WEEKEND

WEEKEND // FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2015

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WE LIKE A THREE-RING CIRCUS

WHAT’S FIT AND BEFITTING

A MINISTER TO THE PEOPLE

A presentation of art where the “Side Show” is the main exhibit.

How not to offend, and when to get offended by breaches of gym etiquette.

Pastor Carlton lee preaches the Brown family.

Now he sits down to talk with WKND.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

KIRWAN-TAYLOR

WEEKEND VIEWS

ON THE ROAD TO TOAD’S // BY IVAN KIRWAN-TAYLOR It was the winter of ’15 and I’d just come crashing down from San Jose in a beaten-up Hudson with three college kids who only wanted to live and die. I swung by Dean’s pad — he was a freshman who talked Nietzsche and Marx and Duke Ellington, man, and he said Toad’s was the place to be on a Wednesday night. I didn’t ask questions because questions are odious.

It was the kind of Wednesday, a bellicose, gray Wednesday, that makes men wage war and waitresses run away from home and drive across the country (which I’ve done loads of times, by the way).

I found myself sprawled on a shredded couch at Dean’s. We were drinking this poison called Dubra and man, it was the realest thing I ever drank. I saw a lost girl dancing in the corner of the room. Her eyes had only youth in them. She was exactly 19.

I thought about how much I wanted to have a clothing-optional Yab-Yum session with her — that’s coitus between Wisdom and Compassion, by the way — recite the mantras, my own Bodhisattva right there, enlightenment in a temple of flesh.

Then the sickness overcame me: how weary the need of body, how desperate the need of extinction. So I looked for nirvana in the bottom of my glass. Then, Dean, the Lost Girl and I swung

by Yorkside and I had a cheap slice of pizza. (It was the realest pizza I ever ate.)

Toad’s was a scene, man. There was music and sweat and people and dancing and music. Man, was there music. I returned in an effluvium of memory to that jazz club in San Francisco, when the night was hot and the arpeggios were burning. (I’d just driven across the country. That’s something I do.) I couldn’t find any saxophones or trashed pianos but I found love in a hopeless place. Over the basslines and the unruly rhythms, the Lost Girl asked me if I wanted a cigarette. I asked her to marry me in my head. We went outside.

“Got any Luckies,” I said with quixotic confidence.

“No. I have American Spirit.” (Oh baby, did she have American Spirit.) “It’s a brand? Of Tobacco?”

“Right. Yeah. Cool.” We shared a cheap cigarette and it was the realest cigarette I ever smoked.

Then, we went back in and Beatific Beyoncé showed me the ragged, ecstatic joy of being. I was afraid to dance but I was more afraid to die so I danced. One precocious cat who was known in the town for his fine spoken word came up to me.

“Man, there are some gone girls here. Gone, like the color blue. Gone, like America.”

I thought about telling him to maybe read books before he wrote them, but his turtleneck covered his ears. The beret disappeared into the crowd. I never saw that cat again. (Apart from once, when I was driving across the country.)

I finally beat myself up enough to go over to the Lost Girl.

With religion in my bones I said, “Hey, let’s buy a piece-of-shit car and pull outta here — go to Mexico, go to Wyoming, go anywhere.”

She ran ink-stained fingers through her living hair, shrugged her Hepburn shoulders in her denim jacket, looked at me with the kind of eyes that make a guy understand sex and death, and said: “I have a paper due tomorrow.”

So, Dean and I slipped out, sex-crazed and self-loathing. I was restored to factory settings. He said, “Hey man, you can’t give a Dharma talk if you’ve shot yourself for one lost love.”

(Dharma talk is Buddhist discourse, by the way.) So he took me to Ivy Noodle and we filled ourselves with hot Lo Mein. It was salty, fatty, and man, it was the realest thing I ever ate.

I stood on the corner of York and Broadway and saw hipsters and gone girls and geniuses and mad ones with man buns and I thought, Maybe I won’t go West anymore. Maybe the life force is here, on the East Coast. That feeling didn’t last: In the spring of that year I drove across the country. But that’s another dream, man.

Contact IVAN KIRWAN-TAYLOR at ivan.kirwan-taylor@yale.edu .

Urban Outfitters Only // BY CORYNA OGUNSEITAN The boy holding the sign that reads “2 Kiko Milano” is not wearing makeup.

Maybe this is the joke, I think to myself, because Kiko Milano an Italian makeup boutique. What does he know about makeup, anyway? Though I know that The Yale Record organized this protest, I’m having difficulty seeing the humor in advocating for another Kiko Milano on Broadway. Another boy holds a sign and assumes an expression he must imagine is solemn; it’s as if he has carefully studied the “Humans of New York,” and appropriated their soul-wrenching stares.

In other circumstances, this could have been moving. But he’s not expressing a sincere objection to the expensive storefronts in New Haven. If he were, I might admire him. But as is, I’m confused and more than a little skeptical.

Kiko Milano, despite being a small boutique with an Italian name, is relatively inexpensive. I don’t wear makeup, but I own mascara from Target, and their prices are similar. Still, a lot of people do use makeup, and an inexpensive cosmetics store is hardly the worst of the newest Shops at Yale. As in, I once saw a person in Kiko Milano, and I think they made a purchase — business is much worse next door, at Emporium DNA. Sure, Kiko Milano might not attract many customers from the greater New Haven area. When I asked a demonstrator what, exactly, he and The Record were doing out there in the cold, he told me that it was a joke! He quickly added that the protest addressed more serious issues.

He told me Yale could use the space in ways that wouldn’t alienate the community. But I could only think, “I doubt that Kiko Milano is any more alienating than

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J. Crew, American Apparel, or that store that labels itself the principal outfitter of “The Yale Man.” Or Emporium DNA. Or Urban Outfitters. Or, honestly, Blue State.”

I understand — and support — the desire to influence Yale’s utilization of the Broadway real estate. I’m just not certain that a satirical protest is the best way to effect change. Protests can be real, and sad, and scary; mocking a serious response to New Haven’s towngown inequality is flippant. I don’t think it’s impossible for satire to influence and inform people. Jon Stewart did it! But Jon Stewart is funny because he knows that his subject matter is ultimately unfunny, that at the crux of a every joke is a real and complex problem. Good satire knows that it’s a defense mechanism.

The Record’s event lacked this selfawareness, because the satirical protest didn’t target the most obviously alienating stores on Broadway. I understand the irony; the true meaning of the poster “2 Kiko Milano” is “0 Kiko Milano.”

The Record thinks Yale should cater to a broader community. But still, the stakes are too low; two or no Kiko Milanos is all the same to me. Maybe “5 J. Crews” or “Urban Outfitters Only” would have been a better slogan; those are stores with higher prices and closer ties to the student body.

Even the phrase “it’s just a joke” doesn’t excuse the demonstration from any pretense to effectiveness. If Kiko Milano were really something worthy of protest, maybe I would get the joke.

