan & pierie korostoff

P.O. Box 1930 Brown University Providence, RI 02912 Letters to the editor are welcome distractions. The Independent is published weekly during the fall & spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

THEINDY.ORG // @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN ROBBER BARONS

by Kyle Giddon, Sebastian Clark, & Elias Bresnick illustration Ming Zhen

FORD FIESTA

UNOCCUPIED

ROAD BEERS

It is with sadness that The College Hill Independent confirms what other sources have reported: Canada’s great picaresque has reached its coda. On Monday, the City of Toronto elected a new mayor, John Tory, spelling the end of four years of office for Rob Ford, who outlasted career-ending scandal after careerending scandal en route to a full term. While a full account of Ford’s mayoralty is too rich for these pages, we offer a brief primer: In August 2012, Ford was caught driving on the highway while reading. He defended himself by saying he was busy and was trying to “catch up on his work.” (He rejected the idea of hiring a driver.) Three months later, Ford endured a conflict-of-interest trial after casting a vote in the City Council to excuse himself from repaying $3,150 to 11 lobbyists and one corporation from whom he improperly sought donations for his charitable football foundation. Although a judge removed Ford from office, an appeals court reversed the removal on a technicality.

In May 2013, video emerged of Ford smoking crack cocaine and shouting about how he is “fucking right-wing”; in the video he also calls Justin Trudeau, the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party, a homophobic slur. Ford initially denied the allegations, but after a police investigation, he admitted to drug use “probably in one of my drunken stupors.” While the City Council did not have the power to remove Ford from office, they asked him to step down and stripped him of many of his powers, which they transferred to Deputy Mayor Norm Kelly.

In November, former Ford staff members filed a suit against him, alleging that he consorted with sex workers and told a female staff member that he wanted to perform oral sex on her. In a televised press conference renouncing the charges, Ford wore a custom Toronto Argonauts jersey (Canadian football) and denied he would make such a lewd remark: “I’m happily married. I have more than enough to eat at home.” (The Argonauts, for good measure, posted a statement on Twitter: “[Mayor Ford’s] latest remarks while wearing our team’s jersey are particularly disappointing given our organization’s work in the community to help youth deal with issues of bullying prevention”).

In January of this year, Ford was videotaped at a fastfood restaurant swearing and slurring while attempting to do a Jamaican accent. Ford admitted to drinking but denied any impropriety: “What I do in my personal life with my personal friends, that’s up to me.” (One is less surprised at Ford’s unseemly actions than his continuing propensity to get videotaped doing them.)

On September 12, Ford announced that health issues would force him to abandon his bid for reelection as mayor, and he instead ran for his old City Council seat, to which he was again elected. But there are already whispers of a mayoral comeback in four years; as The Toronto Star put it: “While Torontonians have tired of scandal, there is scant evidence they have tired of fiscal conservatism.” –KG

“We were trying to create an environment where people could be heard,” so said David Graeber, one of Occupy Wall Street’s founders, in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek. While we can’t doubt that, through the common use of the human microphone, Occupy activists heard themselves time and time again. In retrospect, it seems as though many of these chants fell on deaf ears. Total revolution a la the Arab Spring never came, and a collective decision was made—perhaps active, perhaps passive—not to step out of entrenchment and into the upheaval that the frenzied embrace of Occupy Wall Street might bring. The tents were folded up, the impassioned collectivism petered out of the public eye.

Its most preeminent activists, who by its end were firmly committed to alternative living, have since bided their time well, enjoying the most popular pastime of the politically jaded—writing.

Graeber himself penned a new book, The New Inquiry, which has asserted itself as the go-to publication of the leftist graduate who is resolutely against the Platonic ideal of gentrification, but still can’t seem to help moving to Brooklyn.

Probably the same person that just sneered that there can be no Platonic ideal of gentrification. Don’t get me wrong. I think The New Inquiry is great. I’m one of you too. Brooklyn is the place where my dreams will come true.

But rolling the credits on the movement may yet be premature. This week, Occupy Democracy gained a little traction in London. Hundreds of activists took to Parliament Square with a concrete list of demands, this time addressing government, not the moneyed elite. The Metropolitan Police, keeping with their blossoming record of draconian control, responded by simply fencing off the square that was purposively built as a space for deliberative democracy. Tents were torn down, raincoats were confiscated as sleeping equipment, pizza boxes seized as illegal structures. The events, however, struggled to make news headlines. Before Graeber wrote a Guardian Op-Ed on Monday called “Occupy Democracy is not considered newsworthy. It should be,” The Malay Mail was pretty much the only publication covering its gaining momentum. To find out more, visit their website. –SC

I’d argue that, in general, we tend to accept apologies. Clinton’s approval ratings reached their highest only after the scandal; Kanye’s popularity hasn’t flagged despite offending the world twice over; no one even remembers what Hugh Grant did 20 years ago. It seems we’ll give anyone a second chance as long as he’s willing to appear glassy-eyed on television to dolefully explain what he learned from past mistakes.

But in the world of quotidian interactions, is a person to person apology so easily swallowed? Might it always be necessary to hire a PR team in order to effectively navigate a crisis?

On Sunday morning, Cyle Abbot, a 23-year-old resident of Eureka, California, strode into a Patriot gas station and robbed the teller with what he later claimed was a BB gun.

After gathering up all the available money (plus two beers for the road), Abbot fled the scene and managed to escape before officers arrived a few minutes later.

But few things weigh more heavily on a man than a guilty conscience, and it must have been a strange scene indeed for the teller when, just three hours later, Abbott returned to the gas station to give back the cash he had stolen.

Explaining that he had wanted to use the money to turn his life around but soon realized the error of his ways, the criminal-turned-confessor returned to rectify his mistake.

One could make the argument that Abbott’s apology was more genuine than, say, Bono’s recent “I’m sorry” to the People’s Republic of iTunes for forcibly downloading his music onto their libraries. After all, there was no social pressure for Abbott to come back, no pundits screaming for his head on a platter, no open letters promulgated among social media outlets to foment public outrage, no implication, even, that he would be caught by the authorities. In truth, nothing more than the cold pangs of remorse led Abbott back to the fateful spot of his transgression.

Alas, it seems as though the court of public opinion is more lenient than the district courts of Humboldt County.

As for how his apology was received, Abbot is currently being held in county jail, with bond set a $50,000. –EB

OCTOBER 31 2014

NEWS

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EBOLA ACCORDING TO CNN, ETC. Keeping tabs on the mainstream media swarm

by Sebastian Clark & Elias Bresnick

Ebola in the air? A nightmare that could happen -CNN Nurses in safety gear got Ebola, why wouldn’t you -WBNS ISIS Could Turn Ebola Into Bioweapon, Security Expert Warns NewsMax

How you can profit from Ebola -USA Today

Experts: Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People Away -The Onion

President Obama links ‘headlines’ to Ebola fear -The Washington Post Ebola the ‘ISIS of Bio-Agents’ -CNN

EBOLA SCARE IN THE CITY -NY Daily News

EBOLA DOCTOR: SINNER OR SAINT? -CNN Outrageous: Dallas Paramedics Weren’t Told They Were Driving Ebola Contaminated Ambulance for 48 Hours How the Feds block Ebola cures -New York Post

-SHTFplan.com

Cam’ron takes on Ebola virus by selling his own surgical masks -NY Daily News

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan dies at Dallas hospital -Dallas News

Lysol Buys Ad Around Google Searches for ‘Ebola’

Burn Ebola Bodies, Gov’t Ordered -The New Dawn

Is Ebola a Sign of Judgment or a Prophetic Warning? -Charisma News New Ebola Cases May Soon Reach 10,000 a Week, Officials Predict -New York Times

Conservatives link Ebola scare to U.S. border security -Star-Telegram

"Will Ebola sink dems' chances at the polls?” -CNN

OCTOBER 31 2014

NEWS

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SCATTERBRAINED SEX-ED

Examining Rhode Island’s patchwork sexual education policies

by Sophie Kasakove illustration by Caroline Brewer

In December 2007, the Rhode Island branch of the Heritage Foundation, an abstinenceonly-until-marriage education provider, shut its doors. For over two years, the provider had faced scrutiny from the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE), parents, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who argued that the program “promoted sexist stereotypes, isolated gay and lesbian students, and did not appear to comport with the state’s comprehensive sex education standards.” To give an example of the language these groups opposed, a choice quote from the Heritage curriculum, as printed in an article by the National Coalition to Support Sexuality Education: “Males are more sight orientated whereas females are more touch orientated. This is why girls need to be careful with what they wear, because males are looking! The girl might be thinking fashion, while the boy is thinking sex. For this reason, girls have a responsibility to wear modest clothing that doesn’t invite lustful thoughts.”

The Heritage program, which was taught in Pawtucket and Woonsocket public schools during the early 2000s, is one of many similar programs funded by the federal abstinence-only-until-marriage grant Title V, Section 510 of the Social Security Act. The 1996 law set forth an 8-point definition of an abstinence education program as one that teaches, among other concepts, that a “mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity” and that “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.” According to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, Congress funneled over $1.3 billion taxpayer dollars into abstinence-only programs between 2001 and 2009. +++ In recent years, public opinion has, on the whole, shifted away from abstinence towards a more comprehensive approach. According to a 2013 poll conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 69 percent of adults over the age of 18 agree that sex-ed classes should include accurate prevention methods in addition to messages about delaying sex until teens are ready for it. Over 20 states now reject Title V funding because of its strict restrictions. In 2009, Congress passed an appropriations bill that eliminated the majority of funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, reallocating over $100 million annually to evidence-based sex-ed initiatives that “encourage abstinence, promote appropriate condom use, and teach sexual communication skills.” But the transition hasn’t been smooth. $55 million of federal funds still go towards abstinence-based programs. Additionally, only 22 states in the U.S. currently mandate sex-ed in public schools; of these, only 18 require that information on contraceptives be provided. Even in these states, sex-ed programs are often implemented unevenly across school districts. Clearly, recognizing the values of comprehensive sex-ed and actually implementing these values do not go hand in hand.

