This WEEKEND by Yale Daily News

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013

Contributing writers, from Yale hockey players to a Quinnipiac rival, share their perspectives on the game of the year. PAGE 3

GRIEF

GUNS

GARMENTS

LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

BYE BYE, CONNECTICUT

CLINGIN’ TO SPRING

Eamon Roman reflects on the personal costs of loss and on how he came to terms with death’s inevitability.

The state’s new gun legislation has gun manufacturers up in arms — and ready to take factories and jobs elsewhere.

’Tis the season for shades and lighter fabrics. Five campus fashionistas share their top spring-ready looks.

// DAVID YU

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

CAI

WEEKEND VIEWS

A COLLABORATIVE SPIRIT // BY AMELIA CAI

I BELIEVE THAT TRULY CIVICMINDED DIALOGUE OCCURS NOT WITH PEOPLE WHO THINK THE SAME WAYS THAT YOU DO, BUT WITH PEOPLE WHO THINK IN DIFFERNT WAYS THAN YOU DO.

PONTES

On my way to the exhibit, I heard a very worried man expressing his concern about one storefront that he was certain

contained toxic asbestos. This man then waited for about 20 minutes to speak to the event’s organizers. One visitor who had gone into the exhibit before I arrived on the street said to me, “It seems moldy.” After I saw the man talking to the appropriate people in charge of the event, I went home. The last words I heard from this man were, “I’m so nervous about this, I’m literally shaking.” I do not know this man, and I do not know if his claims were true. But I do get the sense that his intentions were good. However, his cautioning for the safety of XS members and their visitors was not properly acknowledged in XS’s follow-up note on Facebook explaining Friday’s events and why police shut their exhibition down. This Facebook note, authored by XS founder Saga Blane, made light of the potential danger of this situation and delegitimized this kind man’s actions. To introduce what had happened, the note says, “A member of the Yale community arrived on site and began to complain about potential hazards in the space.” The use of “complain” implies that this man’s intentions were baseless and disruptive. “Potential hazard” does not even begin to cover the potential danger that this man, as a concerned passerby, began to express. This note also unnecessarily questioned this man’s motivations and cast him as an outsider to the art event, saying, “we don’t know how or why he came to the show,” and “our evening … caught unintended attention.” Furthermore, I am extremely

surprised by the lack of acknowledgement or apology for possibly endangering the health of their visitors. Not once was “asbestos” mentioned in XS’s note. Instead, their note only vaguely refers to “potential hazards”. The note, which focuses on who the man was and questions his motivations, does not ask the real question — did whoever owns the storefronts wrongfully endanger XS Collaborative members and their visitors by neglecting basic safety protocol? It is indeed terrible that XS’s yearlong effort got shut down with one phone call. But now XS has the responsibility to figure out if someone or some company endangered the lives of students by not appropriately testing the space. This kind of urgent digging requires a leap of faith, an empathetic response to this stranger who clearly had no malicious intent. This leap of faith is something that XS promotes and seems to achieve well among themselves as practitioners. A public and respectful acknowledgement of this man would have strengthened my opinion of XS and Friday’s opening exhibition. I believe that truly civic-minded dialogue occurs not with people who think the same ways that you do, but with people who think in different ways than you do. That is the real challenge, and one that artistic collectives like XS are uniquely disposed to achieve. Contact AMELIA CAI at amelia.cai@yale.edu .

A Poem from the Incarcerated // BY ALDA PONTES

On Saturday mornings, I park a car outside the Cheshire County Correctional Facility, and then walk through a metal detector carrying nothing but a book, perhaps a Bible, some pencils and my Yale ID. Since my freshman year I have been involved with the Yale Prison Initiative, mentoring postGED incarcerated youth in an effort to smooth their reintegration process upon release. The prison schooling system is geared towards GED completion, and established postGED programs are targeted at inmates with imminent release dates, marginalizing those serving longer sentences. With this in mind, I devised a four-person group that has been meeting in the prison for over a year now — myself, and three inmates, ages between 17 and 20. They have all been convicted of multiple charges ranging from armed robberies, drug possession and seconddegree murder. One of the young inmates is a Hispanic from New Brighton, Lionel (whose name has been changed for anonymity). Lionel has the liveliest presence for someone in his situation: Every Saturday, he greets me with a warm chuckle and sincere handshake. He hangs on every word of our conversations, though at times jittering and shaking his head, explaining to me that “Ma’am, we are sheltered from the way you think.” Trying to better understand him, I asked him to write a piece that was representative of his past. The next week, Lionel showed up with his unfailing smile and this poem, asking me when he would become a published author. Well, here it is, Lionel.

F R I D AY APRIL 19

*** The Mighty Dollar By Lionel Cold blood spills for the warmth of a green piece of paper. Faces many of us never take time to admire are printed on them. The things these national heroes have done — it’s earned them this currency spotlight, but their deeds and efforts can’t compare to the sacrifice, the pain the torture some endure to have a pocket filled with their portraits. Most of us are careless: their faces go unnoticed and instead get crumpled into the pockets, pockets of individuals who crave this power, crave the liberty, freedom and honor of these portraited men. And most of us, holders of these images, have no freedom. We are enslaved by the vice, The corrupted need for one more dollar bill A twisted obsession with the collections of images, Intrinsically valueless but socially invaluable. What an overwhelming power does this piece of paper have — to pull the world together into buildings and stores and capitalism, or crush it into pieces — behind prison bars. That’s the strength of the mighty dollar. Only god is stronger. Contact ALDA PONTES at alda.pontes@yale.edu .

AMERICAN LITERATURE IN THE WORLD CONFERENCE

Linsly-Chittenden Hall // 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. Melville and Wharton and Twain, oh my!

RONAN

This past Friday, I went to view XS Collaborative’s opening exhibition, a series of three converted New Haven storefronts on College Street. XS Collaborative is a mixture of graduate students drawn from the Schools of Art, Music, Architecture, Forestry among others. According to their mission statement on their Facebook page, XS views itself as an “interdisciplinary collaborative student group that seeks to open up siloed knowledge and production at Yale.” After seeing how XS publicly engaged with Friday’s events on their Facebook page, I would urge XS to extend their collaborative spirit to everyone in the greater New Haven community.

// ALEXANDRA MORRISON

So It Went // BY EAMON RONAN

I. By the time I boarded the bus, a year ago yesterday, I was already crying. I knew a freshman boy in Davenport, in my own year and residential college, had committed suicide, but I did not yet know who it was. As we slowly neared campus, I pleaded and bargained with some higher power, begging that the student in question not be one of my nine suitemates. It wasn’t. It was Zach, our gregarious, curly-haired next-door neighbor whom we had dubbed an honorary member of our suite, the 11th member of Welch Hall’s 10-pack. I walked back through campus on one of those idyllic spring days when the weather, more than anything else, mocks you. Shell-shocked and spilling tears, I drifted past spring’s many co-conspirators — the Frisbee-playing, sunbathing Yale students, painfully unaware of what had happened, and everything was deteriorating as they lazed on the grass. In the following weeks, I came to view each individual student that I walked past as a tiny sliver of my many freshman-year selves: too caught up playing games to anticipate the imminent sorrow, blissfully ignorant of the fucked-up conclusion that lurked around the corner. II. Like a pebble dropped in water, death triggers a proverbial ripple effect on the lives of those who were connected to the deceased. In the days after Zach’s death, I observed the outpouring of emotional support from the Yale community and from Zach’s friends and family all over the U.S. In life, he had influenced a wide variety of individuals. In dying, he had done the same. After the initial period of shock, I anticipated my own ripple from Zach’s death, a small change in my life that would forever remind me of him and the relatively short time that we spent together. But the shock never fully subsided, and my own tiny ripple revealed itself as an inundating tidal wave, an overwhelming emotional response that, I believe, has altered the entire trajec-

tory of my life. I cried for Zach. I cried for his friends from home. I cried for his relatives, his teary-eyed parents who barely mustered the strength to utter a few cautionary words at the candlelight vigil. But, most of all, I cried for myself. And weeks later, months later, when it seemed that my friends had moved on, I was still crying.

LIKE A PEBBLE DROPPED IN WATER, DEATH TRIGGERS A PROVERBIAL RIPPLE EFFECT ON THE LIVES OF THOSE WHO WERE CONNECTED TO THE DECEASED. III. As I grappled with Zach’s death, I imagined a point in the future when I would undergo an all-encompassing, Joycean epiphany in which I would accept and understand Zach’s death, and quite possibly, in the process, explain human life and death in their entireties. In my state, the potential emotional detachment available to the fatalists, to those who surrendered to the inevitability of life, appealed to me. Most likely, I figured I would embrace the philosophy that Billy Pilgrim adopts from the Tralfamadorians in “Slaughterhouse-Five”: “When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in a bad condition in that particular moment, but the same person is fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “so it goes.” In a case of life imitating art, I, like Billy Pilgrim, would become unstuck

in time, or at least would understand life as more than a linear progression with a finite beginning and end. With this understanding, I would free myself from the intense tangles of human emotion, from the burden of my own self-absorption. This form of existential fatalism to which I would subscribe would not only ensure that I would never feel the way I once did, but would also, with its accompanying ability to transcend time, heal the emotional suffering of my past. I would, most likely, even tattoo “so it goes,” my new personal credo, somewhere on my body, perhaps, logically, over my beating heart. That way, when my time came, whoever was left of my family and friends, when observing my lifeless corpse, would read the words aloud, off my still body, over and over again, until they too believed them to be true. IV. A year has passed — an eventfilled, emotion-laden, life-altering year — and I still do not find solace in repeating “so it goes” to myself, no matter how often I say it in my mind. During a particularly low point, I passed a week in a psych ward, struggling with my own questions of life and death. Before I left, a doctor asked me to explain what bound me to this earth. I struggled to answer the question at the time, but I think I might be closer to answering it now. There is no escaping what happened, no literal or metaphorical alternative reality into which I may slip to avoid the truth: Zach lived, and Zach died. I must accept that. But I do not have to shrug at death; I do not need to — nor do I have the ability to — render myself unfeeling. Because disconnecting and succumbing to numbness is not the right answer to feeling too much for too long. That’s what links me to those around me, what roots me to the earth, what keeps me stuck in time. For me, that’s how it really goes. Contact EAMON RONAN at eamon.ronan@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Gun-control legislation

It’s time. Fuck you, 45 senators.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

HOW THE GAME WAS WON

// BRIANNE BOWEN

ast Saturday, for the first time in Yale hockey history, the Bulldogs defeated Quinnipiac 4–0 to win the NCAA Division I men’s hockey championship. But you already knew that. This week, WEEKEND brings you what you don’t already know. What were the players thinking moments after the final buzzer rang? If it took Yale this long to win, then what were we doing for the past 120 years? Three hockey players offer the details on what this momentous victory means; a Yale history professor gives us a crash course in Yale hockey history; a devoted hockey fan tells us about the Pittsburgh viewing experience; and for the first time in the News’ history, a Quinnipiac student offers his take on the Yale-Quinnipiac rivalry. Take a moment and read their words — because this is what it feels like to go to a school that’s good at sports.