Contact CORYNA OGUNSEITAN at coryna.ogunseitan@yale.edu .

MARIO BATALI IN CONVERSATION WITH MARK BOMFORD

BRAUNSTEIN

OGUNSEITAN

//ASHLYN OAKES

Brother Sun, Sister Moon // BY SOFIA BRAUNSTEIN Crisp and resplendent among the stars, she bathes me in pure white, nurturing light, a light that lingers in the empty spaces, filling them, making me whole. Even with a double window pane and 238,900 miles between us, the moon shines a light on my life, listening to my secrets, providing me with wisdom, protecting me from the monster beyond the locked door of my room — a monster that inhabits my brother’s psyche.

Even before I learned the monster’s true identity — the OCD, ADHD, dyslexia and anxiety — I knew its secrets. I remember the first time I understood the severity of my situation: I was nine years old. I sat at the dinner table with my family and our half-eaten plates of pasta when the monster emerged with demands and accusations. It yelled at my parents for the horrible dinner they had prepared. It said that they were purposefully trying to starve it. Finally, it threatened its revenge.

My mother gave me a quick glance, my cue to retreat to the safety of my room. My brother was unable to express his rage in words, and his fists began to fly, writing anger into the air.

He hit the table and stomped on the floor. The house shook.

I watched from the hall as he threw his plate to the ground — my parents narrowly escaped his fists and herded him away from the table.

He continued to scream, loud enough for neighbors to hear; he bruised his hands and knees, slamming them on the floor; he hit my parents’ heads, arms and torsos. This small child, no more than three feet tall, possessed with rage: a fiery, blinding sun. In a stumbling dance, my parents pinned him to the ground, holding him down as he fought to breathe in anger once again. Looking at each other, they prayed silently that the monster would remain immobile while I escaped to my window and

the moon beyond.

I concluded that my situation was atypical: none of my friends discussed their home life and so I assumed they didn’t share my troubles. In middle school I began to compensate for this difference by attempting to be perfect. At school, I got good grades, participated in field hockey, and helped run a student organization. At home, I completed my chores without complaint and behaved like a model child. I closed myself off, rarely sharing any information about myself or my family, only speaking about school or the latest trend.

At night, I confided in the moon, releasing my sorrow to the sky.

But a few months ago, I realized that I was no longer confiding in the moon. My brother sat at his computer in the family room, clicking his mouse as he moved himself around a virtual Minecraft world and told me about what he was doing. In that moment, I saw how far I had come from my nine-year-old self. Instead of hiding in my room, face glued to the window, I am out in the open. Instead of cowering in the face of screams and fists, I stand my ground.

In the nine years since my brother’s tantrum, I have shed my meek, withdrawn self to reveal my independent, outgoing self. The years of compensating, although painful, have resulted in academic ability, social capability and emotional maturity. I have come to see that my brother, tied down by disorders and medications, doesn’t have the same freedom. Every day, I am so grateful I don’t share his struggles and every day, I am so grateful for my health. I have become the nurturing one, the wise one. I have become my brother’s moon.

Contact SOFIA BRAUNSTEIN at sofia.braunstein@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS:

Whitney Humanities Center // 3:00 p.m.

Will it be catered? Fingers crossed.

Pasta with marinara sauce. Real easy.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

THE SOCIAL PERILS OF DISABILITY // BY MICHELLE HACKMAN

When Christina Kim ’16 arrived for her freshman year at Yale, construction workers were still hammering an automatic door into the frame of her accessible single. Her family lingered in the courtyard, waiting to carry luggage into her new room. It was the first of many signs that reality on campus would deviate from her expectations.

She did know coming into college that she would need a living space large enough to accommodate the wheelchair she used — so a freshman-sized double was out of the question. But the only accessible room offered that year in Timothy Dwight, her residential college, was a stand-alone single, separate from all the other freshman quarters. While her peers clustered into suites of four in freshman-only entryways, Christina lived alone, closer in proximity to her dean than to any of her friends.

In some ways, Christina found her freshman year liberating: the start of classes marked the first time she began using a motorized wheelchair, which provided her with unprecedented mobility and independence. She enjoyed getting to know other freshmen in her college — the ones she met in her FroCo group and over dinner in the dining hall.

But by the very nature of her disability — Christina has trouble balancing on her feet — she felt shut out of many freshman social circles. She couldn’t go visit her friends in their rooms in TD or on Old Campus because they all lived up flights of stairs. She couldn’t attend many of the events at the Asian American Cultural Center because it had no ramp. And when friends didn’t come to visit her, she would once more find herself alone in her room, isolated. Feeling invisible.

“College is about living with other people — living with friends,” she said. “And I really wanted the college experience.”

Two-and-a-half years later, Christina, now a junior living in Jonathan Edwards College, recounted these details to me in a soft, even voice, suggesting that her disappointment with freshman year has since dissipated. She lives with four other girls, one of whom invited her to transfer to JE during her freshman year.

She has found friends who have learned to make social plans in accessible spaces, such as restaurants with no steps out front. And the Asian American Cultural Center, once a bastion of inaccessibility, has since installed a ramp rendering the first floor accessible, and has adopted a protocol to clear furniture whenever Christina plans to attend an event.

Now, Christina’s preoccupations revolve mainly around her extracurriculars, problem sets and treks up Science Hill, concerns that hardly set her apart from her peers. (Or, at least, the scientifically minded ones.) Still, every so often, she is reminded of her disability: when an automatic door doesn’t open; when it

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snows and paths become obstructed; when an event or party she’d like to attend is only reachable via a flight of stairs. These are the moments when, whatever her desires, Christina’s story diverges from that of the college students around her.

Christina is not alone in this regard. At Yale, 326 undergraduate students are registered with the Resource Office on Disabilities, according to Judy York, the office’s director.

But beyond that, it’s hard to glean much else about the range of needs York’s office witnesses. We cannot know, for example, how many students struggle, at least partially because of their disability, to adjust to life at Yale freshman year. We cannot know how many feel ostracized or stereotyped because of an outward difference in appearance. And we cannot know how many have suffered from the acute social pain of isolation.

These questions haunt me because they are the ones that have so profoundly colored my four years at Yale.

I am completely blind — the only such undergraduate at Yale, York tells me — and throughout my time here, I’ve wondered, with varying degrees of urgency, how my peers perceive me fitting in.

Now, as a senior, I thought it high time to apply my reporter’s eye to the issue: How does a physical disability impact a student’s capacity to find contentment and respect, friendship and maybe even romance?

I decided to focus on students with physical disabilities, not because I believe their conditions to be any more debilitating than psychiatric or intellectual ones, but because, for better or for worse, they are the experiences to which I relate best. But, for the record, Karen Nakamura, an anthropology professor at Yale focusing on disability studies, challenged my dichotomy.

“I would invite you to ask yourself why you are bracketing out visible physical disabilities and whether you might have some latent prejudices in this area yourself,” she said over email.

