This Weekend

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013

//BY ANYA GRENIER PAGE 3

POOP

B2

PUNNY

B5

PUDENDA

B6-7

AFTER THE LAUNDRY SCANDAL

LEARNING TO GET A LAUGH

A NAKED JOURNEY

Lucy Fleming uncovers the deeper meaning behind a dirty prank.

Is Yale truly a breeding ground for up-andcoming comedy stars?

Our three brave sophomores bare it all (almost) during their trip to a nudist resort.

PAGE B2

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

FLEMING

WEEKEND VIEWS

AN EARTH(L)Y REVELATION // BY LUCY FLEMING

In the sixth grade, we took a test about what kind of learner we were. Apparently it has something to do with how you draw an infinity sign — if the nexus of your sideways “8” is below the center line, you’re a visual learner; if it’s in the middle, you’re tactile, or something like that. I was visual. This made sense. I, like many Yalies, respond well to words, symbols, diagrams. Ever since, I’ve basked in this self-knowledge, content to take meticulous notes and revel in following the written instructions on everything from problem sets to assembly-required IKEA furniture. But there’s something about tactile experience that just can’t be paralleled. Especially when you’re holding your tactile experience tactilely in your tactile hands, cupped in a tactile paper towel, fresh out of the (need I mention, tactile) laundry machine. Okay. So I found poop in my laundry. By then, we were far enough into shopping period for Kant and the species development theory to have popped up at dinner. We were all, myself included, pleasantly sinking back into the intellectual soirée that is Yale, with all of the casual Chaucer and breakfast-time Bernoulli that it entails. Yes, GHeav and Woad’s have their place in our priorities, but the primeval calls for food and repro-

duction generally fade into the background as we face far more urgent lab reports and looming midterms. I was, only moments before the incident, considering frantically how to do two readings at the same time. Waft along the gauzy phraseology of “Gatsby”? Or delve into the depths of psychological truth in Genesis 22? But you know, it’s hard to weigh Fitzgerald against Biblical commentary when there’s poop next to your socks in the dryer. Actual poop. Not poop in the abstract. Not a drawing or diagram or description of poop. Not even a metaphor for poop. Real, physical, slightly dried-out poop.

SO I FOUND POOP IN MY LAUNDRY. In a matter of seconds, I fell several thousand feet, from the lofty heights of human sapience to, well, the ground. And, surprisingly, shockingly even, it was an okay place to be. Where instead of asking, “Where am I on the plane of human existence?” I suddenly asked, “What the heck is in this dryer it’s awfully round those were

some pretty nice socks.” We find ourselves at a unique juncture, here in college. We’re immature enough to find human excrement funny, yet mature enough to write policy papers on the use of force in Syria or Martin Luther’s approach to feminism. We’ve graduated from wearing diapers, but we’re not even thinking about changing them. (Hopefully.) Toilet humor pops up when we’re trying to prove we’re still kids, but it’s just humor. When was the last time you actually saw someone else’s excrement? Ask yourself. Probably not for a while. But there it was. Poop. Someone else’s poop. And yeah, as I walked to the bathroom in utter shock and horror, it did cross my mind that Martin Luther himself had an encounter with some poop, specifically when the Devil threw it at him to test his faith, and it’s usually translated into English as “ink,” but in the German, it’s “Scheiße,” plain and simple … and the visual learner in me wanted to know what it meant and what it symbolized and what it reflected about our society that someone would do this … but for once, I put my foot down, stopped thinking, grabbed a paper towel and went to clean it up. Contact LUCY FLEMING at lucy.fleming@yale.edu .

Finding a start after Yale // BY RAISA BRUNER

I should have gone on a social media hiatus this month. Instead, I obsessively trawled my feeds, which were filled with snapshots and comments about the start of the academic year. For many of you kids I like to call my friends, it was the “Last First Day.” For me and my 2013 cohort, it was the First Not-First Day. That’s right: I’m a graduate. School’s out … forever. Sure, some people took gap years, or semesters off, or had unusual academic schedules. Whatever. In the end we are all bound to the biological clock of the classroom since age 5 (or younger), a solid 17 years of schooling in which summer came to a close at the end of August, marked by the annual trips to Staples for fresh mechanical pencils and the agonizing search for the perfect bookbag. (The phases were endless: classic Jansport backpack, glitzy leopard-print tote, hippie cross-body satchel…) And of course there was always the critical question: binders or notebooks? In college: Mead FiveStars or Moleskines? This was followed by the equally grave transition from forgiving, erasable pencils to permanent — gasp! — pens. I can trace my growing-up — my personal journey to adulthood (or some semblance of it) — through the materials I chose to carry with me to school, the things I decided were worthy of storing my accumulating knowledge. But this year, for the first time in memory: no back-to-school. Just another day out here in California. There’s something oddly final about missing out on that annual ritual. This must be what it’s like to be born on a leap year, when everyone just skips over your birthday. Or to miss New Year’s Eve while traveling across time zones. Back-to-school is always more than just a day to show off some fresh kicks, your summer tan or a Lisa Frank sticker collection. Back-to-school is, each and every time, that most glorious of things: a new start. The night before, sleepless, I would resort to envisioning my new self for the year, reflecting with eager optimism on the bright possibilities. This year, I thought, I would be friends with her. I would hang out with him. I would talk like that. I would look like this. This cyclical opportunity for reinvention is what gives school its everlasting charm, even as we get older and jaded by homework, studying, the mundane reality of the academic grind.

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 20

Finish off a semester or a summer, and then, no matter what had happened, the First Day provides a blank slate. Wise people will tell you that every day is a blank slate. Today, they’ll say, is the first day of the rest of your life. Whatever. I’m 22: I am not wise. I’m coming off of four years that were fueled by the energy of words like FOMO, YOLO, young-wild-free, livewhile-we’re-young, we-can’t-stop, till-the-world-ends. These are powerful mantras for recklessness and immaturity, and they’re a hard habit to kick. Penny drinks are an objectively great deal, Box is just a block away, and a flirty text awaits your emoji-filled response. The truth is, it’s not cool to be wise. It’s hard to be wise. It’s hard to remember, without the classrooms and changing leaves, that not going back to school can still bring about some kind of metamorphosis. But I have trouble feeling the fizzy anticipation of a fresh start without everyone around me doing the same thing.

FOR ME AND MY 2013 COHORT, IT IS THE FIRST NOT-FIRST DAY.