The same holds true in Rhode Island. Since banning Heritage, Rhode Island has indicated a commitment to more progressive sex-ed policy. In 2007, Rhode Island became one of the first states to reject Title V funding. In August 2012, the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) revised its health education content standards to be detailed and comprehensive. For example, according to the updated Rhode Island’s Coordinated School Health Program (CSHP) Rhode Island public school students between kindergarten and 4th grade are expected to demonstrate the ability to describe male and female reproductive anatomy and differentiate between “good and bad touch.” Students in grades five to eight are expected to learn about contraceptives, rape, and masturbation. By high school, Providence students are expected know about preventative health behaviors including breast and testicular self-exams, abortion as an alternative to birth in the event of an unplanned pregnancy, and fetal and infant health.

And these topics are only the tip of the iceberg. The CSHP, in a super-dense chart of 8-point font, suggests that Rhode Island students graduate high school as near experts on sex and sexual health. But the outcomes raise questions about the true depth and breadth of Rhode Island sex-ed: only 61 percent of Rhode Island teenagers grades 9-12 reported using a condom when last having sex, according to a study by the Rhode Island Alliance, a statewide organization dedicated to reducing teen pregnancy. Additionally, according to a Guttmacher Institute report in 2010, the teen pregnancy rate in Rhode Island is 44 pregnancies per 1000 women in the 15-19 age group, a rate better than the national average of 57 per 1000 women, but worse than other states in the region (Massachusetts’ rate was 37, New Hampshire’s—the best in the country— was 28).

Clearly, Rhode Island students are missing out on more than just the curriculum’s more minute points about when to get a mammogram or the difference between STDs and STIs. The reality, according to state health workers and educators, is that most Rhode Island students aren’t learning sex-ed according to the RIDE curriculum, but are instead learning from abstinence-based programs, or no program at all. Besty Shimberg, a Rhode Island educator and former policy researcher at Rhode Island Kids Count, told the Indy that most Rhode Island public school students she interacts with don’t know nearly enough about contraceptive options to make informed decisions about their sexual health.

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This wide gap between policy and practice can be partly attributed to contradictions within state law. State law does mandate that Rhode Island schools offer sex-ed, including instruction in STIs, HIV, and contraception. According to the mandate, Rhode Island students are expected to receive instruction in health and physical education, which should average at least 20 minutes in each school day (notably, the mandate does not delineate between time allotted to health education and to physical education). But, contrary to RIDE’s expectations, the law still requires abstinence to be “emphasized” as the preferred method of preventing teen pregnancy and STDs, according to The Rhode Island Board of Education Act (Section 16-22-18).

For public school teachers and administrators with limited resources, time, and expertise in sex and sexual health education, the word “emphasized” is key. In many school districts, that single word wins out over the pages of expectations compiled in CSHP and makes comprehensive sex-ed appear optional to educators.

The perceived optionality of comprehensive sex-ed programs is encouraged by the total lack of both enforcement and assessment of how the curriculum is being enforced in different school districts. Neither the implementation of sex-ed programs nor student comprehension of health-related concepts have been evaluated in the over 10 years since RIDE re-appropriated funding for sex-ed assessments to more standard curricular assessments (the NECAP, in particular). Elliot Krieger, a public information officer at RIDE claimed in an interview that these assessments were cut primarily for financial reasons and that “acceptable” results of the assessments conducted in the early 2000s justified their retirement.

Without enforcement mechanisms, every district and school within it is at liberty to implement RIDE’s curriculum according to its budgetary restrictions and (though this factor is often unacknowledged) its community’s cultural and ideological leanings. Carolyn Mark, President of the Rhode Island National Organization for Women (RI NOW), explained in an interview with The Indy, “Different schools may decide to cover different subjects in different grades, or they may just cut out topics altogether. Schools are given extensive power in figuring out how to implement these standards.” +++ Rhode Island’s $67 million deficit (down from $300 million in 2011) has taken a toll on the state’s public schools. Just as in public schools across the country, when budgets are tight, the first programs to go are those deemed less-than-essential: arts, sports, and sex education. Mark believes that some of the energy and resources assigned towards implementing the core curriculum should be re-appropriated to implement sex-ed programs.

“Some schools have been teaching the same curriculum for the past 10 years and don’t have the funds to update it,” Mark says. “Some don’t have the funds to implement sex-ed at all. This needs to change.” Shimberg echoed this sentiment, saying “We’re arming children with knowledge so they will be literate and so they can do math. We should also be arming them with information so they can be knowledgeable about their bodies and protect themselves from disease.”

Neither Mark nor Shimberg are hopeful about the possibility of progress, at least in the near future. Comprehensive sex-ed advocates in Rhode Island come up against significant cultural barriers, such as the state’s strong Catholic heritage (44 percent of Rhode Island’s population is Catholic, outnumbering members of other faiths and making Rhode Island the second most heavily Catholic state in the country after Massachusetts).

Shimberg also points out that the state’s deep culture of self-governance tends to create aversion to state-wide programs, “New England is all about town meetings. The way we implement education reflects that clearly: education is locally controlled down to the school boards.”

Mark suggests that another cultural barrier to more progressive sex-ed in the state is the faction of Rhode Islanders who don’t recognize teen pregnancy as an issue. “There are some women and men who do have the information they need but for a variety of other socio-economic factors are deciding that they want to have a child,” Mark says.

There are some communities in the state, however, that are eager to address the issue.

For example parents, educators, and students in Westerly, a rural town on the southwestern shoreline of the state, are well aware of the consequences of insufficient sex-ed.

Teen pregnancy is a particularly pressing issue in Westerly: according to a self-assessment conducted by the town in 2010, Westerly’s teens are 50 percent more likely to have babies than the state average. The study highlights key factors contributing to Westerly’s teen pregnancy rates: lack of public transportation leaves Westerly isolated, while lacking after-school activities. Most Westerly students do receive sex-ed in school, but students are expected to cover the entire health curriculum in only one semester. Sex-ed is limited to four topics: anatomy, abstinence, birth control, and STIs. In Westerly, where teen pregnancy maintains an undeniable and visible presence, the community self-assessment reported that an overwhelming majority of survey respondents believed that high schools should provide more comprehensive information about contraceptives to students.

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

+++ Progress towards a more comprehensive sex-ed curriculum won’t happen unless this same sense of urgency is felt statewide. “This issue isn’t super politicized at the local level,” Mark says. “Really, there’s just a lack of attention.” The precedent exists for Rhode Island parents to put pressure on RIDE to make curricular changes, such as a recent effort to have Rhode Island opt-out of the Common Core. But parents are keeping quiet on sex-ed, and without that pressure, there’s little hope that RIDE will even acknowledge that a problem exists. When asked if RIDE was considering reviving the sex-ed assessment, Krieger, the public relations officer responded, “We are confident that schools are following the guidelines. We have no reason to think that these things are not being taught as expected.”

Recognizing the current inability of the state to enforce sex-ed education, nonprofit and advocacy groups are stepping up to fill in the gaps in Rhode Island students’ knowledge. Planned Parenthood runs several in-state sexuality educational programs, such as Students Teaching About Responsible Sexuality (STARS), a high-school peer education group, and Teen Clinics—a once-a-month teens only clinic in Providence. Volunteer programs like Sex Ed by Brown Med, through which Brown medical students teach sex-ed

OCTOBER 31 2014

to seventh and eighth grade students at Calcutt Middle School in Central Falls, are also gaining traction. These programs are important, but their reach is small and relies heavily on a transient, college-aged volunteer base. +++ In April 2012, an updated version of the aforementioned Heritage program was quietly added to the national Office of Adolescent Health lists of approved “evidence-based” programs eligible for government funds. The program, though abstinence-only in content, met the office of Health and Human Services’ two benchmarks for approval as “evidencebased”: it had a strong study design and demonstrated a statistically significant impact on students’ behavior. The criteria for these “evidence-based” programs appear comically vague, especially when compared with the level of detail in RIDE’s criteria. But without proper assessment and enforcement measures, both criteria lead to the same outcome: sexed programs that fail to reflect the needs and wishes of the communities they serve.

SOPHIE KASAKOVE B’17 wonders if RIDE got their name from the DMX song.

METRO

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HAUNTED, RI

by Mika Kligler illustration by Layla Ehsan It’s Hallow’s Eve in our nation’s most tolerant state; open your mind, unfocus your eyes. Join one of Rhode Island’s nine Wiccan covens; blame that smell of rotting flesh in your house on a malevolent apparition. The Ocean State’s ghosts are ready to play.

(A) The Biltmore (Providence) Rumored to be an inspiration for Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel, the Biltmore has seen its fair share of paranormal activity. A suicidal stockbroker has supposedly stuck around since the height of the Great Depression. One questionable Internet source claims that the hotel’s one-time rooftop chicken coop was stocked with poultry for weekly Satanist sacrifices (as opposed to fresh eggs). Also that a cardinal once drowned an 11-year-old prostitute in a hotel bathtub. Assertions from guests of supernatural sightings—slamming doors and apparitions—abound. Stake the place out, stay all night, see what happens. 11 Dorrance Street, Providence, RI.