Nakamura might be on to something. I have always felt profoundly uncomfortable with overtly identifying myself as a person with a disability, no matter how visible it may be. I never dreamed, in all my time at Yale, that I would ever author the words you are now reading.

So why, then, did I change my mind? Perhaps it is because I am nearing graduation, and revealing awkward details about myself no longer perturbs me. Or perhaps it is because moving through a judgmental social environment such as Yale’s with a disability can sometimes feel incredibly frustrating. In the past, when I would come up against these points of frustration, sometimes I would think to myself, “One day I’ll write about this, and maybe then they’ll understand.” ***

I arrived at Yale in the fall of 2011 armed with little other than a relief map of the campus and hope that I would find more mature friends in my new home.

Just several months earlier, my closest high school friends set about making plans for the weekend after our prom. At my high school, seniors typically clustered into groups of 20 or 30 and rented houses with a pool in back. It was an opulent tradition, but one that I didn’t want to miss out on.

As the event drew closer, though, I started noticing that my friends were dodging the question of the house whenever I brought it up, their excuses growing thinner and thinner each time.

Finally, a couple weeks shy of prom, I confronted my best friend, and she snapped. “No one wants you to come, Michelle,” she told me. “They’re worried that if everyone is drunk and you accidentally wander into the pool, no one will notice and you might drown.”

I now realize that my friend was trying to wave aside the inconvenience of being mindful of me on a night that was supposed to be about mindless fun. But at the time, it peeled away years of false confidences that my friends saw me as an equal. My only consolation rested in the fact that, in a few months’ time, I would be living among some of the world’s smartest people, who would know better than to expect me to drown.

That illusion, too, was quickly stripped away.

As my classmates acclimated to campus, I seemed to be the only freshman who still didn’t know how to travel to buildings a mere block away from where I lived — no matter how diligently I studied my map. I sometimes skipped meals, for fear that a dining hall worker would place me at a random table of students, where I couldn’t look around and spot friendly faces for myself. And on Friday and Saturday nights, I didn’t know anyone well enough to tag along when they went out; the few times I accompanied acquaintances to frat parties, I would inevitably lose them and meander my way, quaking, back to my room.

On one such night, I shuttered myself in my

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LEGALLY BLACK

Calhoun Cabaret // 8 p.m.

Zina Ellis’ senior project examines how black women are depicted on stage and screen.

tiny L-Dub single and cried into my pink velvet pillow. Here was where the concept of invisibility first occurred to me: sheltered by my four walls, as long as I sobbed quietly enough and wiped away the tears carefully enough, maybe no one would notice. I spent many nights of my freshman year huddled up with that pillow.

I remember once reading a study that found Americans fear losing their vision more than they fear being diagnosed with heart disease, HIV or cancer. That statistic may sound preposterous — blindness is not a life-threatening illness, after all. Yet sight is so essential to the concept of living that people feel an existential attachment to it, as if to lose their sight would be akin to losing life itself.

Or maybe they just can’t conceive of what it would be like. Plug your ears, and you hear nothing. But close your eyes and you see the insides of your eyelids, the light shining through your lashes, the wild Technicolor of your imagination flashing before you. Whenever I tell someone, “I really don’t see at all — just like you don’t hear anything at all when you cover your ears,” they always seem bamboozled because the sensation I am describing sounds physically impossible. The lack of understanding, in turn, all too easily breeds a lack of respect.

I asked Judy York whether she thinks anything can be done to ease disabled students’ social transition to Yale. When I was a freshman, she had told me that adults would be available to walk me to class, but during evenings and weekends, I was on my own. Now I asked her whether that line of demarcation was fair.

“This is a tough one, to be honest with you,” she said. “I think universities hope that the social network will take over a great deal, so that you can get to where you want to go in the evening.”

“But,” she added, “there’s not much a university can or frankly should do if it does not. I don’t think an institution can force friendships on anybody. And I’m not sure if offering a paid staff person is the right answer toward fulfilling an engaging social life.” ***

WKND RECOMMENDS: Reheated pasta with marinara sauce. Perhaps even easier.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND MIXES

SUITE VICTORY // BY ELIZABETH MILES

FRESHMEN CONSIDERING MIXED GENDER HOUSING 36% YES

MIXED GENDER

44% NO

20% UNSURE

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TOMMY BAZARIAN CD RELEASE St. A’s // 8:00 p.m.

The former Teaspoons crooner goes solo with what he calls a “weird chamber-folk vibe.”

STUDENTS’ STANCE ON EXTENSION OF GENDER NEUTRAL HOUSING Strongly Suport

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FRESHMEN CONSIDERING LIVING IN A MIXED-GENDER SUITE NEXT YEAR

Contact ELIZABETH MILES at elizabeth.a.miles@yale.edu .

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year, because I had no possibilities in mind.”

The class of 2018, whether or not they choose mixed-gender housing, will at least have all the possibilities open to them.

Even students who don’t plan on taking advantage of this opportunity commend the change. Though Summer Kim ’18 has personal reservations about co-ed housing, she appreciates that it’s now available, especially at a place like Yale, because her concerns “don’t resonate with everyone or even a majority of students here.”

Despite the fact that 50 percent of freshmen surveyed expressed interest in mixed-gender housing next year, historically speaking, it has not been quick to catch on. In 2010–11, the first year with mixed-gender housing as a Yale College policy, only 39 seniors took advantage of it.

Though Jones, Gau and Price have strong feelings about the issue, and though they have the support of the student body, they may be in the minority.

The greatest change may not be the number of students who live in co-ed suites, but rather the way the policy’s adoption affects campus culture.

Daniel Dangaran ’15, a freshman counselor in Ezra Stiles College, said his freshmen are very excited. One freshman told him he was glad the YCC succeeded in its task — even if he does not live in a co-ed suite next year, he’s happy the option is available to other freshman.

Dangaran knows that freshmen may hesitate at first.

“Only time will tell which freshmen will decide to take advantage of the policy and opt to live in mixed-gender suites,” he said, “but the option will help to normalize having friendships with people of all genders.” *** Yale’s spaces seem already gender-neutral in many ways, with shared bathrooms, suites connected by fire doors (which are then left open, creating “double suites” of men and women), and even unofficial room swaps or permanent sleepover situations. But, Jones said, an improvised situation is not enough.

“In those instances, there still is a lack of the shared space that you would experience if you were living together,” he said. “With the pol-

“There was a feeling that developmentally, sophomores are not ready for mixed-gender suites,” he said. “There are a whole host of cognitive and social abilities sophomores are still forming, and I think many are not quite ready for the interesting complications that may arise from gender-neutral housing.”

Yet, by the end of 2014, the administration had decided that the complications were secondary to the benefits of the policy.

The possibility of change was first brought to the administration in December 2007, after the LGBTQ Co-Op led demonstrations like a public “sleep-in” on Cross Campus in the snow. The YCC followed, with formal reports that would soon become a staple in their efforts to expand the policy.