On the flip side, though, now there’s a dark glamour in feeling personally responsible for any changes I might want to make to my life. (I’m hardly the first person to say this, but bear with me.) If this is the empowerment that comes with adulthood, it’s scary — but encouraging. As I go back through those social media feeds and see you kids these days having your back-to-school moments and settling into the rhythm of your semester, bringing in the year with a bang and plenty of booze, I’m not jealous of what I’m missing. I don’t envy your fun. Instead I envy how easy it is for you to engage in a structured reinvention of self. You remind me that if I want to feel that First-Day fervor again, no one is going to serve it up to me. Like everyone else before me, I have to find it. Contact RAISA BRUNER at raisabruner@gmail.com .

LUNCH WITH OLYMPIA OPENING RECEPTION 32 Edgewood Ave. // 4 p.m.

Feel cultured, rub shoulders with Manet’s ghost, hear some French. No food actually served.

KSIAZEK

BRUNER

// ANNELISA LEINBACH

In Amsterdam, rethinking prostitution // BY KAROLINA KSIAZEK

Maybe it was just because I had prostitutes on my mind already, but the click of my heels seemed especially loud in the Red Light District today. Ten minutes ago, my mind had been stuck on how bad I knew I smelled after a sweaty all-nighter. My last load of laundry had left my clothes smelling like crotch, and I hadn’t shaved in over a week. In the dim classroom, I felt like what I was: a sleep-deprived college student with body odor. But in the Red Light District, that overtired college student looked like a prostitute. A man in a large, black coat standing outside of the Casa Rosa Theater (the home of world famous live sex shows) nodded at me: “Hoi.” As I am wont to do, I smiled up at him — “Hey!” — and immediately regretted it. Somebody else asked me where an ATM was. Was that a hint? A man muttered something as I passed. By the third catcall, I started to ignore it. I stopped looking men in the eyes, lest I give them the idea that I was looking for a client. Even on an early Wednesday afternoon, I felt the stigma of a woman walking alone in heels: The age-old cultural weight of that clickclick-click of a pair of vintage boots on a cobblestone street. If you haven’t been to Amsterdam before, you might not know that the Red Light District is large and central; it’s easy to pass through it on your way to just about anywhere. A girl my age walking through is likely to be a student returning from class at the Universiteit van Amsterdam. I also happened to be looking like a prostitute. Even though I’d already been awake for a few hours, I’d already talked to a prostitute that day, a guest speaker in my class on the Local and Global Complexity of Prostitution. The woman was the founder and director of the Geisha Institute, a foundation that works to secure better working conditions for sex workers in the Netherlands. “I loved my job,” she told us. “I was an S&M mistress for 20 years. Men would tell me what they liked and I could tell a story. It was very exciting for me.” It’s hard for almost everybody to believe that a prostitute could enjoy her job. Even my classmates, liberal young people like me, self-selected

by the very fact that they’re taking a course on prostitution, were incredulous. The thought of having sex as a full time job for years on end isn’t appealing to me either. But after sitting through a full time desk job this summer, maybe this prostitution gig wouldn’t be the worst way to go. There are dozens of occupational hazards and lifestyle choices you can level against prostitution, but the only one that is unique to the job is the stigma it leaves on a person’s life forever once he or she enters the business. Millions of people spend their days doing jobs they hate. Millions of people are victims of “getting into it just for the money.” So what makes prostitutes different?

THE AGE-OLD CULTURAL WEIGHT OF THAT CLICL-CLICKCLICK ON A COBBLESTONE STREET. Well, for one, I paid 50 euros to talk to a second sex worker, which is much more than most people in the world can make in 20 minutes. After wandering through De Wallen, it was exhilarating to go past the other side of a red window, walk up the narrow staircase and enter the spacious but plainly furnished room where she worked. That’s when things got boring. I imagined a prostitute’s room to look like an Arabian fantasy, with mirrors on the ceiling and luscious red curtains. I imagined there would be large closets, wooden shutters that were splintering, purple wallpaper. I imagined a wardrobe, sex toys and all sorts of things that would be sure to surprise me through their mere presence. But the bed didn’t even have sheets. There was a mirror, a small table where she tossed my 50 euro bill, a standard bathroom and a few nondescript articles of clothing

hanging on the wall. Her first impulse was to head toward the bed, asking me what I wanted, but I assured her 10 times, “I just want to talk! I promise! I swear!” She instantly got to talking: “It’s not a bad job, I like it. A lot of men just want to fuck. They fuck and leave. Usually, it’s 50 euro for the basics … But it’s not 20 minutes of fucking, of course … It’s five minutes undressing, five minutes sucking, five minutes fucking …” It’s not that she was boring — she was just normal. We ended up talking about Bulgaria. When she told me my time was up, she gave me three kisses on the cheek and a hug. It was like meeting an aunt I hadn’t seen in so long that I didn’t remember her. After a month in Amsterdam, walking past hundreds of girls just like me in red windows, I’m only starting to understand why prostitution is a career you may never turn back from. But in countries like the Netherlands, where some women would prefer being a prostitute to selling burgers at McDonald’s, why do we still treat sex workers like pariahs? How is prostitution different than any other kind of service a person can sell? I don’t have an answer. I am inclined to believe it has to do with a discomfort with female sexuality, with the ancient idea that a woman’s vagina is sacred, and that anyone who would be willing to give up that sacred purity so many times must be immoral and unholy. I have a feeling that people are still uncertain about whether women even have the agency to decide what they do with their own bodies. I could be wrong. A few years ago, I would have shuddered at the idea of becoming a prostitute. But I walked past a coffee shop in the Red Light District called the Bulldog and wondered what it would mean to take my education behind a window in Amsterdam. What if it made me happier than the more popular option of investment banking? The thought may make you uncomfortable. If it does, that’s okay. Contact KAROLINA KSIAZEK at karolina.ksiazek@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sex on the YDN Boardroom Table First, remove the stick from your ass.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B3

WEEKEND COVER

WHEN WE TALK ABOUT CRAZY // BY ANYA GRENIER

Oh, she’s crazy.” “Fuck her but don’t date her, she’s crazy.” “She’s my friend, but she’s completely batshit.” I don’t remember when I first started to notice, but it was hard to stop hearing these things once I did. I was hearing this word, I was hearing it everywhere and I had next to no idea what it actually meant. On a campus full of people with bizarre study habits and sleep schedules, what does it take to get called “crazy”? In an unscientific survey conducted in Blue States and dining halls, students told me they think we’re all very sensitive when it comes to talking about our peers’ mental health. Conversations about mental illn e ss ta ke place in hushed tones, full of