***

#WINNING BY YALE MEN’S HOCKEY TEAM // BY NICHOLAS MARICIC ’13 Goalie It took years of clawing, scratching, pushing and pulling to get to the door. With each tournament appearance, we knocked a little louder: a soft rasp in ’09, a respectable thud in ’10 and an almost impossible-to-ignore bang in ’11. What happened in ’13 was different, more akin to quietly walking up, pulling that oh-soheavy door of national acceptance off its hinges and casually tossing it aside. It is now undeniable — Yale has arrived. The club of Division I hockey national champions is an exclusive one, with Yale now being only its 19th member. For the Yale hockey program and its fans, this is a long-awaited moment to savor. For us players, the experience has been surreal, and perhaps a little overwhelming. Skating around the ice after the final buzzer, it was hard not to think of the people who made this all possible. For Yale, our families, our coaches both past and present, friends, teachers, classmates and suitemates, we couldn’t have done it without you. More than anything else, this experience has made us cognizant of just how fortunate we are. For all of us, this championship is the culmina-

F R I D AY APRIL 19

tion of a journey 10, 11 or 12 years in the making. Hockey isn’t a sport you can casually pick up in high school — it’s a lifestyle that consumes you before your age reaches double digits. To feed the obsession, you need enablers. This championship was for our parents, who selflessly gave up vacations, birthdays and anniversaries without a complaint just to make sure we got to pee-wee practice at those ungodly hours. It was for the coaches of past and present, who saw our potential as both players and people and gave up thousands upon thousands of hours to make sure we didn’t squander it. It is for the teachers, whose flexibility and understanding make it possible for us to succeed both academically and athletically; you don’t know how much that paper extension after a long road trip means to us. It’s for the friends and suitemates who support us inside and outside of Ingalls. We might feign a stoicism when we are on the ice, but rest assured we see you up there breaking it down in the student section, and we love it. Your support outside of the rink is just as important; talking to us about everything except the rough game last night provides an outlet for us that, though we might not verbalize it, we appreciate. Finally, Yale, after an incredible four years, this is for you. A certain coach, smiling what I can honestly say might have been the first grin I’ve seen in four years, said it best after a certain big game on Saturday: “You’ve already given us more than it would ever be possible to give back to you”. Contact NICHOLAS MARICIC at nicholas.maricic@yale.edu .

// BY CHARLES ORZETTI ’16 Left-winger First and foremost, I feel blessed to have had the opportunity to play with my team this year and accomplish what we did. Most college hockey players go through four years without making the tournament, and my class was fortunate enough to win the whole thing in our first year. It is surreal, and we’re still in celebration mode; I suspect once everything settles down, it will sink in. I remember skating around after the win in disbelief. Every team says winning the championship is its goal, but we had actually done it. I was struggling to come up with words

for an interview to describe the feeling, and I still am. Being able to celebrate with my mom, dad, brother and sister after the game made winning even more special. I will never forget that night. Playing for this University and having the entire school behind us was an unbelievable feeling. I’m proud of the boys, coaches, staff and what we were able to accomplish. Hockey is the ultimate team sport, and we have a special group of guys who play for each other. The senior leadership was unbelievable, and I truly believe that Andrew Miller ’13, Josh Balch ’13, Antoine Laganiere ’13, Colin Dueck ’13, Jeff Malcolm ’13 and Nick Maricic ’13 creating winning expectations was the biggest factor in our success. When a reporter asked about the team after our win, I told him it was the mentally toughest group with which I’ve ever played. That’s a tribute to the seniors, and I think it’s the main reason we were able to handle a lot of adversity during the season and in the tournament. I’m glad they are graduating as champions — I cannot think of a better way to send off such a great group. As for the future of Yale hockey, I’m already excited for next season. The bar has been set regarding expectations, and after experiencing this ride, I know everyone will want it again even more. Since college hockey crowned its first winner in 1948, there have been eight repeat national champions. Next year, we’d love nothing more than to be the ninth. Contact CHARLES ORZETTI at charles.orzetti@yale.edu .

// BY ROBERT O’GARA ’16 Defense I still do not think what we accomplished last weekend has completely sank in. I think Nick Maricic ’13 put it best in his speech during the celebration at the rink, when he said it feels like a dream still, and he doesn’t want to wake up and have it end. As a kid you dream about winning championships like this one, and to actually accomplish that goal and win that championship feels nothing short of incredible. To win that game with this group of guys, incredible coaching staff and my parents in the stands is something I will remember for the rest of my life and for which I could never

PERFORMING FEMINISM WLH 117 // 4:30 p.m.

Come see Amy Klein (writer, musician, feminist activist) spit some truth.

describe my true gratitude. I feel beyond lucky and honored to have played with each and every one of those guys out on that ice Saturday night. Everyone stuck to the plan, and with the leadership of our seniors, who are already about to be doing big things in hockey in different sweaters, we were able to persevere. This is quite obviously the greatest victory of my hockey career, and I have my teammates and coaches to thank for that. It really is difficult to describe my emotions, but to say I am still on cloud nine would be an understatement.

EVERY TEAM SAYS WINNING THE CHAMPIONSHIP IS THEIR GOAL, BUT WE HAD ACTUALLY DONE IT. CHARLES ORZETTI ’16

In terms of what this win means for the future of Yale hockey, I hope that it makes everyone here even hungrier to win it all again. That feeling was one like no other, and to say “I want it again” would be severely underexaggerating my desire to have our hockey team back on top once again: I am already looking forward to next season to hopefully do it all again, and that’s what our focus will be. We now have a large group of guys who know what it takes to win at that stage, and I think that alone will really help our program in the coming years. I am so excited at where we can go in my next three years here at Yale, and once again want to express my appreciation for going through this unbelievable experience as a freshman. A quick shoutout again to our awesome senior class who really deserved to go out this way — a great group of guys. Also Gus Young ’14, my defense partner, will appreciate a shoutout if he reads this — I can’t wait to play with him again next year. And finally the freshman class — the best class dynamic in the NCAA. Thanks. Contact ROBERT O’GARA at robert.ogara@yale.edu . ***

A LOOK BACK INTO YALE’S HOCKEY HISTORY BY JAY GITLIN ’71 MUS ’74 GRD ’02 First — best sign ever: Pux et Veritas. Second — congratulations to head coach Keith Allain ’80 and the NATIONAL CHAMPIONS: Yale men’s hockey team. I like the sound of that. Thanks guys. We’re very proud of you. And nod to Max de La Bruyère ’13, Alberta is in the house. All of this may be a surprise to some, but it shouldn’t be. The Yale men’s ice hockey team is the oldest existing intercollegiate ice hockey program in the United States, dating back to 1893. The team had its ups and downs, and even won the Hobey Baker Award in the 1934– ’35 season, but the modern era began in 1938 when the University hired former New York Rangers player Murray Murdoch to be the team’s head coach. Murdoch, born in Ontario and raised in Alberta, played over a decade for the Rangers. He coached the Yale team until 1965, received the Lester Patrick Trophy for his contributions to U.S. hockey in 1974 and died at the age of 96 in 2001. Murdoch, known as the “Iron Man” for never having missed a game in 11 seasons with the Rangers, came to Yale at the suggestion of John Reed Kilpatrick 1911, an All-American football player in 1909 and 1910. Kilpatrick became the president of Madison Square Garden and the New York Rangers in 1933. How’s that for “life after Yale”? I knew Kilpatrick’s daughter, Frannie Field, a wonderful person who had the best stories ever, having literally grown up in Madison Square Garden. She would tell us about meeting Will Rogers, Walter Chrysler, rodeo stars and hockey players. As for me, I developed a fascination for hockey as a young kid in the late 1950s. I couldn’t stand up on skates, but I loved the game. Channel-surfing for something to watch — well, it wasn’t exactly channel-surfing then since these were the pre-cable and preremote days and you had to get up and turn the dial on the set — I found such marvels as the New York Tuck Tapers of the National Industrial Basketball League and then, hockey: the Rangers. (I patiently explained hockey to my dad — blue lines, cross-checking, etc. He loved all sports and had been a boxer, a runner and a big

baseball fan.) The Rangers didn’t have a great team. The Montreal Canadiens with Maurice “Rocket” Richard and his younger brother Henri, the “Pocket Rocket,” and later, the incomparable Guy Lafleur, always seemed to dominate the NHL. But the Rangers had their great players, Camille “the Eel” Henry and Andy Bathgate. My favorites were Rod Gilbert and Jean Ratelle. I got to meet Gilbert when I played the piano at the New Haven Coliseum at a reception for the New Haven Nighthawks, the Rangers’ AHL affiliate, back in the 1970s. So I was already a hockey fan when I arrived at Yale in the late ’60s and discovered that hockey was a big deal in the Ivies and in prep schools all over New England. At Yale, however, hockey also became my window into Canada in the form of Duane D. Drager ’71 — “Spike.” Spike was from Sudbury, Ontario, and lived across the hall my sophomore year in Calhoun. We cheered him on at Ingalls Rink, but perhaps of more lasting importance for me, it was Spike that introduced us to his “home and native land,” Canada. While other rooms sat around listening to the Stones and the Beatles, we listened over and over again to the great songs of Canadian singersongwriter Gordon Lightfoot. You should check him out. Apparently, Robbie Robertson of The Band (also Canadian) and Bob Dylan were huge Gordon Lightfoot fans. Lightfoot’s biggest hits were “If You Could Read My Mind” (beautiful song) and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” (Both hit the top 10 in the U.S.) My own favorites are “She Was Something Very Special To Me” and “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.” Thanks Spike — still love these songs. Well, many years later, I wound up as a member of the Canadian Studies Committee at Yale, and now I’ve taught Canadian history here for 15 years. Especially in the first years I taught the course, I would always have a few hockey players in class, and I have to share a story about one of them: Nick Deschenes ’03. Nick, a native of Alberta, took my class and wrote an excellent final paper. I was also pleased that he had used this occasion to reconnect with relatives in Québec and brush up on his French. He wrote his history SEE HOCKEY PAGE B8

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Momofuku Milk Bar

Going to the city? Stop by and get the banana vanilla soft serve, yum!