(B) The Jack O’ Lantern Spectacular (Providence) Wander through Roger Williams Park, where 5,000 jack o’ lanterns carved by “a team of professional pumpkin carvers” are on display. The team, dubbed “Passion for Pumpkins,” expects to go through 20,000 winter squash over the course of the month-long festival. Go for the ambience, stay for James Gandolfini’s delicately rendered face. Roger Williams Park, 1000 Elmwood Ave, Providence RI. Open 6-11 PM through November 2nd. $12-$16.

(C) Exeter Grange (Exeter) The year is 1892. The vibe is New England Vampire Panic.

19-year-old Mercy Brown is two months dead of Consumption. Now her brother Edwin has come down with it too; general consensus in the neighborhood is that Mercy is a vampire and is consuming Edwin’s life from beyond the grave.

The townspeople exhume Mercy’s body and find it remarkably intact, heart still full of pooled blood. Hypothesis confirmed.

They cut out Mercy’s heart, burn it in a fire, mix the ashes with water, and give the concoction to Edwin to slurp down.

He does, but dies anyway. The story is well documented in contemporary newspapers; an 1892 Chicago Tribune article speculates that it “must have been a weird ceremony.” You can visit Mercy’s grave in Exeter, Rhode Island—rumor has it she hangs around. Chestnut Hill Baptist Church Cemetery, Exeter, RI.

(E) Séance at the ACI (Cranston) Did Mercury’s retrograde mess with your psyche? In need of spiritual healing or custom spell-work? Look no further than Heather Anderson, a local RI medium and also, ironically, a Correctional Officer at a RI state prison. This past March, four high-up administrators at RI’s Adult Correctional Institute were placed on administrative leave for calling Anderson back to the ACI after her overnight shift to lead a séance and perform extensive psychic readings in a top official’s private office. All four administrators were on the clock, pulling in six-figure salaries as they explored their spiritual selves. The investigation is ongoing, but you can contact Anderson for a cleansing at chariotmoon5@themysticalmedium.com.

(F) Zombie Paint Ball (West Greenwich) The apocalypse is coming; you should probably hone your survival tactics. Head to West Greenwich’s “Field of Screams” to release suppressed aggression, live out fantasies of drillsergeant power dynamics, and down the undead via paintball from a five-ton military transport truck. 179 Plain Meeting House Road, West Greenwich, RI. Open 6-10 PM through November 1st. $20.

(G) Providence Ghost Tour (Providence) Traverse College Hill and hear historic stories of freaky happenings. Edgar Allen Poe is involved; so are H.P. Lovecraft and Anne-Marie Brown. I went last Saturday along with 180 (!) others. When prodded, my guide admitted that she “wants to be a believer.” But halfway through the tour, a short girl in a North Face fleece passed her iPhone around the circle; on the screen was a picture of Brown’s University Hall, and in the highest, northernmost window, a small, blue-green orb (orbs in photographs are imprints of occult activity). She showed us the next photo: the same window, a moment later, completely dark. I tried all night to capture orbs; my phone is filled with dim blurry shots of College Hill houses. Yours could be too.

Prospect Terrace Park, 60 Congdon Street, Providence, RI. Tours run every evening at 7 PM. $15.

MIKA KLIGLER B’17 @ themysicalmedium.com

(D) Factory of Terror (West Warwick) For those in search of a more synthetic thrill: your standard haunted house, dubbed Rhode Island’s best. Yelp reviews are inconclusive, but Linda N. of Boston is on board: “they can make ur heart weak!” she says. 3 Bridal Ave, West Warwick, RI. Open through November 1st. $20.

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THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

WATCH ME EAT Examining the globalization of gluttony

by Stephanie Hayes illustration by Pierie Korostoff

Every evening at 8 PM, The Diva sits before her laptop in her South Korean apartment, turns on a camera, and eats for the world.

“I’m going to eat the pizza,” she tells her viewers in singsongy Korean. “It was baked in a wood-fired oven, so I think it’ll taste really clean and delicious.”

She dangles a cheese-slathered slice before the camera— her imagined dinner company—and begins to eat.

“This is much better than the gorgonzola pizza,” she giggles, referring to a previous broadcast.

In a single sitting, spanning a few hours, The Diva consumes days worth of calories: giant bowls of noodles, buckets of greasy chicken wings, plates of fried meat, entire pizzas. One Sunday, I watched her consume four plates of inch-thick prime beef, alongside a tray of grilled mushrooms, zucchini, and eggplant. I heard the meat sizzle, saw the juices squirt, and witnessed her chatting and giggling in animated Korean. I didn’t understand a single word, but I was enchanted.

These programs, called muk bang in Korean, have been variably referred to as “eating broadcasts,” “gastronomic voyeurism,” or even “food porn,” and are a growing trend in South Korea. The phenomenon first appeared in 2009, when people began filming parody shows where they mimicked the signature behaviors and speech patterns of celebrity chefs.

These tongue-in-cheek shows later developed into earnest eating broadcasts, which saw some of the hosts become celebrities in their own right. The petite Diva, whose real name is Park Seo-Yeon, hosted one of the most popular broadcasts of this kind, earning over $9,000 per month from the hosting site, Afreeca TV, for displaying her eating talents.

She recently suspended her broadcasts due to family reasons, but fans continue to get their fix by watching old sessions on YouTube. A chat room that accompanied her broadcast allowed her to interact with viewers in real-time, responding to their questions and taking food requests. They could even send her money in the form of “balloons,” a digital currency that can be swapped for legal tender. In return, she provided virtual company and the promise that she wouldn’t promote foods that aren’t to her liking. After two years spent juggling her eating broadcasts with a day job at a consulting agency, she quit her job—to eat for a living. +++ In recent years, societal obsession with food as spectacle has skyrocketed. This Fourth of July, an estimated 35,000 people gathered to watch Joey Chestnut devour 61 hotdogs in 10 minutes at Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest on Coney Island. The annual event, referred to as the “Superbowl of Competitive Eating,” aired on ESPN— all part of Major League Eating’s push to earn some extra coverage and see competitive eating officially labeled a sport. Our interest in food as spectacle is made manifest on a more everyday level in the array of cooking programs broadcast on TV. Today, there are entire channels devoted to culinary shows, ranging from the cook-offs of Masterchef, Top Chef, and Iron Chef, to the how-to programs of celebrity chefs. When the Food Network spread from North America to the United Kingdom and Asia, in late 2009 and 2010 respectively, large swathes of the world were suddenly able to watch food sizzle, sautée, and steam, 24/7.

Competitive eating, in particular, has attracted a lot of coverage in recent years, with articles in The Atlantic (“The High Art of Competitive Eating”), The New York Times (“The Hideous Masters of Gluttony”), and even a 2004 documentary film: Crazy Legs Conti: Zen and The Art of Competitive Eating. All of this coverage has centered on the eaters: how they train (undergoing hypnosis, doing regular hand-eye coordination exercises, or fasting for days before the competition), how they eat (separating bun from hotdog vs. eating it whole), and how they look (the slight Japanese gurgitators

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vs. the heftier American eaters). Yet, little attention has been given to the spectators’ impulse. Why do we watch for hours as chefs create mouth-watering recipes, only to have judges eat a single bite? What’s the appeal of watching grown men, their faces caked in black beans, shovel entire tacos into their mouths for minutes on end? What draws people to sit before their laptops and dine with The Diva, watching as she engorges herself? +++ Throughout history, various faiths and traditions have frowned upon overconsumption. During Ramadan, Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset in order to redirect one’s focus from worldly activities and cleanse the soul from impurities.

Yom Kippur sees Jews fast in order to seek atonement for their sins. The Baha’i faith sees gluttony as the result of man’s spiritual side being overcome by his animal nature. Similarly, in Catholicism, gluttony is one of the seven deadly sins, disapproved of as a misplaced desire for food withheld from the needy. Aside from proving one’s devoutness, these rules were tied to food’s status as a precious commodity that shouldn’t be squandered.

Today, gluttony’s transgressiveness is arguably determined more by social etiquette than religious doctrine. “Eating is one of the most intimate acts we perform in public on a regular basis,” Vivian Halloran, professor of Food Studies at Indiana University, told The Indy. “We put extraneous things into our bodies in the company of others.” To police this personal act, we’ve developed rules of etiquette. Etiquette, it’s crucial to note, isn’t simply a response to eating—it actively shapes our views of eating by reinforcing the idea that there is something inherently gross about eating done “wrong.”

These rules of etiquette vary according to one’s culture, context, and, crucially, one’s class. In France, for instance, one is expected to wipe their plate with a piece of bread after each course. Meanwhile, in Japan, it’s considered good manners to empty your bowl of the last grain of rice, to show the host that you enjoyed the meal. Similarly, while it was once expected that men in Western countries would stand whenever a woman left or returned to the table, this gendered rule is now antiquated. In spite of these differences, most cultures today share the values of eating at a measured pace, in moderation (i.e. until satiated), and in the company of others.

Competitive eating and muk bang pride themselves on the exact opposite: shoveling down high fat foods with no regard for one’s recommended daily intake of calories and one’s hunger levels. As such, competitive eating doesn’t merely break a culturally specific social contract, but a biological one. That is, it “decoupl[es] the act of eating from its most basic raison d’être: hunger,” explains Halloran in her article “Biting Reality,” published in the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. Once removed from its biological roles of satiation and nourishment, eating serves only to demonstrate a competitor’s “stomach capacity, willpower, and determination.” One could argue that this contract is broken everyday in fast-food joints across the country—and they’d be right.