“

sympathy and euphemisms. They do not involve big, loud words like “crazy.” “I think in my experience when I talk about people with mental illnesses, it’s pretty sympathetic,” said Maggie Zhou ’15, a member of my random sample. “The enemy is always Yale Health.” Students I spoke with had a wide range of horror stories about Yale Mental Health Services: waiting up to four months for an appointment, encountering therapists who didn’t recognize their patients, who cut them off in the middle of sentences when their time was up, who pushed medication on them after two sessions, who prescribed the wrong

kind of medication, who made them feel judged. On the surface, we’re trying to fix this. Every Yale College Council presidential candidate in recent memory has made improving Yale’s mental health resources a prominent part of his or her platform. When Cameron Dabaghi ’11 jumped off the Empire State Building in the March of 2010, we wrote op-eds and talked about boosting access to mental health services. When Zachary Brunt ’15 committed suicide two years later, we did much the same thing. We hear that Yale’s mental health services are failing us. The failures are big and gaping and scary. But we also hear about the stigma that makes so many students reluctant to seek help, or even articulate their

suffering in the first place. The source of this stigma seemed a little mysterious to me at first. Yale is famously inclusive, extremely PC. But then there’s the hard truth that based on the numbers, at least one in every two people we have no problem calling crazy on this campus have visited Yale Mental Health at least once during their Yale careers. We hear that we don’t talk about mental health enough. But maybe we need to listen to what we’re saying. *** Abigail*, a junior who has struggled with clinical depression, insomnia and anxiety during her time at Yale, can describe, immediately and at length, the kinds of qualities that comprise craziness here. “I hear the words ‘chill’ and ‘crazy’ so much at Yale, and it’s a problem I have had for a very long time,” she told me. “Crazy has the connotation of a girl who doesn’t really have a handle over her emotions … and chill is the positive way to be, if you can be chill and act like things don’t affect you.” Thirteen students interviewed were unanimous about one aspect of “crazy”: Girls get called crazy more often and more casually than boys do. Many identified strikingly similar characteristics that mark a “crazy” Yale woman. Elea-

nor Michotte ’15 said it can mean going out too much or not enough. But she said that it’s applied especially often to girls who exhibit too much “clinginess” in romantic situations. Andrea Villena ’15 told me “crazy” is typically used to refer to girls who seem overly dramatic in dealing with their relationships. Abigail said these are girls who seem immature or insecure, who publicly and dynamically react to things.

because of it. It’s something she’s been thinking about a lot post-Yale. Jessica began feeling “very body conscious” at age 10 — and the feeling never went away. She believes those concerns helped feed her anxiety at Yale. When she was 20, she went to the beach and a male friend made a rude comment about her body. Jessica remembers going home, sitting on the floor of her bathroom and crying for hours.

ARE THOSE ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS EXPERIENCED DIFFERENTLY BY GENDERS, AND THE ANSWER IS PROBABLY YES. They are clearly socially anxious. They don’t seem chill. Jay Pabarue ’14 said the word is used so much and so generally that it’s hard to identify just one meaning. But he too associates the term with girls who seem to have a “pathological way of dealing with social scenes.” The only guy Abigail has heard called crazy at Yale is “legitimately crazy,” she said. Several students said that calling a boy crazy is more serious than calling a girl crazy: It suggests more about their actual psychological state. When asked why they think so many girls do get called “crazy,” many blamed unjustified cultural stereotypes about girls being more neurotic and hysterical. But the World Health Organization tells us women are far more likely to be afflicted with anxiety and depression. And they are twice as likely to develop generalized anxiety and panic disorders as men, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. These disorders are also more tied to external influences than any genetic or internal predisposition, which means the environment we collectively create on campus each day matters. Psychology professor Tyrone Cannon, who is presently teaching a course on the neuroscience of mental disorders, said that depression and anxiety are only 35 percent determined by genetic factors, with environmental influences accounting for the remaining 65 percent. He contrasted this with disorders not particularly associated with one gender over another, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, which are 85 percent determined by genetic factors. “I think the mechanisms are similar across men and women,” Cannon told me. “The question is, are those environmental factors experienced differently by genders, and the answer is probably yes.” According to June Gruber, one of Cannon’s colleagues in Yale’s Psychology Department, girls begin to experience the social world differently at a very young age. Their parents encourage them to express t h e i r emotions. Girls mature more quickly and develop a strong social orientation earlier. They tend to be more ruminative. But all this introspection comes at a cost: Girls are much more likely to become depressed as they grow. All through high school, 2013 grad Jessica* dealt with anxiety and insomnia. The summer after her freshman year at Yale, she found herself having panic attacks and even more extreme anxiety. She took a year off. Jessica doesn’t think her experience of depression and anxiety can be divorced from her gender and the way she grew up

“I think there are these social expectations for girls to be a certain way, to act a certain way, to not be weird, to be attractive. A part of the education as a preteen girl is to learn how to be attractive to boys. A lot of my friends and I are going through this experience where we’re unlearning that,” she said. “Definitely there is a direct physiological connection to my mood and my body consciousness and anxieties about being a woman.” Such feelings may be exacerbated on campus. Michotte said people at Yale, and girls especially, seem much more intense about their appearance than in her native England (an issue she discussed in one of her “Crit from the Brit” columns for WEEKEND). “I think there’s appearance inflation. As everyone grooms more, works out more … suddenly everyone falling short of that standard stands out, and the collective average creeps up and up,” she said. Abigail thinks a lot of the girls she knows who get “crazy” thrown at them probably have mental health issues that people too easily overlook. She doesn’t think she’s crazy; she thinks she’s someone who feels things deeply and has problems with her brain chemistry that she’s working hard on. “I’m sure people call me crazy, though no one’s ever called me crazy to my face,” Abigail tells me suddenly, 20 minutes into our conversation at the Hall of Graduate Studies dining hall. She sounds as though she is articulating this thought to herself for the first time. In a culture where there’s so much silence about people’s diagnoses, it’s hard to know who might be suffering. Pabarue cited one girl he knows who often gets called crazy in an unsympathetic way by people not aware that she has a problem. After a bad breakup her freshman year, Abigail found herself breaking down and crying multiple times a day, for several months. It never occurred to her that she was “actually depressed”; she thought she was just another girl who had been dumped. She’s always been someone who experiences higher highs and lower lows than other people, and the line between grief and illness wasn’t obvious. “When your boyfriend and you have a really bad breakup, the time when you’re crying and mourning that’s not called clinical depression,” she said. “I thought I was just really sad.” But though few students interviewed believed girls were legitimately at a greater risk for developing any mental disorder, society has no problem making judgment calls based on gender when it comes to one commonly reported disorder: eating issues. When Sally*, now a junior, developed Crohn’s disease her freshman year, she lost 18 pounds in a month and was constantly vomiting. Yet as she sought treatment, she found herself under attack from all sides. “Everyone was saying I was anorexic,” Sally said. “People at Yale Health, people at Yale. People just wouldn’t believe me when I was saying I was in pain.” Sally had friends trying to force SEE RIGHT WORDS PAGE B8