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND ARTS

AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER // BY ANYA GRENIER The dancers of Rhythmic Blue may not always smile, but they always look like they’re having so much fun onstage that it takes some time for it to sink in just how difficult it must be to do what they do. These dancers move more than seems possible in the course of five seconds of music. They look as though their bodies are on the verge of flying out of control at any moment, all while keeping an extraordinary level of precision in every finger and every muscle. Rhythmic Blue’s spring performance, “A Black Tie Affair,” is a streamlined, energetic experience, whether it’s your first RB show or your tenth (I’m part of the former camp). Despite its name, the show had a casual, friendly vibe: Early on, members coached the audience not to be afraid to cheer during the dances. Later on, the dancers would invite audience volunteers on stage for a

brief tutorial. But all of this underlies the dancers’ seriousness and professionalism when it comes to moving. The group pieces were crisply choreographed and almost never fell out of sync. “A Black Tie Affair” never lagged, with the dances following in quick succession, and each one ends before the novelty wea off. Many of the numbers are mash-ups of popular songs, so that the mood might switch multiple times even before the piece is over. The show’s fast pace lets the audience see just how many dancers and different kinds of talent make up the group, with a beautifully choreographed modern piece immediately transitioning into a spectacular break dancing solo by Andrew Kang ’13. While these transitions can occasionally feel jarring, having the intensity of most of the hip-hop pieces broken up by a few slower ones gives the dancers the opportunity to show

a softer side. Pretty soon the audience no longer needed any prompting to applaud. The crowd burst into genuine, spontaneous cheers when a trio of dancers did a series of beautifully timed spins at the culmination of one of the show’s more balletic inspired numbers, “Just Another Man.” The show’s second half was overall darker and less flirtatious than the first. This shift in mood was especially striking coming out of the fun and goofy “Mean Girls” themed mash-up that came right before intermission — complete with brief sound bites from the film acted out by the dancers (“She doesn’t even go here!”). The title theme also came through more clearly in the latter half, as the dancers came out in formal wear to dance to Kanye West’s “Runaway,” and “Power.” The lighting became more striking, the choreography more dramatic, with clearer and more emo-

tionally gripping narratives. You felt more like the dances were trying to show you something beyond sheer technical skill. One piece, “Discovery, Passion, Wonder,” had a creepy, machine-like feel complemented by dissonant mechanical music. While usually seen as a group, individual dancers still stood out. Jennifer Lunceford ’15 was particularly captivating to watch, throwing her entire self into each movement, with a range of control over her expression as well as body. RB showed off some new talent as well, with Kellyanna Polk ’16, a bright and energetic presence at the forefront of several numbers. The boys were technically skilled but lacked some of the facial expressiveness of their female counterparts, which was only noticeable when they danced alone. While Rhythmic Blue remains a predominantly undergraduate group, some of the most riveting danc-

// SAMANTHA GARDNER

RB shows us how to pop, lock and drop it.

ers came from outside Yale College, including Ben Baker LAW ’14, and Ty Holbrook, Whitney Lucky and Jasmine Chavis, all from Bridgeport, Conn. Lucky and Chavis in particular had such a commanding presence that it was difficult to watch anyone else while they were on stage, leaping and moving with ease, strength and flexibility. “A Black Tie Affair” has two more shows at the Off Broadway Theater this Friday at 6:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. Contact ANYA GRENIER at anna.grenier@yale.edu .

A Different Kind of Dance Show // BY LEAH MOTZKIN It is nearly unthinkable to walk down York Street on a Wednesday night without getting subsumed into the throbbing mass outside Toad’s Place. This week though, I accomplished the impossible: I kept my head down, kept my vision straight and kept my editor’s threats in mind while passing the inebriated boy in my FroCo group who was leaving with my TA. I rounded the corner towards Storse/Miles and entered the OffBroadway Theater for a performance of A Different Drum’s “A Different Circus.” The show was worth missing Woad’s for. The performance, composed of 19 dances, is completely choreographed by A Different Drum’s members — 20 undergrad and gradu-

F R I D AY APRIL 19

ate school students. The pieces themselves do not abide by a particular theme, but rather are the creation of individuals in the group who wanted to showcase a particular talent or vision. The “circus” theme comes in through comic interludes. (One of these segments spoofed the idea of tight rope walking and included a male dancer wearing ballet point shoes.) The show’s set is very aesthetically interesting. A backlit white sheet hangs across the stage. The colors projected on the screen are based on the mood of the piece. Each performance becomes a vignette that projects either a different tone or story. Three panels of black hang on either side of the large dance space, allowing dancers to come out at specific times

during different numbers. The disparate nature of each piece aims to highlight the diversity within the group, according to dancer Christine Shaw ’14. I, however, found the quick changes of genre to be a little bit jarring at times. The flow between pieces seemed a bit haphazard. The change from a classical dance number to a country piece to a burlesque performance was far from seamless. While some members of the company were obviously well trained and able to execute the dances well, the overall mixture of skill levels added a sense of amateurish fun to the show. Derek DiMartini ’13, A Different Drum’s artistic director, and Rachel Ouellette ’13, the troupe’s president, were both extraordinary in the show.

Ouellette’s solo piece was particularly interesting interpretation of Imogen Heap’s “Wait It Out.” While there were parts of the show that seemed unnatural and overly in sync with the music, it is evident that a lot of time went into its creation. Each dancer, regardless of his or her training, committed to the performance, and their movements came across as earnest and entertaining. Each vignette was fully formed, with a different set of costumes — some more exaggerated than the others over the top. One segment stood out as the most riveting: Olivia Mala’s GRD ’13 ribbon dance brought back my childhood Lizzie McGuire dreams in full force. One of the most elegant dance

“FICRE GHEBREYESUS: POLYCHROMASIA, AN EVENING OF MUSIC AND POETRY” Artspace // 5 p.m.

What a guest list, what a collaboration, what a name!

numbers in itself, the swirling ribbon was spectacular and quite breathtaking. While it was only one of the circus interludes, I wished it had gone on for longer. If for nothing else, the show is worth seeing for this piece alone. If you want to experience the spectacular spectacle yourself, the show runs through this Saturday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Contact LEAH MOTZKIN at leah.motzkin@yale.edu .

// MARIA ZEPEDA

A Different Drum marches to their own beat.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Hoodie Allen

Worked at Google, now a rapper. “He’s pretty underground,” says a freshman.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND INDUSTRY

BITING THE BULLET — AND LEAVING CONNECTICUT // BY NICOLE NAREA

Surrounded by a tobacco store and a deserted Thai restaurant in a strip mall off I-95, a white-haired man in a baseball cap and plaid flannel shirt took a midday smoke on the stoop of Connecticut Firearms and Tactical LLC. The only marking on the storefront was a large sign reading “GUNS.” Below the awning, someone at the Orange, Conn.,based retailer had pasted advertisements for National Rifle Association pistol courses and a bumper sticker with another message: “God bless our troops … especially our snipers.” The date was April 19. 15 days earlier, Connecticut Governor Dannel P. Malloy had signed historic, tough new gun legislation into law. A customer entered the shop, surveying the walls lined with guns, ammunition and pistol cases. “Do you have a round of .40?” the customer asked. CFT was the only retailer in the state he had called that had that particular kind of ammunition in stock. “Get it while you can, before the prices go up,” the attendant replied ominously. With state legislators having cracked down on gun sales in all iterations, the going rate for ammunition might just be as volatile as prices at the gas pump. CFT used to stock AR-15s and AK-47s — the kind of assault rifles demonized in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings. But the retailer had to completely reevaluate its merchandise and change its business model after the reform package extended the state’s assault weapons ban, limited the size of magazines and instigated universal background checks. The state’s House voted 105-44 in favor, with the approval of Malloy. Both gun retailers and gun manufacturers alike have been hit hard by the decision — and are in the process of reacting to it. Last week, Bristol’s PTR industries, which employs a staff of 50, announced that it will consider invitations to relocate to other states. In an April 9 press release, PTR indicated that it will choose a new location within the next six weeks and aim to complete its relocation out of Connecticut by the end of the year. “We feel that

our industry as a whole will continue to be threatened so long as it remains in a state where its elected leaders have no regard for the rights of those who produce and manufacture its wealth,” the PTR release read. “We encourage those in our industry to abandon this state as its leaders have abandoned the proud heritage that forged our freedom.” PTR is one — and the smallest — of four Connecticut gun manufacturers; the others include Stag Arms in New Britain, O.F. Mossberg & Sons, Inc. in North Haven and Colt Manufacturing Company LLC in West Hartford. Together, they employ over 1000 Connecticut residents. As PTR urges both gun manufacturers and retailers to leave the state, showing politicians what the company describes as the “true consequences of their hasty and uninformed actions,” the future looks bleak for Connecticut residents dependent on the gun industry’s role in the state economy. Lawmakers, then, are fighting not just the gun-rights backlash born of the recent legislation but also accusations that they have created a hostile working environment for the Nutmeg State’s gun industry, one gun-related businesses may just do well to abandon. “They don’t know what they can sell legally to whom, or when, or how,” said Josh Fiorini, the CEO of PTR. “Their world just got turned upside down.”