But, with it’s framing as a competition and its adoption of the fast, play-by-play framing of sport, competitive eating breaks this contract with even greater gusto.

Excessive consumption is particularly taboo in today’s health-conscious Western world, where we’re constantly bombarded with competing messages about healthy eating and weight loss. One day, fat is the enemy, the next fat is fine but sugar is the devil; one moment meat products must be cut out, then suddenly the Paleo diet is all the rage and grains must be excised. Cultural food fads imbue competitive eating with new meaning. For instance, although Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest has always fascinated viewers who know that eating that hot dogs would make them feel horrible, Halloran argues that this event holds even more “danger and thrill” in our gluten-free age because of the new

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meaning lent to the buns. “A lot of people see that now and think: ‘oh my god, that would hurt my stomach so much,’ in a way they wouldn’t have thought before.”

In short, competitive eating excites us because it throws etiquette and social norms out the window. “People who don’t feel comfortable breaking that taboo nevertheless want to see what happens to the person that does,” explains Halloran. And so, when people eat excessively, we watch—and we wait for them to be punished. +++ “I try to look pretty, eat pretty, and eat a lot of delicious food,” The Diva told The Times, as she brushed and straightened her hair in preparation for her broadcast.

When women eat to excess, we expect the most severe punishment. This can be traced to a long history of expecting women to eat in moderation. In “Reading the Slender Body,” Susan Bordo describes how women eat small candies while men eat hearty meals, how women eat in private rather than in company. Women, she writes, are expected to repress hunger to show their self-management and moral superiority.

This history explains why the caricature of the pretty, petite woman with the bottomless stomach exists across a number of different eating displays. In muk bang, there’s The Diva and the equally waifish female broadcast jockeys BJ Termin and BJ Shoogi. In competitive eating, there’s Sonya Thomas, a 98-pound Korean-born eater known within the field as “The Black Widow,” “because like the female black widow spider, it is [her] desire to eliminate the males,” she explains on her website’s FAQ. Her dexterity and everexpanding stomach have seen her consume 11 pounds of cheesecake in nine minutes, 206 gyoza in 10 minutes, and an overwhelming 46 dozen oysters in 10 minutes (followed by another 6 dozen oysters, 15 minutes later, to break an existing endurance record). Thomas currently holds over 25 competitive eating records and boasts that she has usually digested everything and is “good to go” within eight to 12 hours after competing. She promises fans that she never purges after competitions and does not have an eating disorder. She’s an alluring paradox: a dainty woman with an immense appetite, gluttonous but thin. There’s something mesmerizing about a woman whose body never betrays her, even as she eats with gusto. Not only does she not become sick from overeating, but she also maintains a low body weight in spite of frequent binge eating.

For some, such spectacles serve as a form of vicarious eating. Certainly, fans of The Diva have directly told her that “they live vicariously through [me], or they are hospital patients who only have access to hospital food so they also watch my broadcasts to see me eat,” as she told CNN. Others told her that her programs had helped them stick to their diets. Much like sufferers of anorexia who peruse the pages of cookbooks and prepare elaborate banquets with no intention of eating, viewers can watch eating displays without having to face the consequences of consumption.

But such food spectacles serve an even more insidious purpose. Watching men and women shudder and heave as they stuff their mouths with greasy food, one can’t help but think of the fact that there are many people in the world who can’t afford or access enough food to satisfy their hunger. Even if we’re talking about something as disgusting as mounds of soggy hot dogs, eating spectacles are displays of culinary bling. In this way, competitive eating and muk bang represent a reversal of the rigorous self-denial that became de rigeur in the late Victorian era as people pursued the aesthetic ideal of slimness. Just as intentionally denying oneself food was a privilege reserved for the wealthy, the ability to eat well past the point of satiation flaunts the abundance of food at one’s disposal. This captures a crucial paradox of our society that Susan Bordo sums up succinctly: “as consumers we must display a boundless capacity to capitulate to desire

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and indulge in impulse,” yet as producers we must “repress desires for immediate gratification, we must cultivate work ethic.” It’s the economic equivalent of a binge-purge cycle.

We are “constantly besieged by temptation, while socially condemned for overindulgence.” So we settle on watching others eat.

+++ “It requires very little effort and gives an enormous amount of pleasure,” Nigella Lawson tells her viewers, with an alluring eyebrow raise. “Any minute now, it’s going to be covered in these luxurious juices,” she continues, referring to the marinated chicken thighs she’s just popped in the oven.

From her mannerisms to her decidedly sexual descriptions of the food, Nigella Lawson makes cooking a sensual experience. Take out the nouns in one of her programs and you have a porn script—a sentiment that certainly isn’t lost on her viewers. A number of YouTubers have compiled snippets of her programs to create overtly sexual videos with titles like “Naughty Nigella” and “Nigella’s Sexy Kitchen.” “I think men like the spectacle of watching a beautiful woman get her hands dirty,” Halloran told The Indy. Nigella’s manicured fingernails and freshly lipsticked mouth might seem worlds away from the unglamorous realm of competitive eating, but the majority of her shows feature a coda where she sneaks down to the kitchen in her silk bathrobe (ostensibly in the middle of the night), opens the fridge, and consumes mounds of the food she prepared earlier. She’s basically The Diva with a refined British accent and bigger hips.

Nigella’s programs acknowledge a key factor of eating that competitive events ignore: it’s inherently pleasurable.

The taste, textures, and aromas of food excite us. Yet, Nigella’s programs push this connection further, conflating eating with sex. This connection is hardly a new one: the Romans were known for engaging in sex and eating in equally excessive measures, with their infamous orgies and vomitoriums (rooms they would visit in between courses at a banquet to purge and make room for another course). The tradition of aphrodisiacs is entirely based on the idea that food and drink can enhance sexual pleasure. The connection between food and sexuality is also seen (or rather, decidedly not seen) in the anorexic, whose undernourished body loses many of its secondary sexual characteristics. It’s further affirmed in the number of food fetishes out there, ranging from sploshing (arousal caused by wet and messy substances being applied to the skin, like cream or fruit juices), to stuffing (being aroused by feeding and fattening up others) to Nyotaimori (the Japanese practice of serving sushi on the naked body of a woman). Although not immediately apparent, there’s also an arguably sexual element to competitive eating. One New York Times reviewer situated competitive eating between the genres of food documentary and porn documentary when he described the Crazy Legs Conti documentary as fitting “somewhere alongside Supersize Me and Inside Deep Throat.” Watching others eat excessively satisfies our desires and our curiosity, without causing us to be socially or physically condemned for our overindulgence.

scribes an obese man eating at her diner—eating and eating and eating. “I think we will begin with the Caesar salad,” he tells the waitress. We, like a pregnant woman ordering for her unnamed child. Her orders soup lamb chops, a baked potato with sour cream, and “we’ll see about dessert.” He and his fictitious fellow diners consume three baskets of bread, each slice slathered with butter, before the main course. The narrator returns repeatedly to his fingers, his “long, thick, creamy fingers,” and later describes her friends “dainty fingers.” That evening, she imagines herself becoming terrifically fat, “so fat that [her partner] is a tiny thing and hardly there at all.”

“Fat” is about gluttony, but it’s also about control, change, choice, and, most importantly, connection.

STEPHANIE HAYES B’15 is more of a Hebrew National girl.

+++ When it comes to the success of Korean eating broadcasts, connection is a central idea. The 2010 Census revealed that almost 25 percent of South Koreans live alone, with this number expected to rise to one-third by the 2015 Census.

This statistic becomes particularly troubling when dinnertime arrives as eating is a highly social activity in Korea, evidenced by the fact that the Korean word for “family” means “those who eat together.” For South Koreans in single households, eating with The Diva means not eating alone.

Still, when I think about gluttony, I think about Raymond Carver’s short story “Fat.” An unnamed narrator de-

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THE SECOND COMING On King James's return and Cleveland's salvation

by Zeve Sanderson illustration by Ming Zhen We look up to the heavens: birds chirp, sunlight wrestles through the cloudy sky. As a soft piano ballad fades in, the camera brings us back to earth. We’re driving. We pass rundown city blocks, tired apartment complexes, a local burger joint with its changeable sign reading “Welcome Home LeBron,” children playing basketball. A tender female voice speaks over our journey through the city: “Akron is home. This is the city that raised you. I’m so proud of you. Welcome home, son.” She speaks these last words as we reach St. Vincent-St. Mary High School, LeBron James’s alma mater.

James walks through the front doors into the school’s lobby, his head down, his movement steadily towards us.

A-a-amen. Amen. Amen. Irish singer Hozier belts this final religious affirmation as James enters the gym in which he first became a national star.

Take me to church I'll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies I'll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife Offer me that deathless death Good God, let me give you my life Hozier’s chorus narrates the next minute and 10 seconds of the Beats by Dre commercial, released in mid-October.

James is pictured lifting weights shirtless intermittently throughout: he looks like Atlas of the rust belt in these images, carrying the post-industrial landscape of downtrodden Akron on his back. As he transitions from lift to lift, video clips of his upbringing punctuate each movement. We see his hands interlocking with his mother’s, his backpack being packed, their old house being demolished, their fridge opening to empty shelves. “Don’t ever forget where you came from,” the same woman says—it’s the voice of his mother, Gloria James. “Re-established 2014,” appears in stark white text, a reformulation of the “Akron Est. 1984” tattoo that adorns his trapezii. Amen. Hozier’s song fades along with the image of James, eyes closed, countenance resolute, Beats in ear. +++ In 2010, James announced his move from Cleveland, where he played since 2003, to Miami on “The Decision”—an hourlong spectacle broadcast nationwide in which he declared he was “going to take [his] talents to South Beach.” Grantland writer Andrew Sharp described it as “so tone-deaf and ridiculous and cruel to Cleveland that we’ll remember it forever.”