From the beginning, the YCC found that “support for gender-neutral housing at home was wide: some Yale students needed gender-neutral housing and virtually none were opposed,” according to Eliscovich Sigal’s letter in the Winter 2014 newsletter. In 2010, after three years of lobbying, the Yale Corporation extended the option for seniors, but some in the administration still considered it an “experiment.”

Since 2010, half a decade has passed, in which the YCC has often returned to students, and heard universally positive experiences from those who chose mixed-gender housing. Herbert explained that at the beginning of this academic year, YCC chose their issues of focus, which included divestment, financial aid, mental health and improving Yale’s sexual climate.

“But of all of the important subjects, the one with the most straightforward fix was the expansion of mixed-gender housing to sophomores,” he said.

Former Yale College Dean Mary Miller had concurred, leaving a recommendation for her successor that the plan become a reality.

So when Herbert and Eliscovich Sigal brought up the issue at their weekly meeting with Dean of Student Affairs Marichal Gentry in September, they were astonished to be told that the option had been taken off the table due to logistical impossibilities. Herbert was floored, feeling that the “sentiment of permanence had not been communicated to students, and … we did not really understand what “logistically impossible” meant.”

At this point, Yale was “the exception, not the rule, in the Ivy League,” so Herbert and Eliscovich Sigal reached out to residential college deans, and to Holloway. They then asked both the YCC Council of Representatives and the Freshman Class Council to vote — both voted unanimously in favor of the policy change.

Herbert lauds campus enthusiasm for the issue, citing various op-eds from students, and the FCC’s engagement with the freshman class, the first to be affected by the change.

Throughout the fall of 2014, Holloway worked with the YCC, citing reasons for the length of the process: difficulties in housing configurations due to more possible options, the readiness of new housing software, and the various administrative channels the policy had to pass through before a decision.

Herbert and Eliscovich Sigal returned to the drawing board, as their predecessors had done many times since 2007, trying to galvanize support from the administration and students. Herbert found Dean Holloway to be receptive and engaged, and the students and administrators collaborated throughout the fall. Eventually, the Council of Masters approved the policy without obstacles, culminating in this major coup for YCC. Eliscovich Sigal considers this “a victory to be celebrated by every Yale student as a triumph of student voice. Only we know our experiences here.”

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In the viral video, “That’s Why I Chose Yale,” cheery Yalies sing about the merits of their suite camaraderie, in which a pair of roommates even have matching sheets.

But living in a suite of four girls, Adrien Gau ’17 almost never sees any of them, doesn’t have meals with them, and often doesn’t return there to sleep.

“I’d much rather hang out with my suite of guy friends every day,” they said. “It would’ve been much easier if I could’ve just lived with them.”

Gau has moved their schoolbooks and food into the boys’ common room, effectively creating a mixed-gender suite. Though on friendly terms with their four suitemates, Gau, who identifies as gender-neutral and prefers the corresponding pronouns, believes their living situation constitutes an unfair restriction of their choices.

“It is really dysphoric for me to think about how I’m forced to live with girls. It’s like a slap in the face from Yale,” they said. “It’s not that I don’t like girls, it’s just, that’s not me. I’m not a girl, but Yale doesn’t care.”

If Gau had entered the University one year later, they wouldn’t have had to move their books and food to their ideal suite. Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway announced the expansion of gender-neutral housing to the sophomore class on Dec. 9, 2014 — it will become an option this fall, affecting the class of 2018. *** In a survey sent to a random sample of undergraduate students by the News, 91 percent of 104 students surveyed were either in support of or indifferent to the policy extension.

Helen Price ’18, for one, is seriously considering living in a mixed gender suite as a sophomore.

She’s happy to be able to live with her best friend next year, rather than wait until her junior year, just because he’s not female.

Many upperclassmen wish Yale had offered them this choice earlier. Dayrin Jones ’16, who currently lives in a suite with four women, found the lack of choices during his sophomore year frustrating, and considered transferring colleges at the end of his freshman year.

“I thought about rooming options outside of [Ezra Stiles College] because I had few male friends in my college,” he said. “I almost ran out of time before I found a roommate sophomore

icy change, I think campus culture will see an increase in respect for the opposite sex.”

The YCC has argued that co-ed suites will de-sexualize spaces — in a suite where men and women choose to live together as friends, the environment mitigates potential instances of sexual hostility. Price agrees with this assessment, adding that the policy change breaks down the symbolic barrier between men and women.

“Now I feel like I can live with my friends, and some of them just happen to be boys. Separating the genders seems very juvenile,” she said.

Alex Borsa ’16, former president of the LGBTQ Co-Op, meanwhile, believes that the policy change will not generate a massive shift in campus culture. The great majority of students, who have supported the policy even if it will never affect them, have already created a gender-neutral environment.

He added that the extension is a success for many queer and gender non-conforming students, and finds it ridiculous that it hasn’t already happened.

Only the official label has been missing. YCC Vice President and project manager for the issue Maia Eliscovich Sigal ’16 said that the administration’s approval was key.

“I think that the rules that they impose shape the culture we live in,” she said. “Through those rules they make it more open, and more flexible.”

Kim shared a similar perspective, adding that “the administration making it official recognizes how students at Yale already live, and how they would feel most comfortable, which is awesome.”

For most Yalies, the new policy merely adapts the suite, the cornerstone of university living, to fit the relationships we have come to rely on for late night food runs, inside jokes and emotional support. The friends we live with are the family we choose for ourselves, unobstructed by gender norms or bureaucratic policies. *** Will there be any obstacles for freshmen next year, despite this seemingly perfect policy? YCC President Michael Herbert ’16 came up with one: “A potential mistake freshmen could make would be choosing to live with someone with whom they are in a relationship,” he explained. “Such relationships often do not last, which could lead to a very awkward situation.”

One set of connected sophomore suites, which became gender-neutral once the fire door was unlocked, saw the effects of one such relationship. The room by the door, the border between the men and the women, now has a sign. “My room is Sweden. Neutral zone.”

Zachary Blickensderfer ’16, a Jonathan Edwards housing representative, dismissed these pitfalls.

“The question of ‘living with significant others’ as being a legitimate concern is absurd, because the University should feel no obligation to prevent couples from making that stupid decision,” he said.

Dangaran is enthusiastic about that freedom, arguing that those who create their suites with all genders will forge trust-filled bonds in a comfortable setting, without gender as a barrier.

Dangaran stresses that those who do not wish to live with suitemates of the opposite gender will obviously have their wishes respected. To him, the change in policy won’t be an obstacle to their campus welfare.

As YCC project manager for the issue, Eliscovich Sigal never encountered any opposition to the change among fellow students. And not a single student interviewed objected to the policy.

They all briefly endorsed it, almost surprised that I had even asked.