‘TALK TO A MANUFACTURER AT LEAST ONCE’ The gun industry has long regarded Connecticut as its home. In the early 1800s, Connecticut manufacturers produced the first affordable high quality firearms, earning

the state designation as “the arsenal of democracy.” Hartford-born Samuel Colt, Colt Manufacturing’s namesake, invented the revolver design in 1836 and made his company the first in the world to produce firearms with interchangeable parts. But everything changed after Newtown. Connecticut Senators Richard Blumenthal LAW ’73 and Chris Murphy have been lobbying the Senate since December to pass their background checks amendment, which failed just this past Wednesday. Local efforts for gun control were more successful: Malloy scrambled to create a bipartisan task force on gun violence prevention in the Connecticut senate and then pass the state’s sweeping 139-page package of new laws. Gun manufacturers claim the Malloybacked legislative process did not incorporate their input. Fiorini said that he met with all of the legislative leaders responsible for the bill — and added that none of them had any technical expertise with regard to guns. “There was a 100 percent lack of consultation,” Fiorini said. “If you’re writing healthcare legislation, might want to talk to a doctor at least once.” Mike Bazinet, the spokesperson for the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the trade association for the firearms and ammunition industry, confirmed that several industry executives went to Connecticut’s General Assembly with every intention of participating fully in the debate over reform. But he added that he took issue with the fact that the final legislation passed never received a public hearing. Both Fiorini and Bazinet claimed that as the package was sped through the Connecticut legislature, lawmakers failed to even read it in full. Instead, Fiorini suggested, they based their opinion on a 16-page pamphlet that was “floating around.” Things look different to those who backed the stricter laws. Rob Pinciaro, the spokesperson for advocacy group Connecti-

cut Against Gun Violence, called the idea that gun industry figures were left out of the legislative process “patently untrue.” He added that manufacturers were specifically invited to pubic informational hearings. “I don’t know how many hearings they want,” Pinciaro said. Such verbal sparring has even surfaced in the national media, further straining relations between the two groups. In an April 7 interview with CNN anchor Candy Crowley, Malloy launched an attack on the gun industry for which multiple manufacturers are demanding an apology. “What this is about is the ability of the gun industry to sell as many guns to as many people as possible, even if they’re deranged, even if they’re mentally ill, even if they have a criminal record,” Malloy said on-air. “They don’t care.” Manufacturers have accused Malloy of targeting them and of muddying their brand name. Bazinet dubbed the governor’s comments “inaccurate, intemperate and unhelpful to having a civil dialogue” and Fiorini, arguing that the public would not tolerate such antagonistic treatment of any other group, said they were “blatantly offensive.” Gun industry representatives believe they have played their part. Bazinet said that the governor should know that all sales handled by federally licensed retailers at stores and gun shows go through the National Instant Criminal Background Check system (NICS), which he sees as the creation of the firearms industry. “No one in the industry wants any firearm to go to a prohibited person,” Bazinet added. “To say otherwise is an insult to everyone who works in our industry.”

NO LONGER THE ‘ARSENAL OF DEMOCRACY’ Facing hostility in the legislature, gun industry leaders are poised to strike back by moving their facilities — and the jobs they provide — away from Connecticut. PTR is the first to make the public leap towards relocation, but it is likely that the company will start a trend among Connecticut gun manufacturers. The exodus of manufacturers could pose a potent threat to the state economy. Connecticut’s unemployment rate of 8 percent is higher than the national rate of 7.6 percent and Malloy’s budget has been criticized as unrealistic, given the state’s $1.2 billion

deficit. Bazinet pointed out that the firearms industry has an economic impact in the state of more than $1.7 billion. He added that manufacturers have clearly stated, both in testimony before the legislature and in the media, that they oppose the state’s new law for its potential effect on their companies’ brand equity and sales. “Whether more manufacturers ultimately decide to move will be their individual decisions based on their due diligence of the costs and impacts involved, but such decisions are under very serious consideration,” Bazinet said. Even Pinciaro conceded a concern for gun-related jobs, arguing that it is not in the best interest of the state for gun manufacturers to relocate. “They can sell just as well from this state as any other,” Pinciaro added. The stakes are higher for the governor. Andrew Doba, his press aide, emphasized that Malloy thinks about jobs and economic development “24 hours a day” but said protecting Connecticut’s public safety remains his top priority. The bill signed into law will improve security and make Connecticut’s communities and families safer, Doba added. He said Malloy hoped that the gun industry would join the state in that effort. But while public safety improvements may trump the economic activity provided by gun manufacturers from a Connecticut perspective, politicians in other states welcome any economic boost. Texas Governor Rick Perry practically rolled out the red carpet for Connecticut gun manufacturers with a post on Twitter last Friday. “Hey, PTR. Texas is still wide open for business!! Come on down!” he chirped. Manufacturers believe that states in the Southeast and Southwest boast cultures that would welcome their presence as an industry. Some 20 states have so far reached out to Connecticut-based gun manufacturers with invitations to move and offers of economic assistance. But Texas, Fiorini said, is at the top of PTR’s list, thanks to its cultural support for gun ownership and individual rights. “[Texas] is a business-friendly state government,” Fiorini said, identifying it as a “long-term safe haven” for gun manufacturers. Such a haven stands in contrast to other states with liberal leanings. Were PTR to move to a state like Massachusetts, Fiorini said, its fate would remain uncertain. In Texas, it is assured. Contact NICOLE NAREA at nicole.narea@yale.edu .

// MICHAEL MCHUGH

F R I D AY APRIL 19

DVORAK “STABAT MATER”

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Woolsey Hall // 8 p.m.

Come get happy. Listen to the Yale Glee Club!

Eating slowly

Good for your brain and your tummy.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND MUSEUM

THE STORY OF YOU

Mayan Calendar

// BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID

his past Monday, the Peabody Museum of Natural History held ID Day, inviting visitors to bring in their own objects and learn about their histories. Ever wanted to carbon date objects from your own past and discover just how convoluted their journeys have been? WEEKEND writers did just that.

I’d forgotten all about this tacky Mayan calendar I got in Cancun, the way most of us have probably forgotten the apocalypse it falsely predicted for us only months ago. But tragedies have a tendency to remind us of other tragedies — synapses going off like bombs — so it’s only natural that the Monday attacks at the Boston Marathon got us all talking about 9/11. That was the morning I was supposed to present the calendar to my second-grade class, along with other objects that I considered “representations of me.” It was only a meaningless memento from a family trip, but it was azure and circular and statuesque, and it made me look exotic next to the seashells I’d also brought along. Only three kids stayed in school long enough to see my presentation. The teacher cried her eyes out

throughout. I thought back to that calendar on Monday. I remembered how a friend teased me when I said the calendar was unbreakable. “Prove it,” he said. “Throw it on the ground.” I flinched. In retrospect, it’s darkly ironic that he dared me to do that the day the towers fell. But today what seems even more ironic is that the object was a circular calendar. We thought we’d closed the door on an era. Bin Laden’s dead. Most young kids probably know him best as code word “Geronimo,” from “Zero Dark Thirty.” Bush the Younger has all but sunk into oblivion and ROTC’s back on campus, which is

probably the best litmus test we have for the fact that we’re headed out of two wars in the Middle East. I’ve even taken liquids in my carry-on. But something’s back. The calendar’s circular, and it won’t break. And on days, we may find little comfort, but it’s still valuable to figure out what’s important. The calendar isn’t. For God’s sake, I bought it in a hotel gift shop. Contact YUVAL BEN-DAVID at yuval.ben-david@yale. edu .

Pointe Shoes

Garlic

// BY ALEKSANDRA GJORGIEVSKA

// BY ANYA GRENIER There is a cluster of raw garlic cloves on my desk which has not moved for most of the semester. (FYI: There is nothing weird going on with this garlic. It does not even smell like garlic unless you get super close with your nose.) Nobody has commented about it so far. This might be because garlic is basically kind of pale colored and unobtrusive, or because I generally give off the impression of practicing Wicca and/or slaying vampires in my spare time (vibes I can only aspire to). The reason there is a bundle of garlic colonizing my desk is that if Anya, age 5, sneezed, or coughed or went outside with wet hair (which makes you sick if your people are from Russia?), the first line of defense was always the same. Raw garlic, sliced and put on bread with butter (which are apparently to raw garlic as salt

and lime are to tequila). With any luck, my nose was already so stuffed up I couldn’t smell it. But guys, this isn’t the Marxism-Leninism kind of Russian export — raw garlic actually is the cure to all of the world’s ills. Every time someone has whined to me about how they can tell they’re on the verge of the cold, I always offer them a clove or two. “I know it sounds weird, but it works, I swear. You can actually feel yourself getting better.” I haven’t had any takers yet, but have high hopes that WEEKEND will help spread the Good News. All I can say, is I knew I was getting sick in January. Two pieces of toast with garlic later, I was cured. It’s the Pravda.

My old pointe shoes, hanging from one branch of the colorful standing lamp next to my bed, testify to a key aspect of my personality — I am a voluntary “what if”-er. The economic concept of an opportunity cost, alongside being the only one I ever fully understood on the pages of Mankiw et al., is also one I savor in real life. I take a strange kind of pleasure in being aware of all the things I have given up to be where I am today. The polaroids on my wall are remnants of a forsaken career in photography; the marked maps in my drawer are leftovers from my short but sweet time as a free spirit with no academic aspirations; and my pointe shoes gently swing to remind me that I spent almost 11 years of my

life on the stage. Up until my sophomore year of high school, I was a dancer with good grades. Not until YaleDancers passed me by for callbacks last fall did I finally realize that I had turned into an intellectual who occasionally dances. As I gravitated away from the stage and toward the prep books, my priorities changed and so did my body, my abilities. But my pointe shoes — which I still occasionally try on when the realities of my opportunity costs weigh down on me — are always there to remind me of what I could have been and of how far I’ve come. Contact ALEKSANDRA GJORGIEVSKA at aleksandra.gjorgievska@yale.edu .

Contact ANYA GRENIER at anya.grenier@yale.edu .

Misogyny // BY MARISSA MEDANSKY It is a truth universally acknowledged that every SERIOUS archaeologist — re: Indiana Jones, khaki pants, all capital letters — in possession of a SERIOUS reputation must be in want of some SERIOUS artifacts. But let’s be SERIOUS for a moment. Nothing says, “I chose my career based entirely on Michael Crichton novels” or “I think Pawn Stars is a realistic and educational 23 minutes of television” like an unrelenting desire to 1) dig up old shit from the ground and 2) sell that old shit to other people. Archaeologists, historians, storytellers of distant times and distant lands — these are the people we allow to sort through the proverbial trash bin of posterity and extrapolate conclusions from the crap we’ve thrown away. I was super-into that Shakespearian skeleton from a couple of months ago, but my new archae-

S AT U R D AY APRIL 20

ological pet cause is both nearer and dearer to my heart: misogyny, which, as you all know, silly ladies, is DEAD. Gone. Goodbye, alas-poor-Yorick, I-award-you-no-pints, I-said-good-day-sir — gone. I’d like to formally take credit for this find, which I found in a landfill next to some velociraptor bones and my seventh-grade retainer, because upcycling is the future. Since there is no more misogyny in society anymore, and decreases in supply lead to increases in demand — hire me, hedge funds! — I am sure I can sell misogyny to the highest bidder on the free market, leading to increased utility for all parties. Because no one has ever profited from misogyny ever. Especially not Indiana Jones. Contact MARISSA MEDANSKY at marissa.medansky@yale. edu .

“AUTISTICS IN AMERICA”

Saybrook Underbrook // 1 p.m. A reading from an autistic “Odyssey.”