The backlash from the Cavalier fan-base was immediate, unrelenting, and venomous. Fans burned his jersey. Dan Gilbert, the CEO of Quicken Loans and owner of the Cavaliers, wrote in a public letter, “[The people of Cleveland] simply don't deserve this kind of cowardly betrayal…This shocking act of disloyalty from our home grown ‘chosen one’ sends the exact opposite lesson of what we would want our children to learn.”

James became one of the nation’s most hated athletes. Sports writer Bill Simmons wrote of the aftermath of “The Decision,” “We turned him into a wrestling heel, pushed him to a dark place, affected his personality, planted seeds of doubt that blossomed like a black rose.”

On July 11, James publically announced his return to

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Cleveland in Sports Illustrated. The tone of the letter was a stark break from the egotist of four years prior. “What if I were a kid who looked up to an athlete, and that athlete made me want to do better in my own life, and then he left?” he writes to himself rhetorically, the closest thing to an apology he’s given. “People there have seen me grow up…I want to give them hope when I can. I want to inspire them when I can. My relationship with Northeast Ohio is bigger than basketball.” His letter demonstrated a deep self-reflectiveness, not only of the person he wants to be, but also of the responsibility brought on by his position within the community. He was thoughtful and sincere.

And he was re-embraced. The New York Times Magazine writer Sam Tanenhaus described James an example of “civic obligation and social responsibility.” College basketball coach Mike Brown said of James, “He elevated himself to the pantheon of athletes who understand that it’s not just about how many shoes you sell or endorsements you have.”

And Northeast Ohio welcomed him with open arms and a citywide celebration. +++ James’s narrative seems to be one of personal redemption: he erred in narcissism, matured through humility, and was given a second chance. And yet, what has emerged throughout the months following his homecoming is not a narrative of personal redemption for James, but of collective redemption for Northeast Ohio through devotion to and faith in James.

Cleveland resident Haven Ohly described his reaction to James’s decision in The Washington Post: “Nobody has had it like us. Everything has gone wrong. So this is a chance to make it right. This means so much for the people who live here.” Nathan Okuley, a coffee shop owner in Cleveland, told Sprudge, “It’s pretty dynamic to realize how much influence something like this has on a community. It brings a brand new spark of excitement to a lot of people. It changes the way that we talk casually on the day to day.” In The New York Times, William Rhoden described the spirit of the city after James’s announcement: “It’s summertime. There’s dancing in the streets. Many of the dancers are the same ones who burned James’s jersey and cheered Gilbert’s letter.” James may be the one with “CHOSEN” tattooed on his back, but it is Cleveland that feels chosen.

The second coming of Cleveland’s son has had an overwhelmingly Christian feel to it, in imagery, language, and sentiment. The Boston Globe described his move to Cleveland as “the Prodigal Son, returning home.” James’s nicknames are “The Chosen One” and “The King.” His Nike slogan is “Witness,” a Christian term often used in relation to experiencing the Divine. Bill Simmons titled his article about James’s return, “God Loves Cleveland: Why LeBron James—unparalleled NBA genius, heir to Michael (and Larry and Magic)— went home.” In the title’s construction, LeBron James can be read as the antecedent to God. Father Damian Ference, a Catholic Priest in Cleveland, wrote in a blog post, “Northeast Ohioans are walking with our heads high…because our son has returned home.”

Back to the commercial. The structure of the interrupted clips gives us a sense that James is physically elevating the

region. Northeast Ohio will be risen, one bicep curl at a time.

And with every weight lifted, James’s face is pained because he has the city on his back, and that’s hard work. As he sits alone in the empty locker room, his face resolute, we see that it’s a lonely sacrifice. Good God, let me give you my life.

We see the same sentiment in a Sprite commercial, in which James shows up to a public basketball court. Hundreds of kids excitedly congregate around him, others climb on a chain link fence to catch a glimpse of their king. It’s reminiscent of the Pope walking through a largely Catholic area: proximity is precious. And, in the background, the chorus of Imagine Dragon’s “I Bet My Life” repeats: "I bet my life on you, I bet my life on you, I bet my life on you." It’s clear that their devotion to James is their faith, but what is everyone expecting in return?

Cleveland has struggled. It has an income-per-capita of just over $15,000; it’s seen an exodus of young families from the urban center to the suburbs over the past decade; in 2011, its high school graduation rate was 54 percent. Cleveland has experienced a genuine and understandable uplift since James’s return, both in terms of economics and culture. A recent study said James’s return could bring in an extra $500 million to the local economy. And his choice to move from Miami to Cleveland has made residents feel like their city is worthy again—a recent article on livability.com featured the subtitle “LeBron James moved back to Cleveland, and here's why you should consider following him.”

But the religious rejoice has overshadowed any secular excitement for James’s return. In ESPN’s coverage of James returning to Cleveland, an anchor stood in front of an excited crowd. What we saw was not excited basketball fans, but a sign flanking the stage: a photo of James, arms spread wide, head raised towards the sky. His body position evoked Jesus on the cross, and in the empty space above his head, the words: “THE KING HAS RETURNED.” At every turn, the religiosity seems to have a corporate sponsor, or at least a corporate distributor: Nike, Beats, Sprite, the Cavaliers, newspapers, television stations. According to them, James isn’t just a great, mortal basketball player. He’s a demigod. And don’t you want to wear God’s favorite headset, to consume His favorite soft drink, to pay for tickets to witness the sublime, to read about His glory?

In Gilbert’s letter in 2010, he nebulously wrote, “Some people think they should go to heaven but NOT have to die to get there. Sorry, but that's simply not how it works.” At the time, these two sentences were impenetrably unclear. It was uncertain who “some people” were, and what death and heaven represented (assuming they were metaphorical). But looking back over the past four years, those two sentences are given new meaning. Did Cleveland die when James left? Is this their heaven now that he’s returned? In many cities, they expect championships; in Cleveland, their King coming home is an end in itself. Now, let’s sell some shit.

Amen.

ZEVE SANDERSON B’15 dreamt last night of playing 1-on-1 against LeBron.

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BEEF FRITTERS FOR THE SLEEPY TEENS By THE NANA IS A MEATFORK

OCTOBER 31 2014

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by Jennifer Tsai illustration by Lee Bernstein

A LACK OF CARE

Why medical students should focus on Ferguson You can’t ask your co-worker for narcotics the same way you can ask for extra Advil stashed in their purse or backpack. There are good reasons for this. Drugs like Advil or Tylenol carry no association with danger and can be easily bought at any local drugstore.

While they are perfectly good for minimal pain relief from headaches or muscle soreness, they are underequipped for addressing major sources of pain. In comparison, opioid narcotics are serious painkillers. They carry risk of addiction and overdose, and can only be accessed with a physician prescription.

Now imagine you break your arm or leg, and the doctor in the Emergency Room prescribes you Tylenol.

To be clear, long bone fractures are often used in scientific studies specifically because they are always excruciating, and there is little range in the variation of patient pain.

Breaking your leg or your arm hurts a lot, no matter how it happened.

If that broken bone is beneath black skin, the attending physician doing your initial work up and admittance exam is twice as likely to prescribe Tylenol for your fractured leg; twice as likely to prescribe opioid painkillers for the broken leg of the white patient next to you. In fact, in comparison to a white patient, a Black one is half as likely to receive any sort of pain medication during an emergency room assessment of a broken bone.1 These statistics are not rare. African-American children are more likely than white children to be suspended from school or diagnosed with vague, psycho-behavioral ailments such as “Oppositional Defiance Disorder.”2,3 Antipsychotic drugs, as opposed to counseling or therapy that look into child behavior as a fixable issue rather than a pathology, are prescribed four times more often to children covered by Medicaid as to children covered by private insurance. This issue of class intersects with race and disproportionately impacts children of color.4 Black and Hispanic patients are less likely to be prescribed opioid pain medications that carry higher risk of abuse, trafficking, and addiction.5 Pain and mental illness especially, cannot be measured by pricking your finger or stepping on a scale. In the absence of quantitative measures, it is ultimately physician judgment that will determine how to treat a patient. Physicians, however, do not render their perceptions within a vacuum. The cultural makeup of America inevitably shapes physician perception of patient moral and social character, which is not unrelated to the doctor’s formulation and judgment of that patient’s medical issues.

These same perceptions of moral and social character explain why Black men are more likely to be jailed for drug charges that white men more frequently commit, why in 2014 more than 80 percent of New York City stop-and-frisk suspects were people of color despite their constituting less than 30 percent of the local population, and why a young unarmed man can be shot in the middle of the street and left there for hours.6,7 +++ The August 9 shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is a recent and tangible illustration of how systemic racism operates and impacts the perception and treatment of Black bodies. Although Michael Brown’s death is generally understood as political issue, it also illuminates current conditions of healthcare inequality. While issues of medicine and politics are often cast as different and discrete social and scientific realms, analysis of healthcare demonstrates that medicine is, at its heart, also a political issue.

Indeed, the events that have unfolded in Ferguson have everything to do with why people of color in this country lose their health and lives at staggeringly higher rates in comparison to their white counterparts. Healthcare inequality cannot be understood outside the context of systemic racism. The understanding of Michael Brown’s death as a function of institutional oppression helps to explain why individuals proclaiming an interest in medicine or healthcare disparities should have their attention focused on Ferguson. While the landscape regarding Ferguson is heavily dotted with scholars, civil rights leaders, politicians, and journalists, attention from healthcare providers has remained largely absent.