Blickensderfer agreed that the policy is just common sense. “Living with people you like is fun. It’s as simple as that.” Simple, but a complicated process. *** In 2013, Dean Holloway told the News he was not in support of mixed-gender suites for sophomores.

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WKND RECOMMENDS: Twice-reheated pasta with marinara sauce and maybe a little mold but you can hardly taste it.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND ARTS

COMEDY, TRAGEDY AND AN OFFICE // BY ELENA SAAVEDRA BUCKLEY The small lobby of 70 Audubon Street holds a pair of elevators with mirrored doors.

You use them to get to The Arts Council of Greater New Haven on the second floor, where you’ll find the Sumner McKnight Crosby Jr. Gallery. Inside — more an office than a typical, spare art space — people answer phones, printers chug out paper and coffee cups languish on conference room tables. I came here to see “Comedy and Tragedy,” an exhibit curated by local artist Tony Juliano.

The show is disorienting, even beyond the creepy setting. The transitions from one artist’s work to another’s are as jarring as the pieces against the office walls. Bright, acrylic portraits lead to a grotesque cartoon of a sewer rat, and dark photography follows blown-up pictures of crumpled sock puppets.

Perhaps I was most confused by how each artist interpreted Juliano’s broad exhibit theme.

But, hey, I don’t blame them — it’s a tough task. In fact, once I saw the pieces and felt the disjointed spaces between them, I ran a few ideas through my head.

At first, I thought I should suss out what comedy and tragedy really are, deep down. The basics. I realized, then, that when you study the abstract ideas, it becomes difficult to tell them apart.

Works by Audrey K a n -

trowitz line the entrance of “Comedy and Tragedy.” The paintings, all portraits done in acrylic, have a fantastical quality. In one, “Red Dreads,” a woman’s hair winds from her head into inhuman shapes. In “Theda Bara,” gold eyes glimmer like embers behind a black and white face. Kantrowitz also displays two portraits of the man she calls her “absolute favorite muse,” Joseph Carey Merrick. (You can find videos of her sketching his head on YouTube.)

Better known as the Elephant Man, Merrick lived during the late 19th century and had severe physical deformities, leaving his face and body with bulging, lopsided tumors. Kantrowitz doesn’t let his unusual appearance warp her careful portraiture. His eyes stare at the viewer as if he were a regular royal sitting for the family painter.

Juliano’s own work follows the portraits: I found some of it by turning on a TV screen in a conference room. His “Four Short Videos from Dr. Wilde Productions” let him try on different creative personae. I could tell Juliano is probably the guy everyone knows in the neighborhood — he’s prolific, a bit kooky, and the writer, director, editor, producer, and actor in most of the shorts. The first is surreal with a surfer rock soundtrack, ending in a face-off between a woman in a leather bodysuit and a nun. Another adds drama to home videos with funeral footage, and a third follows a stuffed sheep through a washing machine. They’re funny like your uncle’s jokes, but their insidious gloom lingers, too.

The larger paintings display some of the best technical skill in the exhibit. Amie

Ziner’s four-paneled piece called “Chemical Love” fuses the natural and the artificial, the organic and the destructive: a container of weed-killing solution sits under the wing of a butterfly, and drops from a beaker morph into the umbilical cord of a purple, alien baby. “Fire Ant”

by Edward R. Shaw depicts what its title suggests, the smooth, futuristic insect glowing with an eerie green light.

When I left the exhibit, past

girls waiting in the lobby for ballet lessons, a photograph

by Jesse Richards stayed in my head. It’s one of the first pieces I walked by, hung on the side of a cubicle and barely larger than a small paperback book.

A woman with short blond hair crouches, blurry, on a reflective surface that looks like a mudflat. Her long, spidery legs end in a pair of chunky black heels, and her hand almost touches the

ground. She’s black and white and a bit out of focus, like the visualization of a character in a novel.

Why did this piece, dim and understated next to the more flamboyant works, stay with me? I think the photograph addresses the exhibit’s theme on a deeper level, whether Richards knew it or not. The image is weird, the heeled woman out of place. She’s reaching for some-

thing, though, and she hasn’t quite grasped it. Those subtle intersections of “comedy” and “tragedy,” if we can even call them that, often pass by without second thought. We can pull them towards their extremes, but still, they’re most effective when they’re a little bit blurry, not quite in focus.

Contact ELENA SAAVEDRA BUCKLEY at elena.saavedrabuckley@yale.edu .

STEP RIGHT UP TO “SIDE SHOW” // BY EMILY XIAO

“Side Show,” the Yale School of Art’s first exhibition of 2015, has come to town as the main event at 32 Edgewood Gallery. On view until March 20, the exhibition features a wide array of paintings, photographs, banners, dioramas, and historical odds-and-ends, an illuminating cross-section of material artifacts and fine art dating from the mid-18th century to the present.

The unifying theme is the carnival sideshow: a form of escapist entertainment that has b e e n situ-

ated in so many ways — geographically, bodily, psychologically — on the outskirts of the mainstream.

“Side Show” encourages our active consideration of “low-brow” material culture through its placement into a fine-art setting, not an unusual device in curation. An almost obsessive consumption of the exceptional and the abnormal dictates the overall energy of the exhibition. (And, in a way, both popular and high culture share this common fascination.) Curated by Lisa Kereszi ’00 M.F.A. and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Art, the sheer spectacle of “Side Show” is heightened by a lack of accompanying text or labels. These graphic, garish, dreamy pieces pack a visceral, visual punch on their own terms. For instance, upon entering the exhibition through the back door of 32 Edgewood Gallery, visitors are greeted by a taxidermied two-headed calf; nearby is a Feejee Mermaid, a gruesome patchwork of monkey torso and fish tail. If so inclined, of course, curious gallery-goers can pick up handouts that thoroughly document all of the pieces on display. It would be difficult, in fact, to fully appreciate, or even understand, the exhibition’s intent without the supplementary information and curator’s notes provided. In addition, lectures, performances, and live entertainment — beginning with an opening lecture by magician, historian, and collector Ricky Jay — constitute a line-up of sideshows to “Side Show” itself.

In keeping with the sideshow-becomes-mainevent theme, these additional events are central in ensuring that “Side Show,” which might otherwise be spectacle for spectacle’s sake, i n s tea d serves a s

the focus for a critical look at a morally questionable industry. Less than ideally, some of the artists in the exhibition seem to excessively romanticize or appropriate the kind of physical ‘other’-ness that sideshows so infamously exploit — for example, Diane Arbus, whose black-and-white photography is included in the exhibition, once said, “There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle.”