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 20

“STRUCTURES OF MEANING IN THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK” Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library // 4:30 p.m.

Do the reading, Kastan will introduce.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sex on the 50-yard line at the Yale Bowl Touchdown!

PAGE B4

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND ARTS

SOCIAL CROSSROADS IN HONG KONG // BY ELAINA PLOTT For most Americans, the city of Hong Kong evokes a glossy aesthetic — a glimmering skyline rendered even more radiant in its reflection along Victoria Harbor. We envision the hordes of brass-knuckled, Hermes-donning financiers peopling downtown, an ode to the city’s burgeoning status as the definitive portrait of wealth and glamour. But for all of these carefully ingrained motifs, Michael Sloan chooses to instead use his newest exhibit, “Paintings of Hong Kong Street Markets,” to illuminate the island’s lesser-told story. Housed at the Yale-China Association at 442 Temple St., the collection confronts its viewers with the dominating theme of social crossroads. The paintings reflect what Sloan deems the “reality” of Hong Kong, one composed of scenes and characters found exclusively in the Tai Po and Mong Kok East street markets. He juxtaposes these locals — the butcher, the shoe shiner, the waiter — with those who often overshadow them — the tourists, the purveyors of glitz and kitsch. Sloan sketches the latter in black and white, allowing the former to take on the color he finds missing in the Hong Kong cultural conscience. This technique serves Sloan well, translated most literally in a piece depicting a poor, local couple at the MTA station standing below an advertisement featuring a hypersexualized supermodel. Her breasts dominate the painting in size, appearing to spill out of her blouse and occupy their own space within the train station. Her lips and eyelashes have been exaggerated in a similar fashion, both voluminous and bold. But despite the poster’s physical dominance within the sketch, Sloan renders it secondary to the local couple through his selective use of color. Cloaked in shoddy garments, the couple represents quite the opposite of the bourgeoisie displayed in the advertisement, yet the artist — by decorating them in striking hues of red, blue and green — portrays their lives as likely the most meaningful of all. In stark contrast stands the poster, a mere visage of black and white.

Such makes this particular piece most accessible to viewers in understanding the collection’s larger theme. It’s important to note, however, that Sloan does not universally condemn the pomp and circumstance of the city, but instead seeks to qualify it, positioning popular culture and local realities side by side. Indeed, a sketch featuring Hong Kong’s excessive neon lights and cosmopolitan waterfront scenes is complemented by a local waiter, who waits patiently to serve the throngs of tourists soon to take their seats. Here, the social intersection is portrayed more subtly than the grotesquely exaggerated poster girl, but still sheds light on the crossroads that Sloan seeks to convey. Organizationally, the exhibit is fashioned in a logical narrative for the viewer, but nearly fails in convincing one to continue looking. The collection’s centerpieces are found in bird’s eye views of the respective street markets of Tai Po and Mong Kok — certainly a sound starting point for the viewer, but one lacking in aesthetic punch. Indeed, the exhibit’s most gripping and telling pieces, including one portraying an elderly man crafting Chinese poetry along the sidewalk of the People’s Park, are tucked away in the back corners of the room. It thus takes some searching to find Sloan’s true gems, but despite this structural lapse, the effort is well worth it. But Sloan’s cultural commentary is not groundbreaking. The illuminating of two separate cultural spheres — with one historically glossing over the other — is a perspective oft communicated in prominent 20th century drawings (Bill Traylor comes to mind). However, by placing his work in a fresh context — the Tai Po and Mong Kok street markets — Sloan gives this familiar narrative a refreshing sense of novelty. This, coupled with the sheer beauty of the drawings themselves, ensures that even amidst a foreign context, nothing is lost in translation. Contact ELAINA PLOTT at elaina.plott@yale.edu . // KATHRYN CRANDALL

Wagner: A Polemic Wunderkind // BY HELEN ROUNER

Fraught with adultery, debt, fierce rivalry and intensely isolating narcissism, Wagner’s own story was nearly as operatic as those he created for the stage. “Master or Monster: Richard Wagner at 200,” an exhibit in the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library in Sterling Library, celebrates the 200th anniversary of the German composer’s birth. The display includes letters, photographs, books and essays pertaining both to Wagner’s prolific career and to his scandalous personal life. Many aficionados consider Wagner to be the father of modern classical music, as first conceived through his opera “Tristan und Isolde.” Wagner invented the revolutionary “music drama,” using leitmotif and “endless melody” to create cohesive, all-encompassing works of art rather than just collections of arias and recitatives. He was one of very few composers to write both the libretto and the score to each of his operas. But the exhibit skates past Wagner’s artistic legacy and crashes headlong into the shrouded reality of his insufferable narcissism. Of the five of Wagner’s letters on display, two are exceptionally ridiculous. In one, Wagner demands that a publishing house rectify a typo in a libretto of his (a substitution of “damned” [“verdammt”] for “cursed” [“verflucht”]). In another, he begs his American dentist to raise a million dollars to help the Wagner family relocate to the United States (which they never did). “Master or Monster” derives its title from Deems Taylor’s radio talk for a 1936 concert of Wagner’s music by the New York Philharmonic. The talk, later published as “The Monster,” enumerates Wagner’s personal shortcomings — from his insatiable thirst for praise to his disproportionately large head. Wagner considered himself “Shakespeare, and Beethoven, and Plato, rolled into one,” Taylor says, ascribing to him “the emotional stability of a 6-year-old child.” Taylor also describes how Wagner poached his second wife from his best friend and most dedicated follower, and that even while seducing her, Wagner was searching for a wealthier woman to marry.