Doc Martens

// KAREN TIAN

// BY MILA HURSEY Doc Martens are back in style now, which is bullshit because people made fun of my love for Docs for years and years. I have had the same pair of Doc Martens since I was twelve years old. I saw the Doc/baby doll dress combination on VH1’s I <3 the ‘90’s and I was fucking sold. It took a year of convincing to get my folks to buy me a pair because they were afraid I would turn into a goth or something. Nahhhhh, I just wanted to wear my Docs and short-alls with ribbons in my hair, basically, I wanted to be Rachel Leigh Cook in “She’s All That” pre-transformation when she was artsy and didn’t let some dickwad change her. When I read Meg Cabot’s “All-American

Girl” and the protagonist and the love interest both wore Doc Martens, bonded over Doc Martens and fell in love because of their Doc Martens, I knew I was doing my adolescence right. My Docs have served me well. They totally solidified my weird theater girl status in high school and I’d wear them when I was afraid of turning into my parents. Turns out my dad owned a pair in the ’80 … Whatever! I love them despite of my impotent teenage rebellion. Seventy years from now (when I am a true SWUG), I’ll be wearing the same pair of behemoth black combat boots. Haters gon’ hate.

Phone // BY VANESSA YUAN This right here is phone #3, also know as the phone I’ll be using for the rest of my life. Phone #1 was a beautiful BlackBerry Bold. It was the perfect phone for me. I thought I’d use it forever because touch screens made me feel awkward. (They still do, sometimes. They’re just so flimsy!) Then I lost #1 at Toad’s. Oops. After telling my parents a selective explanation of how I lost it, I opted for a perfectly functional flip-phone,

Contact MILA HURSEY at mila.hursey@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: 4,788 pretty average students at Yale right now

Because we are all worth it no matter what Business Insider says.

S AT U R D AY APRIL 20

which was free. (Shout-out to my girl T-Mobile! You go, girl!). Then I lost that one at Toad’s too and the employees cared very little while I probed the empty dance floor at the end of that Saturday night. Just when I was about to lose all hope and dignity, my mom let me know that a girl from “Quinnipiac University” had called her from my phone. I was reaching zero hope and negative dignity at that point, honestly. Fortunately, then “Quinnipiac”

girl said she’d be happy to return #2 to me because she’d be in New Haven every weekend anyway. But that was before she started ignoring my calls. After another selective explanation to my parents, #3 was acquired and we’ve been going strong for over a year. It looks like I might have found my third and only. Contact VANESSA YUAN at vanessa.yuan@yale.edu .

PRACTICE: UNDERGRADUATE SENIOR PROJECTS IN ART RECEPTION Yale School of Art // 5:30 p.m.

Say bye-bye-bye to our artistic comrades.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Woad’s

Just one more time!

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND MUSEUM

THE STORY OF YOU

Mayan Calendar

// BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID

Pointe Shoes

Garlic

// BY ALEKSANDRA GJORGIEVSKA

Contact ANYA GRENIER at anya.grenier@yale.edu .

S AT U R D AY APRIL 20

“AUTISTICS IN AMERICA”

Saybrook Underbrook // 1 p.m. A reading from an autistic “Odyssey.”

Doc Martens

// KAREN TIAN

Contact MILA HURSEY at mila.hursey@yale.edu .

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: 4,788 pretty average students at Yale right now

Because we are all worth it no matter what Business Insider says.

S AT U R D AY APRIL 20

PRACTICE: UNDERGRADUATE SENIOR PROJECTS IN ART RECEPTION Yale School of Art // 5:30 p.m.

Say bye-bye-bye to our artistic comrades.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Woad’s

Just one more time!

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COVER

FIRE ON ICE

HOCKEY FROM PAGE B3 senior essay on a very serious topic, the impact of a cholera epidemic on Québec City in the 1830s. Toward of the end of the semester, he walked into my office in Davenport with the biggest grin ever and announced: “Professor Gitlin, this is the best day of my life. I got an A on my senior essay … and I’ve been drafted by the Philadelphia Flyers.” So here’s to Yale Hockey, past and present. Here’s to our 2013 team and to Nick, to Spike, to Roland Betts ’68 and Jeremy Kinney ’68 who played hockey as undergraduates and have been great alumni and supporters of history initiatives such as the Lamar Center, to classmate Bob Ufer ’71, Bob Brooke ’83 and former student Keith McCullough ’99. Drink a toast to Jeff Malcolm ’13 of Lethbridge, Alberta, and Antoine Laganiere ’13 of Ile Cadieux, Québec. It was a long time coming, but worth the wait. Three cheers for Hockey, Canada and Yale. Murray Murdoch is smiling. Contact JAY GITLIN at jay.gitlin@yale.edu . ****

DON’T TAKE IT FOR GRANTED BY EVAN FRONDORF We may frequently lament the dearth of athletic success here at Yale, but we’re actually pretty spoiled. We’ve seen success that previous Yale classes could only dream about. Yale hockey has never been better, and it’s been good for the better half of the last decade — the team has made the NCAA tournament four times in the last five years. Before that? Just twice in the previous 61 years of the NCAA tournament. Yale’s ice hockey program is the oldest in the United States, but it took 120 years for the Bulldogs to earn the national crown. We’re living through history, folks. I was in Pittsburgh for four days to cover the team for WYBC (and Grand Rapids before that), and my biggest takeaway was how special this moment was for fans and former alumni and team members. Sure, I had spent the last couple years covering games in 3,000-person rinks in upstate New York, so I too was starstruck by watching Yale play in an 18,000-seat NHL arena in downtown Pittsburgh. But to me it seemed like a natural progression: Step 1. Cover the regular season games. Step 2. Cover the conference tournament. Step 3. Cover the NCAA tournament. For longtime Yale fans, the New Haven faithful and employees of Yale Athletics, however, the team usually didn’t make it to Step 3 (or even Step 2). There was no payoff, no reward at the end of a grueling regular season. This was a team that went 5–25–2 during the 2004–’05 season, playing at an Ingalls Rink that badly needed a renovation. Obviously, going to the Frozen Four for the first time in 61 years — and then winning a national championship — was an event of cathartic delayed gratification that no current student can understand or imagine. The New Haven Register’s Chip Malafronte has covered college hockey in New Haven for more than a decade and never saw a team in the Frozen Four. Suddenly, he had both Yale and Quinnipiac not only advancing to the Frozen Four, but also advancing to the national title game. Meanwhile, this was my first full year primarily covering Yale hockey — it almost felt as if I didn’t deserve it. I made memories I’ll have for the rest of my life, but some people have been waiting for a good part of their life to make these memories. But the hockey team’s success is no accident. Yes, Yale was the last at-large team to earn a bid to the tournament. Yes, they were a statistical underdog in each of their four tournament games. Yes, we could call them a Cinderella that made a magical run. Yet this team wouldn’t even have had the chance to compete for championship if it weren’t for the concerted effort of staff

S AT U R D AY APRIL 20

and administrators. When Tim Taylor, a hockey coaching legend, stepped down as head coach in 2006 after 28 years at the helm, the Athletics Department and the administration took a step back to re-evaluate the future of the hockey program. Despite strong criticism of his handling of the University’s athletics programs over the years, President Levin was instrumental in the hiring of current head coach Keith Allain ’80, a former star goaltender for the Bulldogs who had first found success as an assistant coach in the NHL. Also credit Athletics Director Tom Beckett for persuading Allain to come to Yale. As Allain said in a postgame press conference after the team earned its bid to the Frozen Four, “I wouldn’t be coaching in college hockey if it wasn’t for the Yale job.” Step 1: Hire a Yale alumnus renowned in the hockey world, who knows and understands the University’s unique relationship with athletics, to coach the ailing hockey program. Next came a $23 million renovation of the beautiful Ingalls Rink, completed in 2010, just as the school made its second straight NCAA tournament. The renovated facility was essential to establishing Yale as a top-notch hockey school. Just as the program’s stature was rising, fans returned to Ingalls. Step 2: Put millions of dollars into restoring Ingalls Rink to its rightful place as the coolest venue in college hockey. Finally, Yale needed to recruit players that met the school’s academic standards but were still capable of playing at an elite level. The school faces disadvantages, both those that are properly self-imposed (the academic rigor and lack of athletic scholarships) and those that are an unfortunate result of Yale’s position in the college hockey world. If top NHL prospects even choose to play college hockey, they go to one of the powerhouses — Minnesota, Boston College, North Dakota and so on. For example, Yale had four NHL draft picks on the squad this year; Minnesota had 15. Instead, Allain used what he had and created a system based on recruiting smaller players overlooked by the big schools — smaller players who are often speedy, relentless and have a strong hockey IQ. Bringing it all together under a terrific head coach has led to both team success and accolades for individual players. Step 3: Recruit intelligent play-

ers who fit in with Yale’s playing style, instead of developing the team around top recruits. Mix well, and seven years later, the Bulldogs have earned a national championship. But those seven years in the oven were so crucial. Those three steps took time, dedication and a belief that Yale could make waves in the college hockey establishment. And they surely weren’t as clearcut as my naive “three steps to covering a hockey season” I mentioned earlier. This championship is for the current students and the current team, but in large part, it’s also for the former players, the alumni and the die-hard fans that stuck with Yale hockey through the lean years and the program’s growth. Without each of their contributions, there’s no way this program would be where it is now. Contact EVAN FRONDORF at evan.frondorf@yale.edu .

***

TOAD’S RIVARLY TAKES CENTER STAGE BY DANIEL GROSSO After closely following Quinnipiac hockey and attending as many games as my schedule would allow during my four years in college, I could not have dreamed of a better culmination to an incredible season than the championship game on Saturday night. I made the trek to Pittsburgh for the Frozen Four, and it was truly an amazing experience. It was incredible to see my small school from Hamden, Conn., recognized on the red carpet. Countless locals tapped me on the shoulder in bars, puzzled as to the pronunciation of the school on my shirt. The hockey team did more than win that night — it gave Quinnipiac national recognition. Our hockey team had a storybook season. The Bobcats began the season unranked, an impossible-to-pronounce university nuzzled in the heart of Connecticut, and by the end the team had held the top ranking in the nation since February and was playing for the NCAA Division I men’s ice hockey championship. It was only fitting the

STUDENT RECITAL: ROBERT BENNESH

Contact DANIEL GROSSO at dwgrosso@quinnipiac.edu .

// BRIANNE BOWEN

Bulldogs fight the Bobcats for the puck.