At the same time, “Side Show” includes several pieces that challenge this history of exploitation and push against discriminatory social attitudes toward, for example, physical disability. Particularly striking is artist Riva Lehrer’s life-sized, fullfrontal-nude drawing of actor and performance artist Mat Fraser, who was born with phocomelia of the arms. (This congenital disorder resulted from his mother’s use of the anti-nausea drug thalidomide in the sixties.) A disability activist who stars in “American Horror Story: Freak Show,” Fraser performed at the exhibition’s opening reception; Lehrer herself was born with spina bifida and will participate in a panel discussion on January 26. In displaying the work of artists like Fraser and Lehrer, “Side Show” and its accompanying events provide space for their visions and voices, much as the original sideshows gave many performers the opportunity to financially sustain themselves and their families. More importantly, Fraser, Lehrer and other artists in the exhibition redirect the visual vocabulary of sideshows toward more subversive and more productive purposes.

The show’s intellectual and emotional power exists less in any transgressive juxtaposition of high and low culture, and less in any taboo representation of the body: it rests rather in the social critiques put forth by these various artists, in a sense, the most empowering form of transgression. David Carbone’s vivid painting of a female contortionist on a red background is a celebration of the human body, directing us to marvel at its sheer imaginative range, at the existence of fire-breathers and swordeaters. And in the same vein, “Side Show” connects us to unique individuals, from magicians to punkrock disability activists, and their fresh prespectives. Ultimately, these people take center stage — expanding our understanding of the range of human art, and of human experience.

Contact EMILY XIAO at emily.xiao@yale.edu .

// MICHELLE CHAN

FRIDAY JANUARY

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THE YALE LITERARY MAGAZINE RELEASE PARTY

WKND RECOMMENDS:

8 Edgewood Ave.// 9:00 p.m.

Yale’s literary circles converge for a night of cocktail conversation that will be way over your head

General Tso’s Chicken from Main Garden. And while you’re there, could you pick us up an order?

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND SHOPS

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THERAPY

Shop Till You Stop

Where else will you get an $80 crocheted shawl-scarf? Where else can you shop with the calming knowledge that surely nothing so expensive could be produced in sweatshop conditions? And that cardigan is just. So.

On Saturday, Jan. 17, the Yale Record protested in favor of opening a second Kiko Milano downtown. WKND couldn’t endorse the protest more strongly — that is, unless it was in jest, in which case we couldn’t take greater issue with the Record’s flippancy in a matter of such great importance. To hedge our bets, we’ve provided a winter shopping catalogue for the sartorially, cosmetically and status-conscious Yalie. Now that the annoying kind of shopping is done with, you can indulge in exploring the Shops at Yale!

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to step inside Gant, the shirt and shop that dressed Yale? Have you, poor thing, ever wondered what it would be like if you were actually dressed by Gant? Well, wonder and hope no further. The only thing you can afford in our store is the paper stuffing we put in our extra-exclusive leather shoes.

Some might ask, “What with the widespread poverty, paucity of supermarkets, and general urban dysfunction of New Haven, does downtown really need an extra virgin olive-oil emporium?” And the answer to that question would be yes. You can search long and far, but in the whole realm of western Connecticut you’ll be hard pressed to find a store where you can you sample lemon olive oil (totally not vile), black cherry vinegar (we ourselves have a hard time knocking back that one) and just about nothing else. Besides, where else will you get GANT your mother the imported olive oil she didn’t know she always wanted?

Honestly, you need us more than we need you.

Honorable mentions: Therapy, idiom, idiocy, barbour, barber, Maison Matthis, Atticus, unnamed line of storefront windows on Howe Street that you pass on the way to Mamoun’s, Jack Willis, Greg’s Tailor, United Church on the Green, juice bar whose name we forget with $8 kale smoothie, Shen (“seemless garments” that are “made from the finest yarns”), Hello Boutique and

Please see website: “Every individual has a positive message to share with the world and by incorporating powerful symbolism and infusion (+) energy into each piece, Alex and Ani provides a vehicle for the wearer to express their individuality in an organic, spiritual way.” WKND couldn’t have said it better, though we might’ve mentioned Prana

SATURDAY JANUARY

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“SELMA”

Whitney Humanities Center // 3:00 p.m.

The powerful film, and controversial Oscar snub, is on view at the WHC.

WKND RECOMMENDS:

SATURDAY JANUARY

Fried eggs with the yolks broken because you tried to flip them with a spoon.

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THE YALE SCHOLA CANTORUM: HANDEL’S “JUDAS MACCABEUS”

WKND RECOMMENDS:

St. Mary’s Church // 7:30 p.m.

This is our jam.

Toast. No butter.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND COVER

TURNING A BLIND EYE // BY MICHELLE HACKMAN

Josh Slocum ’18 and I spent the first ten minutes of our interview missing one another — I could not see him waiting for me, and he could not hear me circling the shop, calling his name.

Even though Josh entered Yale three years after me, when I recounted my freshman year to him at a corner table in Blue State, he laughed with sympathy. Josh is close to totally deaf, and the device he uses, a cochlear implant, hooks around his right ear, and is supplemented by a hearing aid in his left.

“It’s always that initial meeting that’s nervewracking,” Josh said. Though he pledged to shed the shame surrounding his disability at the start of college — “It’s a fresh start!” — he also wanted to combat the sometimes inflated notion that his deafness is a primary character trait.

“Once I tell someone that I’m deaf, it’s like they don’t really know how to handle me,” he said. People tend to raise their voices to a nearshout when speaking to Josh, though he said that doesn’t actually help him hear them. Some people, he said, bring their faces extremely close to him or gesticulate wildly when they speak. If Josh asks someone to repeat himself, he fears the other person might subconsciously think he is not interested enough to listen. Others, upon learning about his hearing impairment, assume he is either helpless or dumb.

Even though the individuals I interviewed for this story run the gamut of physical disability, one shared experience stood out to them in particular: otherwise intelligent adults, such as Yale students, too easily tack on negative traits to physical differences — such as a lack of intelligence, of responsibility, of complex desire.

“People often don’t know how to approach and interact with folks with disabilities,” Nakamura wrote me. “They make assumptions about what folks with disabilities can and can’t do.

They are afraid of offending — saying something wrong or doing something wrong.”

This reality certainly rings true for me.

Hardly a week passes that a passerby doesn’t try to divert me to an elevator from a set of stairs, despite my functioning legs. All too often, a cashier will turn to a friend standing next to me and tell her the price of my coffee, rather than speaking to me directly. Just the other day, while meeting with my editor about this story, I was eating bits off the top of a muffin when a stranger interrupted our conversation to call over, “Ma’am, just so you know, there’s paper on that muffin!”

Unlike Josh, people don’t always notice Julia Calagiovanni’s ‘15 disability. Julia has a mild form of cerebral palsy that has caused her left leg to grow slightly shorter than the right, which gives her a slight limp and requires her to bend her knees as she walks. But Julia’s condition isn’t always evident; most often, it is mistaken for a temporary injury. “Are you okay?” people routinely ask her. “You’re limping.”

One summer, Julia worked as a girl scout counselor, where her young students felt less abashed: “The kids would be like, ‘Miss C, why do you walk like a duck?’”

Julia wonders why acquaintances feel so comfortable prying into potentially sensitive topics. “It’s an example of people commenting on other people’s bodies in unwanted ways,” she said.