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 20

Conspicuously missing from the list of Wagner’s faults is his anti-Semitism. In a less-than-subtle effort to compensate for those of Wagner’s modern admirers who have “sought to avoid or downplay his antiSemitism,” the exhibit’s curators have chosen to address the issue “head on,” as archivist Richard Boursy writes in the exhibit’s introductory remarks. Many descriptions of correspondence and photographs on display conclude with a non sequitur noting how many years elapsed between their authors’ deaths and Hitler’s rise.

BUT THE EXHIBIT SKATES PAST WAGNER’S ARTISTIC LEGACY AND CRASHES HEADLONG INTO THE SHROUDED REALITY OF HIS INSUFFERABLE NARCISSISM. The exhibit’s most controversial object is Wagner’s essay, “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” in which he argues that Jews cannot rise to musical greatness because they possess no creativity — only imitative capacities. Later in his life, however, Wagner admitted that much of this ethnic prejudice was a product of his rivalry with Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer, both of whom were much more successful than Wagner at the time. A 1869 magazine caricature depicts the composer as a tiny, round man hammering a pointed object into a disembodied ear. Here, Wagner seems as acerbic and irritating as the other objects in this exhibit make him out to be. The cartoon bears a resemblance to Wagner’s most animated tenor, Elmer Fudd, whose rendition of “Kill the Wabbit” seems more sinister in the context of Wagner’s life than Fudd’s anti-lapin libretto could ever suggest. Contact HELEN ROUNER at helen.rouner@yale.edu .

“Don Jon”: Porn in the morn (and afternoon, and night) // BY PATRICE BOWMAN

With all the news of former Disney stars trying too hard to be shocking and tent-pole franchises becoming more bloated and more ridiculous with each new announcement, Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s feature-length directorial debut “Don Jon” is a bright spot in current American pop culture. He and his movie are more impressive within the context of his Hollywood career, which began when he was just a child. Fun fact: I’ve kept track of Gordon-Levitt’s career since the 1990s. Clarifying fact: I’m not an obsessed fan girl; he just happened to be in some movies, such as “Angels in the Outfield” (1994) and “Treasure Planet” (2002), that I saw back then. When I saw him in “(500) Days of Summer” (2009), I thought, who is this guy? He was so charming, vulnerable and funny. It was that kid from those Disney flicks! Since then, he’s had some duds along the way — seriously, whose idea was it to cast him as the villain in “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” (2009)? — but Gordon-Levitt has redeemed himself in such films as “50/50” (2011), “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012) and now “Don Jon.” In the most recent film, Jon (Gordon-Levitt) is a bro from the Jersey Shore: He pumps iron, curses out people as he drives to Mass, keeps his hair oozing with gel and bags ladies every time he goes out with his buds. And he’s addicted to porn. Even after meeting the stunning Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), Jon can’t kick the habit that requires so many tissues. After his relationship with Barbara deteriorates, he finds himself drawn to the odd Esther (Julianne Moore) at his local college.

Even as I congratulate Gordon-Levitt for juggling writing, directing and starring in this production, the movie often has signs of an artist stretched too thinly. What we end up seeing is that Gordon-Levitt the actor succeeds more than GordonLevitt the director and the writer. Although Jon’s character is the focus of the picture, GordonLevitt never makes him out to be some idealized version of masculinity. To be frank, I wouldn’t want to be friends with Jon, let alone date him. I was so used to Gordon-Levitt playing nice guys that when I saw him transform into a selfish womanizer who somehow continues to gain the audience’s sympathy, I had an even greater appreciation for his acting abilities. Gordon-Levitt the director, however, focuses so much on his own acting that his love interests are left with less substantialness. Johansson’s character comes across as the plot-designated battle-ax, turning into a mean girl in the blink of an eye. Moore’s likeable role as an earthmother type who doesn’t wear makeup, smokes weed and gives Jon advice on how to really connect with women during sex suffers because she does not have enough screen time. She’s the (perhaps predictable) wake-up call that Jon needs. She’s eccentric without becoming one of those Manic Pixie Dream Girls from days of old, but she’s not really in the movie as much as she should be. In fact, the movie screen goes to black just as Esther and Jon reach the peak of their relationship. Imagine if “Silver Linings Playbook” (2012) ended just as Pat and Tiffany were really hitting it off.

YALE PHILHARMONIA: “THE RITE OF SPRING”

Contact PATRICE BOWMAN at patrice.bowman@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Woolsey Hall // 8 p.m.

Spring into fall.

But his direction isn’t a total failure. What I did like was the first half of the film’s extreme hyperbole. Ear-splitting dance music punctuates each sexual conquest, parts of women’s bodies glow and people go to watch movies with such titles as “So Hard, So Fast 3D.” This wild take slows down as Jon’s self-confidence breaks down, and the steady camera angles and funny musical cues give way to shaky cam and uncomfortable silence. But even as his direction becomes serious, Gordon-Levitt can’t quite grasp the full depth of the story that he has in his hands. He’s holding back. Not with the pornographic images and unfulfilling sexual encounters with real women — there’s plenty of that — but with the emotional dysfunction on screen. For example, Jon’s family is scary; his father is very close to attacking him, his mother is a borderline idiot and his sister mostly refuses to talk to anyone. Yeah, it’s funny, but there’s a serious problem here. In fact, that statement applies to the whole movie. The movie is almost the lighthearted version of “Shame” (2011), filled with laughter to avoid confronting the core of a bunch of messedup folks. But while Don Jon lacks “Shame”’s explicit and cold tone, it does have some insight into the many ways people fill in the numb voids in their lives with media. “Don Jon” may not be the total knockout that I expected it to be, but it stands as a look into the growing talent of a star who has great skill both in front of and behind the camera.