Just as the shooting of Michael Brown has helped the larger public recognize how the US criminal justice system is racially biased, analyzing the event’s foundations in institutional racism invites parallel scrutiny of our healthcare system. These same racial factors explain why both the American criminal justice system and the American healthcare system continue to produce extremely racialized outcomes despite both being supposedly and superficially race neutral. Our institutions are susceptible to the same vulnerabilities.

Ferguson helps us understand the racial climate that allows injustices to exist under seemingly race-blind policies. It is impossible to imagine a situation in which an unarmed white woman raising her hands in surrender would be shot by a police officer multiple times. This simple acknowledgment begs a number of questions about the structural forces that equate Black individuals with criminals. Michael Brown, as an unarmed individual standing several feet away from pursuing officer Darren Wilson, could not have been seen as a threat in any instance except one where his identity as a Black male had been previously framed as an inherent menace. Why are criminals so often imagined to be Black men, and how does this conception create conditions in which unarmed Black men can

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be shot on the street? Systemic racism is at the foundation of the forces that package and stereotype young Black men, that turn Blackness into a pathology, and overall so greatly impact our systems’ abilities to care for, adjudicate, and see populations of color.

Michael Brown’s body was attacked in the abstract before he was shot, it was attacked physically on the afternoon of August 9, and it continued to be attacked in the days and weeks following. In the days after the shooting, Bill Maher dubbed Brown a “thug” and a “criminal,” while The New York Times suggested he was “no angel.” Multiple media news outlets mobilized classic Black tropes and labeled Brown as a “gang member,” a “hulking thug,” and “ghetto rapper” with no consideration of why such descriptions, true or false, were relevant to the events surrounding his death. The controversy surrounding Michael Brown’s character is further evidence of a system that unjustly scrutinizes certain identities. The injustice in question was an unlawful shooting situated in a culture of police brutality, and yet public conversation often involves Brown’s history as if it could justify Darren Wilson’s actions, as if a supposedly moral evaluation can validate a legal one.

These perceptions of Michael Brown demonstrate the kind of value judgments and stereotypes structural racism continues to foster. There are thousands of 18-year-olds of every race who smoke, rap, and drink, and yet it is so much more often young men of color that are presupposed as “thugs” and threats to society.

The cultural biases that led Officer Wilson to shoot Brown permeate our culture, and this culture does not cease to exist within medical schools and inside hospital wards.

Inevitably, these biases influence the conditions in which doctors shape their decisions regarding diagnostic recommendation, treatment prescription, and patient understanding. Essentialism, the oversimplified assumption or perception that certain populations have congruent values, behaviors, or tendencies, is a major operation, contribution, and byproduct of racism. Essentializing young black men, and indeed any and all populations, creates barriers to equal care and access by influencing the way doctors understand, listen, see, and treat their patients.

This manifestation of institutional oppression folds directly into racial profiling.

Black patients are still associated with sickle cell anemia despite evidence that shows rates of sickle cell increase in all geographic areas with high prevalence of malaria, including Greece, Turkey, and India.8 Gay men are still prohibited from donating blood because of a historical association with HIV and AIDS. Asian women are still targeted in abortion clinics because of presumptions regarding cultural infanticide. Assumptions of patient character or capability impact medical practice by casting patients in roles that doctors expect them to fill. Systemic racism explains why doctors may assume black patients are more likely to exhibit drug-seeking behavior and over-exaggerate their pain. It explains why physicians may unconsciously presuppose black patients to be too irresponsible to self-administer addictive opioid drug treatments, have higher predisposition towards substance abuse, or require anti-psychotic medication. It explains why we cannot create solutions to healthcare disparities without recognizing the ways in which systemic racism prevents equal quality and access to health. The prejudices on display in Ferguson can just as readily be found in the waiting room.

At the center of this issue is a startling fact: if the life expectancy of African Americans in the US equaled that of their white counterparts, there would be 83,750 fewer Black deaths a year.9 In certain cities, one out of three Black deaths would not have occurred if Black and white mortality rates were the same.10 Black infant mortality is twoand-a-half times higher than it is for whites.11 Black patients are less likely to be put on transplant lists, receive aggressive cardiovascular intervention, and hip fracture repair; yet they are more likely to receive lower limb amputation as result of delayed care.12,13,14 The statistics are as jarring as they are extensive. Again and again, studies show that even when controlling for income, occupation, and education, African American citizens receive lower quality care.

To me, this circles back to issues of medical education. While medical knowledge is heavily rooted in the biomedical model, the provision of healthcare needs to explicitly address the social context of medicine. It is not productive to be “race-blind” in a racist society, and we need to directly address issues of race within healthcare if we want to make progress. For those interested in healthcare disparities, the events in Ferguson should not be seen as a peripheral current events issue, but rather an increasingly important platform by which we can better understand how and why racial inequalities continue to exist.

The shooting of Michael Brown remains a primary access point in assessing how racism dictates not only racialized health outcomes and access to care, but also one’s ability to receive equal treatment and quality of care in the context of personal, and thus physician, bias. Questions about healthcare access, policy, insurance, and care quality are very much discussions of human rights, dignity, and citizenship.

Healthcare professionals need to be more critical of the ways in which individual perceptions shaped by systemic racism often leak into practice. The unconscious formation of these stereotypes is dangerous because they often remain unacknowledged and are thus extra insidious by virtue of their subtlety. The doctors prescribing Advil to Black patients

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in lieu of the opioid painkillers they are more apt to give their white patients are likely not trying to discriminate–their decisions may be imperceptibly influenced by inclinations they cannot name or identify succinctly. Similarly, Darren Wilson perhaps did not make the conscious decision to attack Brown in a way he would not have pursued a white individual, but he learned and lived in a society in which being black divorces one from “angelic” qualities and can apparently warrant suspicion and six bullet holes. These issues do not revolve around the isolated mistakes of individual doctors or policemen, but rather systems that are structurally unsound. It is not a question about bad apples, but tainted soil. Implicit biases exist even in people, and doctors, who are vigorously anti-racist.

Understanding the legacy of systemic racism helps us to recognize the ways we ourselves may be complicit in structural racism by virtue of acting within a system that is structurally designed to give lower quality healthcare to the people who are most disempowered and marginalized. At the end of the day, while recognizing institutional forces can help explain widespread inequality, institutions are run by people, and until we allocate greater responsibility and accountability to the people who perpetuate this issue, this problem will never be solved.

Michael Brown’s death is one symptom of the sickness systemic racism produces.

Like symptoms, it decries a larger problem and prompts us to search for its root cause, and the breadth of its infection. The public often extrapolates that medicine, as an extension of science, is an objective, factual practice. Even as medical students, we learn in our textbooks the histological characteristics of cells, the mechanisms of glomerular filtration, pulmonary measurements, biochemical pathways, and diagnostic tests used to identify symptoms and syndromes. It is easy to presume that medicine is colorblind, and the care we give a rational process. But cells are not people, and science is not healthcare. Doctoring is an inherently social discipline that revolves around patient-doctor interaction, and the few minutes doctors have with their patients last only long enough to develop snapshot judgments that go on to dictate the diagnosis and care patients will receive. Pretending medicine is a rational exercise denies its role as a social force and allows its continued participation in structural racism to go undiagnosed.

On a case to case basis, in which structural racism manifests as higher rates of amputation, fewer follow-ups, less effective pain medication, or preconceived assumptions of ability, it may be easy to assume that the racism that creates healthcare disparities is not quite as insidious as the police brutality we see splashed across our newspapers and TV screens. The diminished scrutiny the medical system receives by virtue of its reputation as an objective practice, however, makes it harder to see that healthcare itself is also a primary source and outlet of institutional racism. Michael Brown is one of many victims systemic racism has claimed, and until doctors acknowledge the position of medicine within institutional racism, our healthcare system will continue to reproduce tragedies like Ferguson, even in the absence of a smoking gun.

Knox H. Todd, Christi Deaton, Anne P. D’Adamo, and Leon Goe, “Ethnicity and Analgesic Practice,” Annals of Emergency Medicine 35 (2000).

2 Civil Rights Data Collection Data Snapshot: School Discipline, U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, March 2014 3 McNeil, Cheryl B., Laura C. Capage, and Gwendolyn M. Bennett. “Cultural issues in the treatment of young African American children diagnosed with disruptive behavior disorders.” Journal of pediatric psychology 27.4 (2002): 339-350.

4 Stephen Crystal et al., “Broadened Use of Atypical Antipsychotics: Safety, Effectiveness, and Policy Challenges,” Health Affairs 28 (2009).

5 Joshua H. Tamayo-Sarver, Susan H. Hinze, Rita K. Cydulka, and David W. Baker, “Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Emergency Department Analgesic Prescription,” American Journal of Public Health 93 (2003).

6 Saki Knafo, “When It Comes to Illegal Drug Use, White America Does the Crime, Black America Gets the Time.” Huffington Post, Sept. 2013.

7 New York Civil Liberties Union. “Stop-and-Frisk Data.” 2014.

8 Lundy Braun, “Race, Ethnicity, and Health,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45 (2002).

9 David Satcher et al., “What If We Were Equal? A Comparison of the Black-White Mortality Gap in 1960 and 2000,” Health Affairs 24 (2005).

10 Robert S. Levine, James E. Foster, and Robert E. Fullilove, “Black-White Inequalities in Mortality and Life Expectancy, 1993-1999: Implications for Health People 2010,” Public Health Reports 116 (2001).