Like Julia, Ivy Wanta ’17 has endured plenty of unwanted comments. She told me her friends enjoy attributing aspects of her personality to her visual impairment. (Ivy is legally blind.)

Sometimes, their points have merit: friends say Ivy is unusually organized and responsible, perhaps because her disability has forced her to plan ahead more than her peers. But others grate on her. “Some people say that my cynical sense of humor is because of my disability, and I just don’t think that’s true,” she said. “What I feel like they’re saying is, ‘Half of you is the real you, and half of you is because of this thing.’” *** Had Jessie Benedict ’16 not told me before our interview that she had little to no functioning hearing, I would never have been able to guess. She bounded into Flavors, where we had agreed to meet because Jessie can’t hear over the whir of a coffee shop espresso machine. She promptly spotted me, greeting me with a jovial laugh and offering to steer me through the line of frozen yogurt toppings. “Who is the disabled one here?” I caught myself thinking.

So I was taken aback when, like Josh, Jessie confessed that meeting new people sometimes scares her. But unlike Josh, Jessie most often wears hearing aids inside her ears, invisible to the people around her. That fact lets her get away with more — she doesn’t have to “disclose” her deafness if she doesn’t want to — but it can also create awkward situations when someone says hi and she appears to ignore him.

(This is a common difficulty across disabilities;

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Ivy tells me that people routinely wave in her direction, and she can never see well enough to be sure that they mean to say hello or whether they’re “just, you know, hailing a taxi.”)

Jessie said she typically feels most at ease meeting new people when they are somehow already privy to her hearing impairment or when it comes up naturally in conversation.

“But if I say, ‘Oh I’m hearing-impaired,’ then people will get awkward,” she said. “It’s like, by the way, I’m going to tell you this burden.”

That’s not to say that Jessie — or any of the other students I interviewed, for that matter — have not found some devoted friends. But all of us have discovered those friends on different timelines, each employing a different strategy.

Jessie hardly had any trouble at all after jumping the “disclosure” hurdle. Ivy and Josh have had to discern between those acquaintances who seemed hung up on their disabilities and others who were more willing to look past them.

For me, the process of finding friends was perhaps more studied. No matter how terrible I felt, I always forced myself to wander into new club meetings, college events and neighboring suites. I used a charm offensive, chatting with each individual I encountered so aggressively that, if I was successful, which I often was, their attention would quickly be drawn away from the cane in my hand. Come October or November of my freshman year, I had found a place on my hallmates’ futon, laughing about Internet memes and watching reality TV shows I didn’t quite care about — all to give me an excuse to stick around. Soon, we had begun coordinating nightly dinners.

Just this week, I sat down with two of my best friends, Andres Bustamante ’15 and Carla Vasquez-Noriega ’15, the latter of whom had been the friend to offer me her couch freshman year. How weird had it been, really, to become my friend? “It’s not something you’re not aware of,” Andres started. “But you meet so many people in the first couple of weeks, that it’s like, ‘Yeah, she’s just another person I met.’”

Carla agreed. She’d seen me rushing up and down the entryway stairs or splashing water on my face in the bathroom so often, she said, that she soon became desensitized to any outward difference. “I was like, oh, that’s Michelle!

That’s Michelle bumping into my door trying to get in.”

YOU DON’T WANT TO FEEL HELPLESS, BUT SOMETIMES YOU ARE — AND THERE’S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. JOSH SLOCUM ’18

Still, they have had to learn strategies. Both know, when we are taking a group photo, to ask the photographer to snap his fingers so I can look in the right direction. Both know never to leave me in a large group setting — especially a party — because they know how much the temporary isolation triggers my anxiety.

I heard similarly heartwarming tales of friendship from everyone I interviewed. Ivy’s friends know to keep an eye on her in crowded spaces, since she won’t be able to see them.

Josh’s friends know he likes to stay away from the dance floor at a party, in a part of the room where the music isn’t quite so loud. And Nick Cugini ’14, another wheelchair user I briefly interviewed, told me his friends would offer to carry him up flights of stairs, unprompted, whenever friends were getting together in an inaccessible suite.

I think my friends needed some time to see past the blindness, to realize that, with a little adaptation, I could give and receive as much from a friendship as anyone. As Jessie put it, we knew we’d succeeded when friends felt comfortable enough to crack jokes in front of us. “I probably don’t hear most of the deaf jokes you make anyway,” she said. *** One of the toughest things to balance with friends — or with anyone, really — is to learn when to ask for help and when it may be appropriate to reject it. Some disabilities rights activists, like Nakamura, reject the notion that individuals with physical impairments need more help than anyone else. When I told Nakamura that, at least a few times per week, I lose one of my shoes under the dusty depths of my bed and need sighted help finding it, she countered: “Someone who is sighted might still need their roommate to help with other difficult situations.”

YALE PERCUSSION GROUP Morse Recital Hall // 7:30 p.m.

The thunderous prelude to the YPG’s next-day performance at Carnegie Hall.

That sounded a little rosy to me. To confirm, I asked Carla and Andres whether, over the years, they’d had to provide me with any help outside the bounds of an otherwise normal friendship. They loved this question.

“There are so many things!” Andres said.

“I mean,” Carla answered matter-of-factly, “you bump into shit all the time.”

“The fact that you constantly have crumbs on your clothing,” Andres said.

“Or when we have to point out when your cleavage is hanging out,” Carla added.

Every student with a disability I interviewed agreed: there are situations where we undeniably need our friends’ assistance. But asking for and accepting help can be a difficult balance to negotiate. Sometimes, we need assistance with small tasks — matching a scarf with a shirt, for example, or serving ourselves food in the dining hall — but asking for too much can feel demeaning. Nick, for example, may need a friend to help open a door or lift a book off the shelf. Ivy may need help copying down the numbers her professor is scrawling on the chalkboard. And Josh might need to ask his friends to repeat themselves over and over.

There are times when, despite their best efforts, friends do get annoyed. Ivy recently went to Claire’s and when she asked a friend to read her the menu, the friend responded, “No, I’ll just read you the highlights.”

“I try to really restrain myself unless I know it’s something I can ask really quickly,” Jessie told me. “I make conscious choices to miss out on something instead of pestering people.”

There are still other times when help is unceremoniously foisted upon us, such as unsolicited advice on when to cross the street while we are walking our regular route home, which we must either reluctantly accept or reject at the risk of seeming rude. Whenever a stranger intervenes in my daily routine, I restrain the urge to react in frustration because I know the impulse to help is well-intentioned.

But it’s hard not to find repeated offers of help irksome, especially as they build up throughout the day. When I can, I refuse strangers’ offers as politely as possible, with a thank-you and an assurance that I know what I am doing. For a time, I took to wearing a Yale sweatshirt when flying, because airport employees can be particularly patronizing. That worked for a while; but when one employee asked me if I was wearing the sweatshirt because I had a relative at Yale, I swore off the practice.