Sex on the stage at the Yale University Theater Put on a real show.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B5

WEEKEND CHUCKLES

LAUGH FACTORY // BY JULIA ZORTHIAN

Ari Berkowitz ’12 may live in Los Angeles like Zooey Deschanel, have the same glasses-bangs combination as Zooey Deschanel and spend her time inventing ways to meet Zooey Deschanel, but Berkowitz wants you to know she is not a “Zooey stalker.” She only plays one in her new, six-episode webseries called “Me & Zooey D.” Unlike Berkowitz, many recent alumni pursue jobs for the money, and students pursue courses for grades, but for members of Yale’s comedy scene, all are after one thing — the laughs. The first three-minute installment features Berkowitz’s character Alex in a “New Girl”-esque red dress, staking out an LA Sprinkles cupcake shop and waiting for Deschanel to pick up some gluten-free red velvet treats. In the next episode, Alex and her best friend get in a serious fight over Zooey’s acting talent, but make up over a friendship frittata. The third episode sees Alex try her hand at scriptwriting. For Berkowitz, who writes, coproduces and edits the series, the subject matter isn’t very far removed from her own life. While she may not have moved to L.A. to become best friends with a famous actress, Berkowitz’s own L.A. relocation after college parallels the show’s storyline. The recent alumna said she knew she wanted to pursue comedy writing her senior year so she shaped her American Studies major around television. She was also a member of The Purple Crayon improv group for four years and joined the sketch comedy group Red Hot Poker to hone her writing abilities as a senior. Berkowitz said Yale’s vibrant comedy culture and alumni network prepared her for her current role as an assistant to the executive producers of the ABC show, “Trophy Wife.” With Yale’s sketch-comedy form, Berkowitz said she began to think about jokes more precisely. “Those are great muscles to develop,” she added. “Writing a scene in a sitcom is like writing a mini-sketch.” With numerous comedy outlets, Yale students don’t have to look far for some comedic distraction. Students interested in drawing laughs from others can devote their time to comedic groups or even some classes, with the possibility of pursuing humor after shedding their caps and gowns.

it.” Plenty of Yale alumni have moved on to careers in improv and standup comedy — including comedian Demetri Martin ’95 and “Girls” cast member Allison Williams ’10. Pictures of Williams from her Just Add Water days surfaced on the Internet last month in a Huffington Post story, titled “Allison Williams’ College Improv Team Photos Make Her Seem Way More Fun Than Her ‘Girls’ Character.” In fact, Williams told the News in 2011 that she would not have landed the role on “Girls” if she had not prepared with JAW, because she had to improvise with Lena Dunham in her audition. “The best decision I made at Yale was to audition for [the improv comedy troupe] Just Add Water. Again and again, improv proves to be the most profitable skill that I have,” she said. *** On an average Wednesday in professor Ryan Wepler’s English 121 humor writing class, Wepler reads funny pieces — 75 percent of the time, belonging to the students themselves — aloud to the mix of sophomores, juniors and seniors. Hopefully there’s laughter. “My goal is to teach students to try to be funny,” Wepler said. Wepler has taught an English 114 seminar on laughter and an English 115 course on humorous literature, but this is his first time focusing the class on writing itself. So far this semester, he has assigned one two-page essay per week, with a prompt somewhat lacking in direction. “The prompt of the two-page essay is ‘Be as funny as you can in 500-700 words,” Wepler added. “It’s open intentionally. I want students to work with their own sense of humor, generate their own sense of humor.” But students also read classic humorists like Mark Twain, along with more contemporary writers such as Jack Handy and Joel Stein. Wepler’s classes are not the only ones that deal with humor within the curriculum; filmmaker Michael

game during shows where they run a scene over and over, with audience members shouting out new genres or iterations. “When we play on campus, it’s a lot of ‘The Western canon!’ ‘Kant!’ ‘Surrealist novel!’” Sircus said. “I think Yalies appreciate this esoteric and a little more pedantic style of humor,” he said. “When you’re at a show you can make a joke about the nuances of ‘Othello.’ Maybe not everyone gets it, but they laugh.” *** But the consensus on whether comedy is just an extracurricular is split. Greenspan pointed to Yale’s extensive theater studies program and drama productions supported by University funding. He said that while the student body is hugely supportive of comedy shows on campus, he has rarely seen an administrator at a JAW show the way he has at theater performances. “The thing about improv is, it really is a couple of people standing around and lying. Just making [stuff] up on the spot,” Greenspan explained, laughing. “It’s harder to get funding to do that because technically, anyone has that ability.” Yale’s humor publications, though circulated widely on campus, may face a similar brush-off in the professional world. People say 80 percent of “The Simpson’s” writing staff is from the Harvard Lampoon. There is no such saying about any Yale humor publications. As a senior who submitted a television script as her senior thesis,

Berkowitz said she did not find enough support on and beyond campus for humor writing. “[The Lampoon has] a really good network, and we don’t really,” Berkowitz said. “That was something that I think surprised me. As much as there’s a lot of support for any level of student writing on campus, I don’t think there’s enough for comedy writing, “ Compared with the Lampoon, the Harvard magazine with a long list of venerated alumni like Conan O’Brien and B.J. Novak, Yale’s comedic publications are viewed as less established in the comedy world. Still, Yale prints a base of publications that produce generally funny content, like the Yale Herald, Rumpus and The Record. And since Rumpus established the Rump Chat blog two years ago, students have turned to other peoples’ written gossip tips as another source of humor. “People really like taking pleasure in other people’s pains,” said Andrea Villena ’15, editor in chief of Rumpus. “I think [Rump Chat] keeps people honest and stops us from taking ourselves too seriously.” And the new form of comedic writing certainly has an audience. Villena said when the site printed a report of the laundry vandal scandal to hit campus last week — titled “Poopgate” by Rump Chat — the site received about 3000 hits in one day. Villena added that humor writing is definitely gaining traction on campus, though she is not sure if students want humor to digest their

news or use humor to gain readership. But Berkowitz said readership on campus does align with prestige in the entertainment industry. “If you make it on the Lampoon, it gives you street cred,” she said. “The Record is great, but I don’t think its competitive, well-respected or known enough to give you that.” Yet students in comedy groups interviewed pointed to the more well-known comedy writers who came from Yale as success stories, such as Elizabeth Meriwether ’04, the head writer for “New Girl,” and Steve Bodow ’89, former head writer and now producer of “The Daily Show.” And even if their careers take different turns, students agreed that the take-away from their work with comedy on campus has formed their characters. Blackwell pointed to his developed ability to react well to different situations as helpful while he works on the farm. Greenspan said he appreciates the importance of working in sync with a partner or team. “Improv is definitely a life-lesson thing. I know it sounds so cheesy but our whole lives are so improvised,” Madison said. “The rules that apply to good improv apply to having a good day.” Contact JULIA ZORTHIAN at julia.zorthian@yale.edu .