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

84 Broadway St. // 8 p.m.

He has such an adorable face. This guy pulls at our heartstrings.

final obstacle standing between Quinnipiac and a national title was its rival, a team they beat three times previously in the season, the Yale Bulldogs. Although it provided good media fodder, I wanted nothing less than to face the Bulldogs in the championship. It is incredibly difficult to beat one team, harder yet a rival, four times in a single season. Sure enough, Yale was prepared in the fourth go-around and was able to beat Quinnipiac when it mattered most. The Bulldogs seemed to beat Quinnipiac to every puck; they played inspired hockey, defeated the top three teams in the nation and took home the national championship. Yale put together one of the all-time great runs in college hockey. The championship loss will sting for quite some time, as only a win on the biggest stage could remedy these feelings, but it adds more history to one of college hockey’s best rivalries. Looking back, as a freshman, there was one game I knew I had to get a ticket for: the Yale game. The atmosphere of a Quinnipiac-Yale game is electric, and it was a thrill to experience at the Frozen Four. Seeing the CONSOL Energy Center filled with Connecticut pride is something I will never forget. The game was such a great showing of the quality of hockey our region has to offer. Both student sections were out in full force and ready for some serious competition. Quinnipiac’s section was a sea of gold, while Yale showed plenty of spirit themselves. Students wore all blue, and some painted their chests for the game. As has become customary with the rivalry, the sections fought back and forth. Quinnipiac was keen on the “everybody knows Yale blows” chant, a staple for our school at these games. I love the rivalry our two schools have; it is a time we can openly insult Yale without fighting at Toad’s or peeing on buildings. It’s a way to go crazy and have some good jawing back-and-forth without actually harming anyone. During my four years at Quinnipiac, the Yale game was always the strongest showing of school spirit. The rivalry unifies the student body and is the biggest event at my school each year. Quinnipiac’s hockey game against Yale is the closest I will ever come to the intensity of a Yale-Harvard football game. It’s circled on everybody’s calendar and is a game guaranteed to sell out. Unlike recent incidents in other sports or at other schools, nobody has ever attacked one another at a Quinnipiac-Yale hockey game. To me, this is the rivalry’s best quality. Both schools understand the rivalry is in the name of fun and is more about school spirit and pride than it is anything else. While in Pittsburgh, my friends and I ran into some Yale alumni from Ohio in one of the bars. We were decked out in Quinnipiac gold, but they approached us anyway. We talked for a while about college hockey and took some friendly jabs at each other’s schools, but it was always in good fun. By the end of the afternoon, they had bought us shots and we were sitting and drinking as friends. It was fun to see how a college rivalry can bring together people who have never before met. Although we are “enemies,” it was a good conversation starter. Although the championship loss will be tough to put behind me, I know the rivalry will only grow more intense. Yale has hardware to hold over our heads, but Quinnipiac will be coming even harder for the years to come. The Toad’s rivalry will continue to grow and will be there for new students to enjoy. Seeing both these programs experience national success only makes me excited for the future. Our two hockey teams showed Minnesota and the rest of the nation how strong the ECAC and Connecticut hockey are. We may be rivals, but that does not mean Quinnipiac does not respect a good opponent. My hat goes off to the Yale hockey team; you guys went on an incredible run. It was fun seeing you guys in the championship game, and I can’t wait to be back next year.

Wallabees

Life’s most perfect shoe.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND FASHION

SUN’S OUT, TRENDS OUT

ith the first warm days of the semester, WEEKEND takes to the streets to see what people are wearing. Apparently not everyone wears sweats or Sperrys, so we asked some better-dressed Yalies to strike a pose. Photos by ALLIE KRAUSE.

1. Travis Hutchinson ’15, 2. Cassius Clay ’13, 3. Lauren Hoffman ’14, 4. Kiki Ochieng ’15, 5. Susannah Shattuck ’13

S AT U R D AY APRIL 20

“‘MURICA”

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

Davenport dining hall // 9 p.m. Davenport Pops Orchestra salutes the red, white and blue.

Fabulous nails

Try the upside-down French manicure in daring colors.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

ANTI-FLING, AGAINST ITSELF // BY DAVID WHIPPLE

// CHANTEL SIMPSON

It doesn’t take much to get someone to Toad’s. Past a certain point on Saturday night, it exerts some abnormal gravity over us, and we’re drawn like moths to a flame. It’s understandable: booze, dancing, friends; there’s plenty to be said for Toad’s. Which is why I was so mystified to see the dance floor halfempty last Friday night at the start of WYBC’s annual AntiFling concert. The throngs that usually spill into the bar area were instead confined to a knot pressed up against the stage, bouncing along to a killer set by a freshman DJ. Despite a strong lineup, an evening of live music and — maybe most importantly — a free open bar, Anti-Fling was decidedly off the beaten path. I’d realized this, to some extent, earlier in the night. My suggestions to check out the free show had been met with blank stares all evening: “Antiwhat?” Plenty of people had no idea about the event, and would have remained oblivious if not for my intervention. Everyone I told about Anti-Fling was instantly sold — an open bar will do that — and their enthusiasm for what promised to be a great night was matched only by their confusion as to why they hadn’t heard about it. I have a radio show, as you may have guessed from the fact that I self-indulge in a music column, and I had the distinct feeling that Anti-Fling was a show for radio, by radio, for the cool kids and by the cool kids. Let’s start with the name: Calling the concert “Anti-Fling” makes it nothing more than the opposite of everyone else’s idea of a concert. It’s something close to a “fuck you” to those poor souls ignorant enough to be content with Spring Fling; if you enjoy Spring Fling, then you certainly won’t enjoy its evil twin, the Anti-Fling. Sure, WYBC did promo: a few posters on Old

DAVID WHIPPLE TUNE-UP Campus, a Facebook event. If we wanted this event to be bigger, we could have made it so, and I think we should have. Because who wouldn’t enjoy Anti-Fling if they went? The show opened with a set from Beat Culture, a Yale producer who’s made something of a name for himself in the open water. Beat Culture, aka Sunik Kim ’16, is the rare DJ who puts on a show instead of just pressing buttons. With sounds just unusual enough to be fresh and an ear for infectious beats, Kim had the crowd just as into his music as he was. His music had both edge and appeal — the essence of Anti-Fling.

CALLING THE CONCERT “ANTIFLING MAKES IT NOTHING MORE THAN THE OPPOSITE OF EVERYONE ELSE’S IDEA OF A CONCERT. But the evening’s most memorable performance would belong undoubtedly to Mykki Blanco, a cross-dressing New York rapper who insists on going by female gender pronouns. Although Blanco toned down her get-up for the show, settling for black lipstick and a basketball jersey that doubled as a skirt for the show’s second half, she delivered a snarling, vitriolic performance that was impossible to tune out, one way or the other. Okay, so it’s not the kind of thing you’d see at Spring Fling — although some of Macklemore’s outfits can bor-

der on androgynous. But even if more than a few of the event’s bro-ier attendees might not have expected a cross-dressing rapper, everyone could shout along to the refrain of Blanco’s “Getting Wavy”: “We’re getting wavy, getting wavy, getting wavy.” Like I said, an open bar will do that. Blanco’s bizarre set led into a performance from Brooklyn band Oberhofer, who played convincing if somewhat conservative indie rock, poles apart from Blanco’s antics. As happens with a lot of bands, Oberhofer lost much of their sound’s glockenspiel-fueled nuance once they stepped out of the studio. Their set was all power chords and fist pumping; I’m not sure if I saw someone break out a lighter, but you get the point. No one at the show was as snooty as me, though, and Oberhofer’s set had enough energy to keep a well-lubricated crowd interested before electronic act Pictureplane closed out the night with some solid spinning. There wasn’t much “anti” about Anti-Fling. It wasn’t against anything except itself. Why would you put on a great show, pay for an open bar and then spin it as the concert for people too cool for concerts? It makes no sense to use music to differentiate people, for music to be “for” some people and not for others. Obviously, not everyone likes everything, but music itself isn’t biased. It’s not going to make a football player bleed from the ears to hear some indie rock, and it doesn’t make your music better when you’re apathetic about sharing it with people. Music is an inherently communal activity; we’ve been making it in groups for millennia. It shouldn’t take an open bar for music to pull people together. It helps, though. Contact DAVID WHIPPLE at david.whipple@yale.edu .

Tarantino’s violence, unchained // BY BECCA EDELMAN “Violence is one of the most fun things to watch,” once quipped director Quentin Tarantino. Judging by his films, it must be a pretty fun thing to direct, too. A recent “Vanity Fair” article, examining Tarantino’s repertoire to date, estimated the director’s kill count at about 543. That makes for an average of about 68 deaths per each of Tarantino’s eight films. Scorsese’s been outplayed at his own game. But despite Tarantino’s comment, is “fun” really all that this renowned director’s films are about? Some seem to think so: This summer, The New York Times described Tarantino as “the master of a new, more whimsical sort of violence.” But perhaps Tarantino is saying something more, even with this very whimsy. I would like to argue that Tarantino leaves us clues, some subtle and some opaque, that his films are meant to provoke discourse concerning the effusion of violence in today’s media, a violence that leaves viewers callous and jaded. Tarantino’s story is emblematic of ’90s filmmakers. Unlike his predecessors — Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese — Tarantino did not attend film school. “When people ask me if I went to film school,” Tarantino has said, “I tell them ‘no, I went to films.’” And lots of them. The proliferation of home video in the ’80s transformed not only the film industry’s economics but also the pathway of its filmmakers. With the works of the masters now easily accessible, aspiring filmmakers could watch and admire to their hearts’ content. Tarantino spent several years working at a video store, which might be taken as symbolic of his generation or simply as a formative push toward his future career. The young filmmaker’s breakthrough came at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992 with his first feature, “Reservoir Dogs.” Tarantino managed not only to make the film on a shoestring budget,

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BECCA EDELMAN A CASE FOR CINEMA but also to woo acting veteran Harvey Keitel and a score of other big names. “Reservoir Dogs” was not your run-of-the-mill festival fare. There were guns and there was violence. Lots of violence: A particularly painful sequence depicts a man’s ear being cut off. Audiences at Sundance were horrified. But it was a hit. Since “Reservoir Dogs,” Tarantino has experimented with different characters, settings, and time periods. He has brought us to 1990s Los Angeles, World War II France and the Antebellum South. We have met “The Bride,” “The Bear” and “The Wolf.” But some things haven’t changed — what unites Tarantino’s films is their constant and unrelenting violence. Among the blood and gore of “Pulp Fiction” (1994) stand out a torturous rape scene and an accidental bullet to an accomplice’s face (a nod to an accidental shooting in “Goodfellas” (1990), directed by Martin Scorsese, a favorite of Tarantino). In “Inglorious Basterds” (2009), a packed movie theatre lights on fire. And by the end of “Django Unchained” (2012), Tarantino’s newest work, the walls of a formerly white house have been painted red with blood. So, is this all just “fun”? Does Tarantino just like violence? A closer viewing of his films implies otherwise. Let us first take a look at “Natural Born Killers” (1994), a film directed by Oliver Stone but written by Tarantino. The film follows Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), a young couple who conduct a killing spree across America. Although the film’s plotline may be familiar — murderous lovers are the focus of both Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” (1973) — what differ-

entiates “Natural Born Killers” is its integral incorporation of the media into its very form. It is shot like a music video, integrating color and black and white, using slow motion in otherwise realistically shot scenes, and rocking to a Nine Inch Nails soundtrack. Such stylistic choices are interspersed with news footage, commercials, film clips and magazine headlines. Just as the film’s style seems to be obsessed with the media, the media becomes obsessed with Mickey and Mallory, treating them more like movie stars than confused and morally bankrupt murderers. With its attention to the media’s deification of the couple, Tarantino’s script blatantly satirizes the modern-day media, accusing it of turning emblems of violence into our heroes.