11 Fang, Jing, Shantha Madhavan, and Michael H. Alderman. “The association between birthplace and mortality from cardiovascular causes among black and white residents of New York City.” New England Journal of Medicine 335.21 (1996): 1545-1551.

12 R.S.D. Higgins and J.A. Fishman, “Disparities in Solid Organ Transplantation for Ethnic Minorities: Facts and Solutions,” American Journal of Transplantation 6 (2006).

13 Kevin Sack, “Research Finds Wide Disparities in Health Care by Race and Region,” New York Times, June 5, 2008.

14 Marian E. Gornic et al., “Effects of Race and Income on Mortality and Use of Services Among Medicare Beneficiaries,” New England Journal of Medicine 355 (1996).

1

JENNIFER TSAI B’14 B’18 isn’t sharing her Advil regardless.

OCTOBER 31 2014

FEATURES

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THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU: A CLOSET DRAMA IN TWO ACTS

1 Thomas Engler replied, “Okay. The church was very Southern, very charismatic, sort of scorched-Earth. Weekly services in the high school auditorium. There were times when I didn’t take the whole thing too seriously, but this was a bad year: I was hitting puberty, that Easter. But the preacher wasn’t really talking about the Resurrection. Or, well, he sort of was, but he kept coming back to the exorcism of the Garasene demoniac, which was all he ever came back to: it’s in a couple of the gospels—you know it: the guy, the ‘Garasene demoniac’ is possessed, runs out of the cave and is very…possessed, and Jesus exorcises him, you know, ‘My name is Legion, for we are many,’ and then it, it being Legion, possesses a bunch of pigs and they jump off a cliff. But so the preacher wants to show what it would be like to be possessed, to us. We did a whole similar thing every Halloween, where a bunch of the kids dressed up like demons or like people burning in Hell and it scared everyone straight for that year. Or it was supposed to. Right: that was the connection to Easter, he was trying to show how important the resurrection was, how badly we needed the grace of Christ, the miracle of the resurrection: so he has this whole…exercise in his head and he calls on me, in the congregation—he called on people all the time, the church was very game-show, and he makes me get out and into the aisle in the middle of the congregation, and everyone is looking at me, and he starts to ask questions: ‘What’s your name, son,’ easy questions. They were easy questions. But all about myself. All the questions were.

But so he tells me to pause and tells the congregation—there were probably 75 people in the audience—to start whispering to me, to whisper at me, just whisper in whatever language and he’s asking me the same questions but they’re harder to answer now because I’m distracted, and meanwhile my, um, my body is acting weird: I’m shaking a little bit but I don’t feel scared, just kind of confused; I’m physically buzzing some, but I just feel kind of flustered, and then he stops me; he is smiling really big now, and he tells them all to speak at a normal volume but to be mad at me, to pretend to be mad at me, to speak really angrily to me: and then he starts the questions over again from the beginning, which I was not expecting, and then he starts to fucking—sorry, he starts conducting the audience, like raising up his arm for them to get louder, raising the congregation like an orchestra, smiling, he’s gesturing for them to get louder, and my head starts sort of twitching and I move my hand up to my face to scratch an itch, or rub my eye, and I’m crying, like sobbing and trembling, and I start to cough, and he looks over at me, he was smiling mainly at the audience, and his smile fades a bit and he sort of gives a half-assed kind of cut-off gesture and a couple people applaud. They learned the lesson? He was sort of upset when I talked to him about it and he didn’t apologize afterwards but he came up and shook my hand and said the Lord appreciated my commitment, that was what he said, my commitment, which was maybe the scariest thing about the whole thing, but he looked a little bit shaken up. I guess. +++

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LITERARY

The moment he mentioned that the object of the unnamed preacher’s questioning was himself, Thomas severed eye contact with Dr. Austin and began to rock gently back and forth in his chair: his soft, locked gaze moving up and down, sweeping the wall behind the therapist. Dr. Austin said that he was sorry something like that had happened to him, and waited for evidence that Thomas had recomposed himself before suggesting that he elaborate on why that episode had occurred to him here, or to tell what he thought the story meant.

Thomas straightened his back, reestablished proper eye contact, and took a deep breath before intentionally and discreetly adjusting the conversation to a sufficiently related topic: his childhood concern that he was undeserving of divine grace. A bit of transitional filler, then the thesis: “It’s like the truth of the promise of salvation was sensed or felt by those around me,” he said, as he’d said nearly verbatim a number of times before, “and I hadn’t been granted access to it.”

For all his prevarication, the answer to Dr. Austin’s question was accessible to him.

He had not yet had the courage to apply his attention in its direction, but the answer was simple: he had been interviewing for jobs, and the interview process—the need to face those people and—lie, invent­—or just elaborate, like an honestly-told story at a party?— reminded him of that Easter. One reason for his reluctance to cognize this connection, to dredge it out and drag it into the fluorescent light of consciousness, was his parallel reluctance to acknowledge that the episode still revealed something about his inner life.

And, beyond even this, he hated and feared the fact that, despite years of effort, he did not fully understand the nature of the incident, did not understand its ramifications or implications; how it had shaped him, what it told him about who he was. He couldn’t tell if it was cause, or effect, or both. It was unaccountable.

Dr. Austin noted, calmly and according to familiar procedure, that Thomas had changed the subject. Would he like to answer the original question? It was fine if he did not, or could not, now, but the question would come up again, “either inside or outside of my office.”

He wondered after asking if he had asked too intensely. But he felt the question’s stakes, because he thought he might be on the cusp of genuine understanding, that he might be beginning to perceive the connective tissue linking several years’ worth of relevant and revealing conversational stumbling blocks from Thomas, years’ worth of inadvertent utterances and digressions; he also knew, though, that it would take at least three more sessions’ worth of carefully aimed questions to perceive the web in its entirety, or at least enough to explain what he saw with a modicum of accuracy to Thomas himself.

Besides which, he had become increasingly skeptical of this feeling of almost-comprehending, given that he had been denied, for one reason or another—or, more frighteningly, perhaps for no reason at all—that climactic moment of comprehension with several other patients thus far this year alone, to the point that he was beginning to question whether or not that moment had ever existed: whether or not he had ever experienced such a moment of understanding with any patient.

Should he have gone into obstetrics? Besides which, three weeks was too far away, for practical purposes, to matter anyway. Thomas declined to answer the question.

2 The ENGLER-BORSTEIN apartment. Evening. NEIGHBORS due to arrive any minute.

THOMAS ENGLER: I’m not going to drink tonight. I took a pill.

ELLEN BORSTEIN: Tommy! You’re that nervous?

THOMAS: “Sense of impending doom” is actually a symptom of — [The doorbell rings. THOMAS breathes deeply: inhalation, exhalation.]

ELLEN [whispering]: They’ll stay for — three hours, at most.

THOMAS: It’s okay. They can take their time, this is — [trailing off, earnestly] [ELLEN opens the door. Enter FRANCES and ELLEN KIM. They are carrying a bottle of wine. “So good to finally meet you!” etc. THOMAS coughs loudly, accidentally. They move away from the door and toward the dinner table at the opposite end of the living room.]

ELLEN B.: Hopefully the — uh, building’s been treating you well!

ELLEN K.: No complaints.

FRANCES: One of us, I think it’s my turn, might have to sneak out at some point tonight to check on Timothy, that’s our son, he’s asleep. He just turned five.

THOMAS: How does he do when you guys leave?

ELLEN K.: He gets nervous. But he’s alright.

[Somewhere in the world someone is dying of a preventable disease. The disease is contagious, and those attempting to care for this person run the risk of being infected. THOMAS remembers or realizes this — though certainly not for the first time — and he blinks, as if to shut the thought out. He holds this blink for a (conspicuously?) long time. As the ritual surrounding the KIMS’ entry to their house winds down, the way the thought flickers across his field of thought like a frame of film, or like what one sees on a news network while channelsurfing past it, makes him wonder the extent to which the form of the thought, and thereby

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

by Matthew Marsico illustration by Casey Friedman the thought itself, are indebted to the structure of television. The two film-frames of thought pass from his mental field of vision, and he returns, as best he can, to the party. But unlike the actual field of vision, turning away does not facilitate easy unseeing: like the bodily presence of someone looking at him from behind, or like the painting underneath a painting made atop a used canvas, the frames of thought linger, somewhere, in the air of his mind, perhaps, a ringing in his ears, the glow of the sun on his retinae, dimly but forever: or at least through the end of the night.]

FRANCES: Do you guys need a hand with anything? Dinner-wise?

THOMAS: No. I think we’re good.

ELLEN B. [gesturing at the table]: Take a seat! Please!

[They do.]

Would you like anything to drink?

ELLEN K.: Oh, no, thank you. We aren’t big drinkers.

ELLEN B.: But you brought this wine over! Not even a glass?

FRANCES [refusing]: Oh thanks so much...

[A lull. THOMAS’ heart skips a beat. He is standing on the threshold between kitchen and living room, looking at the dinner table; now glancing right, at the door. FRANCES and ELLEN K. sit with their backs against the window, facing the door. In the kitchen, ELLEN B. pours herself a glass of wine, cracks the oven to check on the roast. THOMAS stands breathing heavily, on the threshold.] +++ ELLEN B.: We’re basically ready to eat. Thomas, can you come help with the baked potatoes?

FRANCES: Are you sure you don’t need anything?

THOMAS: Oh no we’re fine — [THOMAS ducks into the kitchen as oven-mitted ELLEN B. emerges with the pot roast.]

ELLEN K.: That looks superb!

THOMAS [opens the oven, coughs loudly, looks for the oven mitts, realizes ELLEN B. has them, tries to remove the potatoes from the oven without mitts by pulling them quickly with a carving fork into a glass baking dish, burns the side of his hand, drops them]: Shit!