*** The average American college or University has an improv troupe on campus. Yale has five. And two sketch comedy groups. And a standup collective. “There’s such a large comedy scene at Yale,” said Caleb Madison ’15, the director of the Viola Question and a member of the Just the Tip stand-up comedy collective. “If you’re in it, you know everyone in it. That’s kind of nice.” Madison added that while he doesn’t want to jinx his chances, he would be happy to pursue a career in comedy after graduation. Gabe Greenspan ’14, former director of Red Hot Poker and a member of Just Add Water, said he hopes to move to one of three meccas of humor: L.A., Chicago or New York City. Zeke Blackwell ’13, former director of The Purple Crayon, is currently working on a farm, but said he hopes to continue a career in improv in the future. He would want to go to Chicago, which he called “the birthplace of modern improv.” Chicago houses The Second City Comedy Troupe, and Blackwell said the city has more opportunities for beginners in the business. In addition to learning long-form improv comedy with The Purple Crayon — a popular form professionally — Blackwell said the group, like most comedy groups at Yale, gave him an alumni network to fall back on. “[It’s] really cool that if in six months I decided I wanted to move to Chicago, it’s much easier to enter that world knowing people than trying to go in with nothing,” Blackwell said. “The Purple Crayon gave me a really great network, if I want to use

F R I D AY SEPTEMBER 20

Roemer is teaching “American Film Comedy” this semester, and professor Albert Laguna is teaching the class “Race and Comedy.” Madison is c u r rently enrolled i n R o e m e r ’s class, and said the opportunity to study humor, instead of only perform it, gives him a new way to look at comedy. “[Roemer] takes comedy very seriously, which I think is something all the people at Yale do. Which I love,” Madison said. “They apply that academic serious-minded discipline to comedy. Some may say it takes the joy out of it, but I would say it only adds to it.” Joel Sircus ’14, a member of Viola Question, said Yale’s intellectual culture changes the sort of comedy the troupes focus on. He explained how the VQ plays a

// SARA LEE

JAZZ AT THE UNDERBROOK

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Saybrook College // 8 p.m.

Surprise guest and jam session to follow!

Sex in the Saybrook laundry room Don’t shit on your tit.

PAGE B6

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

PAGE B7

WEEKEND STRIPS

SUN ON MY RIDGE: WKND GETS NAKED // BY JENNIFER GERSTEN, YUVAL BEN-DAVID AND LEAH MOTZKIN

Thrust. A relentless pattern; a relentless panting. Thump. Thump. Back and forth. Thrust and groan. The wind caressed our naked bodies. Sweat ran down our sun-kissed skin. Leah heaved. Yuvie squealed. He hit hard. Jennifer watched from the sidelines. We were playing tennis. Just three college students looking to blow off some steam. And we’d found a surprising sanctuary out in the Connecticut boondocks: Sun Ridge Nudist Resort in Sterling, Conn.

Thought you were too young, you know/ So I just watched you sleeping.” We giggled awkwardly. We were about to come face to face with nakedness — our own, and that of others. While we had assured each other that there would be no funny business at this camp, each of us secretly wondered if that would really be the case. When we reached the climax of the hill, would we find only promiscuity or sexual abnormality? Would the people we’d meet be perverts? Was taking our clothes off in front of each other and these strangers, going bare in the unrelenting sunlight on this nippy day, something we really wanted to do? Were we prepared for the parade of pudenda and penis?

WERE WE PREPARED FOR THE PARADE OF PUDENDA AND PENIS? *** We took a collective deep breath as our borrowed black Ford inched up the hill to the resort. The easy banter of the drive waned to a heavy silence, in which the lyrics of a Jim Croce ballad became painfully audible: “I was so afraid to touch you/

At first we could only see some buildings, a small clearing and the pool area. A fully clothed woman, tanned to a crisp, told us where to leave our car, and motioned to the checkin cabin. As we walked up the steps, we spotted our first bare butt-cheeks under a sign that decreed “Party N a k e d .”

Lydia, Sun Ridge’s owner and founder, gave us copies of the ground rules. “There’ll be a chowder bake at 4 — you should come!” she said, waving as we headed for the bathrooms. *** Yuval and Leah went first. They had said they were going to change, but it was into their birthday suits. Walking out into the sun in only her neon salmon Nikes, Leah briefly panicked about the gazes that would soon fall on her exposed body. Then she saw Yuvie, as comfortable nude as he had been in clothes. She was there among friends, and as she looked at the visitors passing by, nobody seemed to fulfill her fears. Together, she, Yuvie and a still-clothed Jennifer walked through the campground. And it was by herself, some time after we had gotten our bearings, that Jennifer chose to strip in a field far removed from the main campground. First went her shirt: an oatmeal-colored tee she had worn in an attempt to blend in. Then: a camisole with elastic bands that at first entangled her in its straps; shorts, whose clasp she turned in her hand like she would a key; underwear, sliding abashedly onto the grass; shoes, kicked off; socks, pared from her feet; ponytail, unbridled. The first sight anyone has of an infant is of it alone, naked. But then it is quickly swaddled in blankets, and it permanently joins the ranks of the covered. To wear clothes is not only this

infant’s right, but also a societal mandate. After the exposure the infant experiences in birth, being nude among others becomes a privilege that it is unlikely to take. Most who do lay claim to this privilege, like those at Sun Ridge, do so in groups. It is easier to be naked alone — take a shower, and look at yourself as you scrub. You will probably not look for long, but even a glimpse is enough to confirm that everything is in its place. You know what you are seeing, yet in public you cannot be sure of how you appear; the eyes of others reflect poorly. If you slam your eyes shut in the shower and then quickly don a robe as though your bare skin had never touched water, then what you look like will be a mystery even to you. You are a house whose furniture you know well, though your exterior is entirely unfamiliar. Awkwardly at first, Jennifer sat cross-legged on a towel, reading “The Canterbury Tales.” For her, nudity among others, even so far away from them, was a pilgrimage to a wilderness she had known only at birth. Small sounds disturbed her; then, less so. Within minutes, her hyperawareness had quieted. Thoreau, it is said, took daily walks in the nude he called “air walks.” No evidence exists that Emerson did the same, but he could have been won over to the practice — he did expound upon seeing everything in nature, after all. Free should the scholar be, and brave; “Know thyself” and “Study nature” become at last one fused maxim, espoused by this