BOTH TARANTINO’S SCRIPT AND DIRECTION ENCOURAGE THE VIEWER TO FEEL REVULSION TOWARD THOSE WHO DERIVE PLEASURE OUT OF THE FIGHTS. Tarantino’s films emphasize not only the profusion of violence in our modern media, but also our resulting desensitization. Tarantino makes such a point in “Django Unchained,” equating his villains’ callousness toward slavery to our own apathy toward the violence on the screen before us. Tarantino interestingly chooses to insert Mandingo Fighting — an antebellum version of the gladiator fight in which two slaves fight to the death for the entertainment of their owners — as an essential element of his plot. Although there has been much press on the matter, most sources conclude that Mandingo

Fighting never really existed. So why include it? Mandingo Fighting provides Tarantino with a distinct practice of violence within the larger horror of slavery. Both Tarantino’s script and direction encourage the viewer to feel revulsion toward those who derive pleasure out of the fights. If Tarantino casts judgment on these slaveowners, censuring their reactions to such a spectacle of violence, does he not too condemn “Django Unchained”’s audience, those who might derive pleasure out of the spectacle of violence taking place on screen? My final clue to Tarantino’s deeper interest in violence is less glaring, but definitively more pervasive than the other two. This is the exaggerated, fantastical nature of much of Tarantino’s violence. These elements, though certainly entertaining, serve the purpose of parodying the gritty gore of realistic action flicks like “Die Hard” (1988). In speaking about Tarantino’s excess, one need not look any further than the formerly addressed kill count. But his general hyperbolic tendencies stress his divergence from reality. The violence of “Kill Bill” (2003–2004) is so extreme that the film itself could be a comic strip. In “Django Unchained,” the narrative meat of the film ends after about two and a half hours. Yet the film continues for another half hour, advancing no narrative premise but merely depicting an excessive killing rampage. As the sequence progresses, the impact of each individual execution declines. The audience’s callousness is exacerbated, and indicated, to an extreme. In addition to hyperbole, Tarantino also uses an element of fantasy to create a satirical cinema. In “Inglorious Basterds,” Tarantino presents a believable historical narrative for most of the film. But (spoiler alert!) the moment

Hitler dies in that movie theatre, something changes. We are no longer in the real world; Tarantino has re-written history, taking us into a realm perhaps just as fantastic as Middle Earth. It is moments like that of Hitler’s death in which Tarantino shakes his audience, screaming in our faces: “This isn’t real! This is a fantasy! This is satire!” Perhaps I need to believe that Tarantino’s violence is more than just for fun. In a world as violent as ours, a world in which events like the Boston Marathon explosion on Monday seem to happen almost every week, the idea of a cinema that emphasizes violence as pleasurable seems almost revolting. Yet, I enjoy Ta ra n t i n o ’s films, and I see him as one

THE MEITAR ENSEMBLE

Contact BECCA EDELMAN at rebecca.edelman@yale.edu .

// KAREN TIAN

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS:

William L. Harkness Hall 201 // 7 p.m. All the way from Israel, this group explores the many ways in which Judaism has intersected with music.

of the preeminent filmmakers of our time. I believe my convictions of Tarantino’s social commentary to be more than a simple longing, more than an attempt tow alleviate a case of cognitive dissonance. Although the director may not come right out and say it, the clues are there in his films, just waiting to be discovered. Tarantino did not grow up on film school; he grew up on pop culture. Our pop culture is consumed by violence. Great artists do not merely imitate what they see, but rather comment on it. And here’s what Quentin has to say.

Just say no!

To the onslaught of eager beaver sublet emailers.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND THEATER

‘CALIFORNIA SUITE’ OUTGROWS SCRIPT // BY YUVAL BEN-DAVID As the specter of final exams confronts me with my spectacular ignorance, I find it healthy to take the occasional inventory of the little wisdoms Yale has taught me. How to bullshit. How to know when to bullshit (if not when to shut up). And while I’m disappointed to hit the end of freshman year still unaware of the naked party code words, I take comfort in the snobbier insights. For example: the best theater at Yale usually takes place in basements. Put up by director Isaac Hudis ’16 in the cavernous Davenport-Pierson auditorium, Neil Simon’s “California Suite” benefits from the luxury of this truism. The play’s integrity — I kept on scribbling “clean” in my notebook — got me thinking about why the best art takes place literally underground. A basement is your architectural equivalent to the Freudian id, so it’s reasonable to assume that underground plays, far removed from critical scrutiny and high expectations, are also far removed from the superego of pretension. They’re more expressive, more whimsical and much more daring; they hold to what I like to call the Hemingway Pleasure Principle — with modest resources, they remain honest, true and damn entertaining. “California Suite” plays up the dou-

ble entendre of its title; it’s a suite of four (sweet) one-acts that take place entirely in a hotel suite in Los Angeles. Entirely without moral outrage, or any sustained outrage, for that matter, the first three one-acts see characters bantering through mini-wars of attrition; there’s so much so deep below the surface — and the verbal wit flies sky-high — that the play strikes you as comic prose. What’s impressive about Hudis’ direction is the way he seems to have lifted to threedimensions a brilliant script that nevertheless feels like a book of Woody Allen short stories. And what’s brave about Hudis’ direction is how he pulls that off: by letting theater be theatrical, albeit poised but always a little over-the-top. The fact that much of the furniture must be mimed obviously underlines the play as spectacle. In fact, so does the smart, symbolic blocking, which often places couples on either side of the bed — as if they were either parenthesizing it or approaching it as a negotiating table. But it’s really the actors who realize “California Suite” as effective theater. And ironically, they do so by overacting. In the first one-act, a power-walking New York editor flies out to fetch her teenage daughter from the girl’s father in LA — a man who went by Bill in New

York but uses Billy in his post-divorce life as a Hollywood screenwriter. Katherine Paulsen ’14, playing the woman, Hannah, talks as if she were using ice cubes for punctuation. Hannah’s a cold, hard eyelid-batting bitch, a prototypical ice queen who yaks her mouth to melting point. “You’re worse than a hopeless romantic. You’re a hopeful one,” she slowly tells her ex-husband, freezeframing some humor so commonplace in this script that it could have gone unnoticed. Grant Fergusson ’16 plays that exhusband, and while his character dresses in boyish surf wear, the actor affects an old soul who drawls his words as much as he enunciates them. With this ironfisted theatricality, Fergusson inspires the audience to string the script’s gags and one-liners into a psychological complexion, if not a narrative arc. The wit crescendos but the emotional tension never really does; what’s most affecting about this one-act, and most of the others in “California Suite,” is precisely the spottiness, the elastic turbulence of emotions. The play eschews climax because all of life is one big climax. Like Paulsen and Fergusson, Anya Richkind ’16 and Conor Bagley ’16 revel in the verbal, but their combined perfor-

mance — as a couple dealing with infidelity at a bar mitzvah — oils up every move with a hyper-energetic slapstick flourish. It’s fun, and certainly elicited roaring approval from the audience. Richkind’s barely-controlled hysteria is overdone as tactfully as Bagley’s fidgety innocence. And that’s why the last one-act of “California Suite” disappoints: not because the actors are bad, but because they’re so good — because Neil Simon, unfortunately, can’t write (physical) slapstick as well as Richkind and Bagley can act verbal slapstick. The actors know best when to summon slapstick as a device; when the playwright assigns it, it just feels tedious. (I suppose there’s such a thing as libertarianism in theater, which replaces the odious nanny-state with the nanny-playwright.) In a way that’s oddly sexual, the last one-act sees the cerebral friction of the earlier oneacts explode into physical relief. Here, two couples are on vacation, and Beth (played by Richkind) breaks her leg playing doubles tennis. She tries to get to bed with an ice pack, but by the time she’s safely convalescing so are the others — from a concussion, a cut foot, a black eye, all acquired in an explosive comedy of errors. The point here

// RAYMOND NOONAN

Actors may repress their characters’ emotions, but their portrayals are nonetheless powerful.

seems to be quite simple, or just wildly overstated: that the couples have been repressing their frustrations with each others’ most minor obsessions. And then they start regretting their outburst, and try to re-repress emotions. One man shakes his friend on the ground, screaming at him to promise that they’ll share another vacation next year. It’s funny that the script here, about people overacting on their emotions, fails, while overacting is precisely how the production succeeds. Ironically, it is through its deliberate theatricality that the play approximates real life. By the way, I went to the show twice. No one had to bang my head in order to convince me. Contact YUVAL BEN-DAVID at yuval.ben-david@yale.edu .