[FRANCES stands up quickly and comes into the kitchen.]

FRANCES [bending over next to THOMAS]: We can just wash those off, it’ll be fine.

[Their clothes touch, but they do not. By the time they exit with the potatoes, the rest of the table has been set. ELLEN B. and ELLEN K. are engaged in conversation, the gravity of which seems improbable to THOMAS given how rapidly it's arisen.]

ELLEN K.: ...so it rarely comes to that, but the problem with this particular strain, yeah, is that we're seeing way more cases of acute respiratory distress syndrome than, than a normal seasonal influenza leads to. And the problem with that, [THOMAS and FRANCES sit down.] is that ARDS actually uses your own immune system against you, which is why so many otherwise healthy young people with very strong immune systems are dying.

[THOMAS' heart rate accelerates.]

ELLEN B.: And the other problem has to do with the antibiotics, right?

ELLEN K.: Right, the antivirals. The primary strain of H1N6 is not resistant to antivirals, but we're starting to see—oh, we should eat.

FRANCES: Not that the flu pandemic isn't great dinnertime conversation.

ELLEN K. [smiling, barely]: Dinner wasn't served yet, it didn't count.

[The two joke with a worn sharpness that signals the topic is skirting the edge of a deeper, older disagreement, the presence of which in his dining room probably frightens THOMAS more than the flu pandemic. The tension dissipates quickly.]

FRANCES: Do you all mind if we say grace?

ELLEN B.: No, not at all!

FRANCES: Thanks so much.

the Son and the Holy Spirit: [ELLEN B., modestly and mutedly interested, almost bemused, joins in,

bowing her head]: Bless us O Lord [THOMAS bows his head, but does not speak.] with these thy gifts, [THOMAS realizes that his voice's absence from the prayer is conspicu

ous, but does not begin to pray.] which we are about to receive, [The words, which he has heard thousands of times, suddenly interest THOM AS. About to receive.] from thy bounty, ["From thy bounty": he lifts his head and opens his eyes. Unaccountably, he

begins to pray with them]: through Christ our Lord, Amen.

[They lift their heads up, smiling, ELLEN B. included, and begin to pass the

food around.]

[Beat.]

THOMAS: So you two are religious?

[As soon as he asks he winces, deeply, at the sound and stupidity of the phrasing. The other three take the question in stride.]

ELLEN K.: Frances is actually a pastor!

FRANCES [smiling]: Well, not yet. I'm finishing my last year of seminary.

ELLEN B.: I had no idea!

THOMAS [strangely — he is still unnerved by the fact that he had joined in the prayer]: Yeah, neither did I. [ELLEN glances at him subtly, with confusion and frustration, in a way that suggests she interpreted his comment as vaguely or implicitly hostile. His heart rate accelerates further.]

FRANCES [eyebrows raised in curiosity or gentle offense, or both]: And you?

ELLEN B.: I go to temple on high holidays. I used to go more regularly, but...

[She trails off, without guilt.]

THOMAS: I was raised in the Baptist church.

ELLEN K.: Oh, that’s great. We’re Methodists — THOMAS [brusquely]: I haven't been in a while.

[He is breathing more quickly and shallowly, now, and he fears that the moment he has been waiting for since he and Ellen began to plan the dinner party—the moment that he has been anticipating in a state of nervousness so intermittently acute that it, at times, approached terror—the moment which he thought would arrive suddenly, on the heels of an unanticipated silence, "a sudden lull in conversation" he thought of it as, when his appearance and the remembered remains in the minds of others of how he had responded, verbally or physically, to accidents—out of his control, of which the party was merely a series—would lead to their destruction of him in those minds and, thereby, his own; he fears, now, when the party has arrived at a topic of conversation he was not expecting, did not have time to prepare for, has not been able to properly understand or apprehend the unfathomably formative role of in his life, that the moment will instead arise from conversation itself, from inside the middle of a conversation, perhaps functioning—no!—as its climax, as the logical conclusion of the expressions preceding it; this thought was almost impossible to bear, and brought his terror to a higher pitch than he'd felt in ages, a higher pitch and louder volume than he could recall.]

FRANCES [seriously]: Do you think you feel — THOMAS [quietly, staring at the table]: I don't think I'm going to want to have a conversation about this here, at dinner, I am not going to sit here and want to talk about my childhood, or about [He begins to get louder]: Jesus, or, or about my relationship with the Living Christ or the Holy Spirit or something like that I am not going to talk about myself like that, so — I let you guys pray, right, I let you guys say the prayer and I even prayed myself, and could we please drop the subject?

[He is shivering. Before anyone has a chance to answer, he continues, quietly] Could we? Could we please talk about something else? Anything else? Could we…else?

[He trails off.

The moment, perhaps — it is hard to tell — arrives.

At one point in the short silence that follows, though nobody present will notice, all four will begin to exhale at precisely the same moment, into the same air they’ll breathe for the rest of the night: they exhale into an identical century.]

ELLEN K [smiling, earnestly]: It shouldn't take long.

FRANCES AND ELLEN K. [bowing their heads]: In the name of the Father [They do the Sign of the Cross.]

OCTOBER 31 2014

LITERARY

□ 16

PINK SKY

by Sara Winnick illustration by Pierie Korostoff She is dressed as toilet paper. He wears Groucho Marx glasses.

They meet at a Halloween party.

At the wedding his mother’s dress is blue with thin yellow and red stripes. “That dress was way ahead of its time,” she tells me when she is my grandmother. At the rehearsal dinner everyone gets drunk.

The night before the bar exam she cannot fall asleep. He sleeps like a baby. They both pass.

When the second baby is born the condominium is too small.

The house on Swarthmore Street has a porch. The house on Santa Fe has a lot of fixing up to do, but there’s a two-car garage. It has a baby girl who chokes on a marble while her older brother watches Winnie the Pooh in the family room.

The kindergarten teachers tell them their son doesn’t play with the other kids. This becomes the first memory in a mental folder marked “your older brother has always been different.”

When the twins are born they buy a minivan, because a family of five fits in a car but a family of six requires a van. The van is light blue. It drives them to Woodbridge for Shabbat dinner at Grandma’s, to Ohio for Christmas at Other Grandma’s.

When the baby who choked on the marble is in middle school, she writes a poem about watching the sunset from the backseat of that minivan. The poem is called “Pink Sky” and wins an award at the local library. The family of six stops calling sunsets sunsets. Instead we point and say, “pink sky.”

The first minivan gets old and they buy another. It is dark blue and has captain seats. It drives the twins to soccer practice and basketball practice and elementary school on the mornings they miss the bus. Once it drives them to a mental hospital to visit their older brother, who is taking a break from high school (Memory 206, “your older brother has always been different”). The older sister, once a baby who swallowed a marble, now a middle-schooler who wrote a poem, refuses to come. The twins claim the captain seats in the car.

For years she sleeps like a baby while my father tosses and turns. He wakes up, breathless, watches TV or does the dishes.

Sometime after my house becomes “my parents' house,” I learn she was dressed as a mummy.

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LITERARY

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Monthly group bike ride taking over the streets this week in costumes.

Panelists discuss of the role of historical research in writing contemporary fiction and nonfiction and how it’s taken their work in surprising directions.

First weekend of winter farmer’s market in Hope Artiste Village.

Stock up on apples and green things before root vegetable season begins in full force!

The Parlour’s Birthday Bash 1119 North Main St // 9 pm // Free Glam rock birthday bash.

November 3

November 1

Wear a stretchy costume for skanking; preferably without wings or other parts that could hit someone in the face while you’re flailing around.

Pawtucket Wintertime Farmer’s Market 1005 Main St, Pawtucket // 9 am - 1 pm //Free

Novel Writing and Historical Research Providence Public Library, 150 Empire St // 1:30 pm // Free

A Closer Walk with Thee: A Jazz funeral for black men who have died unjustly Manning Chapel, 21 Prospect St // 5:15 – 6:15 pm “In loving memory of African-American men who have died unjustly in the arms of racially motivated police brutality and gun violence,” members of Brown University and the greater Providence community will gather for a funeral procession with music, following brief remarks.

Lava Fossil Granoff, Englander Studio // 7:30 pm // Free A “solo suitcase theater show” about “a dad, a crab, a dentist and where things go when they are gone.”

this day MLK’s birthday in listery: becomes a national holiday on November 2, 1963

History of Social Class at Brown Petteruti Lounge, 75 Waterman St // 7-8:30pm // Free $ocial classmates is hosting a self-guided multimedia tour of professors, staff students, and alumni talking about class at Brown.

Modern dance workshop 95 Empire // 6:30 – 8 pm // $13 Open to any level of experience: modern dance class that will have you moving expressively on multiple levels (floor, mid-level, standing).

November 6

Ska-la-ween!

65 Manchester St, Warwick // 8 pm // $7

13.1 miles along the coast. Can register day of.

November 4

Beer tasting. Possibly also a haunted house? 21+

Gansett Half Marathon Narraganset, RI // 11 am // $75 registration

November 5

Haunted Brewery Tour Foolproof Brewery, 241 Grotto Ave // 7, 8, 9, & 10 pm // $20

November 2

October 31

Costumed Critical Mass Burnside Park // 6 pm // Free

The Giver East Providence 10, 60 Newport Avenue, East Providence // 12:50, 3:05, 5:20, 7:30, 9:40 // $2 Also playing: 22 Jump Street, This is where I leave you, As above, so below, and Teenage mutant ninja turtle. Recession Thursday prices, so tickets are $2 all day long.