Girl Thinking. The American scholar will discover herself outdoors. In the middle of the woods, Jennifer entertained the possibility that she was doing Yale right. *** Jennifer dressed and headed back to the swimming pool, where she spoke with Lisa. Lisa had grown up with nudism. “My dad was a hippie,” Lisa said. “[Going nude] feels natural.” Waving a hand over the floral place mats set out for the afternoon chowder bake, she said, “Out there, I work for corporate America. But here … here, I’m Momma Lisa. You need food, someone to talk to, whatever, you come to me. My door’s always open. My husband, Mike, he’s the camp DJ — he probably has any song you want.” It was chilly despite the sun, and Lisa was wearing pink terry sweatpants, but no shoes. No shirt, either. “Clothing … it puts a label on you. Be this, be that.” Scowling, Lisa described her preparations for the daily grind: “I have to fix my hair. Then I have to one by one do up my shirt buttons.” She mimed the action, her fingers inching up her bare stomach and breasts like a spider weaving its web. “It’s just so complicated. … Here, you can be what you want to be, do what you want to do. Wear clothes, or don’t wear clothes, whatever you want.”

To get to Sun Ridge, you must wait at the bottom of the hill and call the office to inform them of your impending arrival. According to Lisa, the resort’s unofficial motto is “Leave your stress at the bottom of the hill.” On the weekends, Lisa leaves her corporate persona behind for her trailer (“the one with the Christmas lights”) at Sun Ridge, where she says she has made friends who live all along the Eastern Seaboard. Lisa has mentioned her weekly jaunts to her co-workers. Some of her Sun Ridge friends, however, have chosen to keep quiet about their pastime — what Lydia, the owner, calls the “fastest growing social sport.” If camp visitors, mostly in their 40s and 50s, choose not to disclose their activities, it is often not out of shame but an unwillingness to defend themselves from public ignorance. Lisa spoke of a couple, both ultra-conservative Catholics, that have declined to tell even their children of their weekend whereabouts. They haven’t even mentioned Sun Ridge’s location to their emergency contacts. What Sun Ridge is not is a voyeurs’ or hedonists’ haven. As in the clothed world, staring or ogling is a breach of etiquette. Visitors to Sun Ridge engage in activities like tennis, tanning, swimming and cooking; the facility is not a space to indulge wanton sexual fantasies. “If it was the orgy everyone thought it would be, I wouldn’t need c o u n s e l i n g ,” L i s a

said dryly. If we are surprised by anything, it should be not the content of our physicality, but rather how little it matters to Sun Ridge’s patrons. They are just human beings, but humans being — what? Beyond the borders of Sun Ridge, who are they actually, and who are they supposed to be? The patrons, when at Sun Ridge, aren’t looking for the answer. For them, it is sufficient that humans simply be. *** At Sun Ridge, people play tennis. So, when in Rome, right? We walked down to the courts. A woman in a golf cart pulled up to offer us tennis balls. We struggled to balance the balls in our arms before dropping them, finally, all over the concrete. After flailing about for several minutes, we abandoned the effort. “Giving up so soon?” a large lobster-red man asked. “Maybe another time,” we promised. We had come to Sun Ridge with high expectations. They weren’t met — instead, they were subverted. The debauchery that we feared and longed for did not exist in the community we joined for the day. Rather, we watched people come together in their natural state to find some respite. ***

Yom Kippur fell on the Saturday we drove up. Do the math: three Jews, skipping synagogue for a nudist resort on the holiest day on the Jewish calendar — the day when most of us apologize for skipping synagogue the rest of the year, for all the sick and nasty things we do in the nude. We reconsidered the trip. On Yom Kippur, Jews beat their chests and name their sins before God. We’d be beating our chests, too, but more in the Neanderthalic tradition. It’s a day of abstinence, Yom Kippur — from food and drink, work, leather, washing, sex. Free of desire and shallow self-regard, it’s a day to dwell sincerely on oneself. And our itinerary didn’t jive with that. As gonzo journalists, however amateur, our task would be to live the lives of others: nudists, serial nudists, people who can’t get enough of airing their privates. That wasn’t us we’d be writing about. Frankly, it felt like we missed the train to heaven. It wasn’t even a close shave. We were too busy chasing other gods, naked. We took on the project for its sensationalism. We thought it would be cool to write about our brush with that subculture. So very Swedish of us. God probably loves Sweden, but he doesn’t care much about cool. Especially not on Yom Kippur. We rationalized. Yuval ran to his rabbi to seek encouragement. The fasting would just be sexual. Imagine forsaking that deli of naked bodies, he said;

having to not get a public erection — that’s hyperfasting right there. The rabbi wasn’t buying it. She wondered if the clientele at the resort wasn’t a bit old for his taste, anyways. There’s an old libel that the Jews run Hollywood. True or not, it’s often the case that synagogue feels like a feature film. “Who shall live and who shall die,” the rabbi intones on Yom Kippur, “who by fire and who by water.” The Jewish God’s all about lightning-bolt theatrics, and while Leah’s driving certainly forced us to reckon with mortality, so did getting naked with a bunch of pensioners. Staring at shriveled testicles is one way of staring death in the face. Nudity testifies to gravity’s slow, sad conquests. It’s an Enlightenment project, really — things come to light with nudism. Truth triumphs. It was a cold day in upstate Connecticut, and there was a temptation to cover up with a towel on the pretext of the chill. At some point, we cut that bullshit: We knew the towel was an excuse to not expose ourselves. In stripping, we got honest with ourselves. That’s what Yom Kippur’s all about. If you’re so inclined, you could say we stood naked before God that Saturday. Hopefully God recognized our newly tanned bottoms. Contact JENNIFER GERSTEN, YUVAL BEN-DAVID and LEAH MOTZKIN at jennifer.gersten@yale.edu, yuval. bendavid@yale.edu and leah.motzkin@ yale.edu .

// KAREN TIAN

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 21

UP WORKSHOP: TECH BOOT CAMPFALL SESSION Stiles-Morse Crescent Theater // 11 a.m.

Freshman techies, get schooled.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sex under the Calder mobile on Beinecke Plaza Get inspired, send her spinning.

S AT U R D AY SEPTEMBER 21

CLASSICAL INDIAN DANCE

Whitney Humanities Center // 6 p.m. Featuring Madhavi Mudgal and her troupe.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Sex at the top of Harkness

Ring the bell when you reach the climax.