Saying “Yes, Please” to “Orlando” // BY JENNIFER GERSTEN To witness “Orlando,” a senior project for Bonnie Antosh ’13, is to awaken to a tumultuous, feverish dream. Here, he is she and she is he, and the twain shall meet in a production explosive enough to singe even the back rows of the Whitney Theater. Energy inhabits the slight and nimble Antosh, who alights on the ground as though stepping perpetually on hot coals. She is combustible, sparking and steaming as her character boils with youthful indignation. Antosh careens around the stage like a mad car dispossessed of its driver, daring us to doubt that it is not she, but “he” — Orlando, a boy of 16 — with whom we are making our acquaintance in Elizabethan England. Director Willa Fitzgerald ’13 calls this rendition of “Orlando,” a Sarah Ruhl play based on the novel by Virginia Woolf, an “adaptation of an adaptation of an adaptation.” An additional adaptation must come from the audience, which is shoved breathlessly along a conveyor belt of gender-bending from which there is no opportunity to disembark. Before we can adjust to Antosh, perhaps more of a creature than adolescent male (if there is a difference), we are overwhelmed by the jarring appearance of Eric Sirakian ’15, playing Queen Elizabeth. In a futuristic headdress and long white skirt, Sirakian is in every simper a woman, yet in every hair upon his arm a man. Charmed by Orlando’s “shapely legs” and desire to

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become a poet, the queen invites Orlando to court, but is betrayed when she chances upon him smooching a young lady in secret. At that moment, Sirakian falls like an aged tree cleaved through its core, crying, “Man’s treachery!” His femininity was purposely awkward and garish, a rendering that winked roguishly at its own absurdity. But in his grating howl was the genuine ache of a woman, destroyed by the careless sexuality of a man she loves but cannot ever have. The teenage, male Orlando of the opening is but one frantic gesture in a wild cavort of identity. In the first act, we see Orlando trapped in the romantic gale that is the androgynous Russian princess Sasha, played with exotic flair by Lucy Fleming ’16. Here, Antosh allows her feline gamboling to give way to a refined allemande, belying Orlando’s newfound civility in love only through her eyes’ fiendish glint. Despite Orlando’s affections, Sasha, pale and perfidious, abandons Orlando as he waits for her arrival at Blackfriars at midnight. Realizing Sasha’s deceit, Antosh breaks into coughs that hack her breathing to smithereens as a nutcracker would a frail walnut. In the sudden darkness, so like a womb, Antosh seemed an embryo waiting to be born from her character’s despair. Later, Orlando, fleeing to Constantinople to avoid the unwelcome advances of a lustful archduchess (Jacob Osborne ’16, a vision in a hot pink boa), awakens after a weeklong slumber to find that he has become

a woman. As before, Orlando and the supporting ensemble of Charlie Kelly ’14, Sirakian, Fleming and Osborne narrate, willing the metamorphosis into action as the words leave their lips. Orlando often struggles to communicate, but when he fails to express himself, this remarkable quartet, playing over 10 roles combined, are effortless raconteurs. They are no mere foils for Antosh. Instead, they elevate her, as both reflections and propulsions of her vigor. The play follows the unaging Orlando across five centuries; in one, the four became motorcars, “driving” alongside a steely Antosh in a whirlwind of dizzying, contrapuntal motion. In another, Sirakian is a wrenching Othello in a playwithin-a-play, and in yet another a trembling old maid. These four are masterful, Scheherazades in both speech and body. Antosh is never so much either sex as sex’s embodiment, a vigorous force that happens to take up residence in a human. When she plays Orlando the man, her energy runs unbridled, occasionally spilling from her frame like water from a jostled glass. When Orlando is a woman, however, Antosh begins to contain herself. To the growing list of what she must learn, Orlando now adds the rules governing the other sex, whose trials and tribulations she realizes only when she joins its roster. “Yes, please!” she says in one scene, with the assertion of her residual manliness. This phrase

SAYBROOK COLLEGE ORCHESTRA SPRING CONCERT Battell Chapel // 7:30 p.m.

Classical music abounds.

she then repeats coquettishly, as a woman should: “Yes, please.” Two words, two genders in which to speak them. Antosh looked down at her chest, disbelieving the physicality of her new identity. Eventually, it is not through serving tea and fluttering a fan that Orlando grows into herself, but sex — “I’m a woman, a real woman, at last!” Antosh exclaimed, crowing a discovery facilitated by the sailor Marmaduke (played by Kelly). That Orlando knows her body, however, does not mean she knows herself. “Orlando” is a phantasmagoria of quicksilver identities, some lingering no longer than a few lines from the ensemble. While Sirakian, Fleming, Kelly and Osborne change with the plot’s rollicking tide, Antosh changes just once, stranded on the yet-unknown shores of womanhood. Assisted by silhouettes and projections, Orlando attempts to map the landscape of her new gender through her poetry. Though fantastical, her struggle is also our own. We, too, are marooned in our bodies, and not by choice. In “Orlando,” the fiery Antosh is firing up smoke signals on our behalf. Ultimately, however, it is we ourselves that will answer them. “Orlando” runs 8 p.m. on Thursday, 8 p.m. on Friday, and 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. on Saturday. Viewer discretion is advised. Contact JENNIFER GERSTEN at jennifer.gersten@yale.edu .

// ADRIAN RODRIGUES

Lucy Fleming ’16 plays one of many androgynous characters in “Orlando.”

WEEKEND RECOMMENDS: Rodgers and Hammerstein

What’s better than a good ol’ musical?

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

EMILY BAZELON // NINA SUBIN

JOURNALIST, LEGAL WONK, BULLYING EXPERT // BY HANNAH SCHWARZ

Q. You write in your book that you were “fired” by your friends in eighth grade. Besides that personal experience of bullying, what makes you so interested in this subject? A. Two things. One is that I’m a mother. When I first started reading all the stories about cyberbullying, it was one of those moments where my interests as a journalist and as a mother intersected. One of the obvious truths about being a parent now is that we didn’t grow up with this technology, so a lot of us are trying to understand the effect that social media has on growing up. I could see that there was a lot of drama going on online and a lot of attention [paid] to that, and I was interested in figuring that out as a parent, as well as a journalist. The second thing is that once I started writing about this topic, I was really struck by how deep people’s memories are of childhood bullying, whether they experienced it or saw it or acted like a bully. I could feel people going inside themselves to talk about these scarring memories that they had. I felt like it was a topic that resonated emotionally with everybody. Q: When you reported on the Phoebe Prince case, in which an Irish teenager who had moved to a Massachusetts high school committed suicide, you ended up giving multiple sides of the story that a lot of news media didn’t report on. When you went in, what was your expectation about what you were going to find? A. When I went in, I was reading and seeing the same sto-

ries as everyone else, and I had just started the bullying series for Slate, and I thought, “Oh my god, what is wrong with this terrible high school? There is a path of marauding teenagers who are terrorizing this girl. How could that have happened in this apparently middle-class, stable community?” I really went to that high school thinking, “These kids must have been really bad kids, and how could this have happened?” I went to understand what I assumed was a very “Lord of the Flies” dynamic. When I started actually talking to lots of kids, it turned out that that was not how they saw what had happened to Phoebe. It was, to them, much more complicated. Q. You also write about how there’s a belief in the U.S. that bullying is affecting a large swath of children, when in fact, it’s not as common as people think. Why do you think people are so quick to label what is drama or plain meanness as bullying? A. If you succeed in attaching that label to a narrative, you’ve created a story about innocence and guilt. Understandably, when adults think that there is a bully and a victim, our sense of moral outrage builds, and that can be a natural and even healthy response if it really is that kind of domineering, intimidating, repetitive power imbalance. The problem is if you’re too quick to jump to that conclusion, and what’s happening is actually a more twoway conflict, then you’ve created this very misleading impression. And the label of “bully” is really stigmatizing for kids. It makes it

sound like they can’t change, that they’re inherently bad in some way. We’re writing off certain kids, essentially, and feeling very self-righteous about doing that.

overturn race-based affirmative action in part in Fisher v. Texas, universities will still be able to make the case for socioeconomic affirmative action?

Q. I know Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court’s swing vote, is difficult to figure out, especially in the cases about the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8, because he’s wrestling with two issues we’ve seen are important to him, states’ rights and equal protection. Do you have any idea about which way he’s going to go on the cases?

A. Yes, I do. Absolutely. In fact, I think the case will be stronger, and the rosy outcome of Fisher striking down racial preferences — I’m not sure that’s going to happen in a broad way, and I’m also not in favor of that outcome — would be more socioeconomic diversity on campuses. David Leonhardt ’94 has been writing about this for The New York Times, and colleges and universities would have to really change how they do admissions because it’s not enough to take into account income. They would have to take into account family wealth and neighborhood in order to get any racial diversity out of the socioeconomic diversity. Otherwise, there are just too many white people: poorer white applicants will just be admitted at a higher rate, and they will kind of swamp the number of African-American and Latino applicants. However, if you came up with a formula that also took into account wealth and neighborhood, you could still include more poor African-American and Latino applicants. It would be hard for me to imagine the court striking that down. I think that could be a good outcome. I’ve been really surprised to learn how little colleges and universities do to recruit and admit low-income students, and it certainly is a contributor to inequality in our society. So I think that could actually be a good thing. It will cost the universities money because

A. I left oral argument in both of those cases feeling optimistic about same-sex marriage viewed through the lens of Justice Kennedy. It’s reading tea leaves, because he doesn’t have to say exactly what he’s going to do at oral argument. He was asking questions and playing with ideas. The most striking moment for me in the California case was in the oral argument, when he said, “What about the voices of the children?” and he was talking about adopted children of gay parents, and seemed to really be taking to heart their plight as kids whose parents can’t have the stability of marriage. That was an emotional moment. It was pretty much the emotional moment in oral argument. And if he cares about those kids, it’s really clear that he should rule in favor of legalizing gay marriage in California. That was my most hopeful moment about him. Q. Let’s also talk about another controversial ongoing case. Do you think that if the court does

financial aid will have to rise, and I don’t think it’s easy — wave a magic wand, accomplished — but when you look at how few poor students are going to selective universities, it’s really upsetting. Q. Linda Greenhouse is also a lecturer at the Law School, and you two are united by your combination of law and writing. What are your thoughts on the impact writing can have on public opinion about law and legal cases? A. The argument I make to my students is that they are going to come out of school and out of their professional work with very specialized knowledge, and if they can figure out how to translate it so that people out in the world who are not lawyers can

understand it, they can have a real impact on the issues that they care about. I think that a lot of the challenge is simply an act of explanation and translation out of a specialized world into the world in which people are not taking “Constitutional Law,” but care about the fundamental principles that are at stake. So the challenge is to always have it be clear what those principles are. What is the actual fundamental tenet of law that people should care about? And sometimes it’s hard, because law can get technical very quickly. But that’s the challenge I have for myself as a writer — and I try to impart that to my students. Contact HANNAH SCHWARZ at hannah.schwarz@yale.edu .

“

AND THE LABEL OF “BULLY” IS REALLY STIGMATIZING FOR KIDS. IT MAKES IT SOUND LIKE THEY CAN’T CHANGE, THAT THEY’RE INHERENTLY BAD IN SOME WAY.

“

croll through Emily Bazelon’s Slate author page, and you’ll find that in the last week, she’s written almost an article a day, i.e., a lot. A senior editor for Slate, Bazelon is also a lecturer and the Truman Capote fellow for creative writing and law at Yale Law School. She is currently teaching a course on nonfiction writing, co-teaching another on ethics and advising students interested in media and the law. Her Slate coverage focuses primarily on bullying, the Supreme Court and women’s issues. Her new book, Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy has garnered praise across the spectrum, being described as “intelligent” and “rigorous” by The New York Times (though it was critiqued for other flaws). WEEKEND sat down with Bazelon to talk about bullying, the advice she gives her students and the enigma that is Anthony Kennedy.