“It does wear you down over time,” Josh said.

“You don’t want to feel helpless, but sometimes you are — and there’s nothing you can do about it.” *** By the time I reached my senior year at Yale, it seemed like I’d accomplished most things I’d set out to do: I’d made a bunch of friends; I’d found intellectual satisfaction at the Yale Daily News; and I’d traveled places on my own, mainly for news stories, that I’d never before thought possible. But no matter how much I’d put my mind to it, I’d never found someone who wanted to date me.

The problem, as I viewed it, was one of perception. Sure, I’d found people who wanted to be my friend, but I feared their image of me ended there. If I was so often viewed as a creature to be helped, the chances were slim that I’d also be seen as a person capable of love.

When I confided my theory to my friends, they wouldn’t challenge it, which only made me more despondent.

// ALEXANDRA SCHMELING

Of all the topics I broached during my interviews, none provoked so many emotions as did the topic of love and dating. Of course, our experiences differed vastly. For some, their disability amounted to a sometimes humorous inconvenience; for others, it felt more like an insurmountable barrier.

Jessie recounted a series of dates she’d recently gone on. Her first date, at the art gallery, passed without an occasion to mention her hearing impairment. On her second date at Barcelona, she felt too embarrassed to tell her date that the restaurant was too noisy, choosing instead to lip-read her way through the night.

But for their third meeting, her date suggested a movie, and Jessie was forced to wear more powerful hearing aids — “big deaf girl hearing aids,” as she calls them. When she finally raised the topic of her impairment, “He was like, ‘What?!’ and picked up my hair to check.”

Ivy articulated a similar discomfort with allowing her disability to interfere with a budding romance. Recently, she was studying in a guy’s room, holding her textbook close to her face so she could make out the text. He teased her, and she said nothing. “With some people, it can definitely kill the vibe,” she said. “I don’t like that I think that, but I guess that it’s true.”

For others, a disability can curtail a person’s chances at finding dates altogether. Although my friend Katie Wang, a post-doctoral fellow at Yale, had tried OK Cupid, she said she’d never made it past making a match. “When you make contact with somebody online,” she said, “you probably want to tell them before you meet them in person that you’re blind. And then some people might decide not to meet with you for that reason. And you just sort of have to deal with the psychological consequences of that.”

Katie and I shared this mindset. While my friends met guys at parties or in class, I all but gave up on trying. I couldn’t catch a guy’s eye, and even if I could have, I doubted anyone would approach me if I looked so obviously disabled.

I was so attuned to the idea that I was undatable that, when an acquaintance started dropping not-so-subtle hints, I didn’t pick up on them. When he started calling me, asking for advice on classes, I thought it was strange but nothing more. He asked me out to coffee, and though I agreed, I sprained my ankle on the proposed day and never rescheduled. It ultimately took a mutual friend (and a fair amount of convincing) to set us up before we went on our first date.

Nearly two months later, he and I were walking hand in hand down Amsterdam Avenue on New York’s Upper West Side. We were chatting about nothing when, seemingly out of nowhere, he asked a question I’d been dreading since we’d started dating: “If you can’t see me,” he asked gingerly, “How did you know you were attracted to me?” I stumbled through an answer about nonvisual features — the way he held my hand, the way he told stories about his family.

After a pause, I changed course: “I guess it’s still a little hard for me to believe that — that, well, you’d want to date me even though I can’t see.” He laughed and held my hand tighter.

“Honestly,” he said, “Most often, I don’t even remember.”

Contact MICHELLE HACKMAN at michelle.hackman@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: Your housemate’s leftover General Tso’s chicken from Main Garden. Quietly. While he sleeps.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND VOLUNTEERS

THE LEAST WE CAN DO // BY DAVID MCCULLOUGH

// JANE KIM

Last Monday at around 9 a.m., roughly 250 Yalies shuffled out of the brisk morning air and into Dwight Chapel to register for the annual MLK Day of Service. After a fair amount of encouragement from a friend, I had tagged along.

The inside of the church was bustling with students and administrators. The floor was littered with an assortment of lunch foods: apples, oranges, sandwiches, chocolate chip cookies, potato chips, bottled water and so on. Students, bundled in every type of fleece-lined clothing one can imagine, wandered from station to station filling plastic bags with apples, oranges, potato chips, cookies and so on. Groups of freshmen gossiped in the corner, while a few lone, bearded u p p e rc l a ss m a n wa n d e re d between the crowds, abandoned by their still-sleeping friends.

Luckily my pals aren’t lazy — at least not the four I signed up with. The basic premise of the Day of Service is for Yalies to sign up and volunteer for several hours at any of a number of community centers or charitable organizations. My friends and I wanted to give back, which is the mission for the Day of Service, but we also wanted to have a good time, so we devised a foolproof plan: we would all arrive at the chapel early, and sign up to volunteer at the same organization.

Unfortunately, I arrived late. I walked up to one of my buddies, who told me they had signed up for the soup kitchen and that I needed to go register. The registration desk sat at the far end of the chapel, and I moseyed over and got in line. Then the unique cognitive function (or lack thereof) that accompanies the early morning kicked in. As a result, I managed to sign up for the wrong organization. An excellent first note of the day. Thankfully, though, the notes improved as the day went on. *** Around 30 minutes later, five of us arrived at a one-room music school, tucked off Whalley Ave-

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nue, that looked as if it was refurbished from an old, retired garage.

The blue letters over the windows read “Music Haven.”

Just after we reached the parking lot, a silver sedan pulled in.

A young, amiable-looking man stepped out, holding a box of Dunkin’ Donuts and a bag of paintbrushes. This, I would later learn, was Greg Tompkins: resident musician and volunteer coordinator at Music Haven, the second violinist in the organization’s string quartet, a tutor of fourteen students, and our boss for the day.

After we introduced ourselves, Greg brought us into the giant classroom and pointed at the walls and bathroom that needed painting. He wanted one giant wall a burnt mustard, the other wall white, and the bathroom sunflower yellow. We nodded and got to work.

First we laid down plastic sheets beneath areas that needed painting, moved tables and dressers, stripped the walls of photographs and hangers, and made a quick run to the Family Dollar for sandpaper and extra brushes.

After the setup was done, the job went by in a whir of sanding, spackling, dusting and painting.

All the while, the various musicians and students bustled in and out of the classroom, in the hectic pre-show preparation for their Martin Luther King Jr. Day Concert, which was to take place later that day. We ignored the tuning of violins and shuffling of sheet music, and continued to work. In fact, it wasn’t until the afternoon, during our lunch break, that Tompkins explained the details of the organization we were helping out.

Music Haven is a communitybased, tuition-free organization that provides instruments and lessons for elementary through high school students from the Newhallville, The Hill, Dixwell, Fairhaven, West Rock and Dwight neighborhoods. The teachers are all performing musicians, who play together in a string quartet.

The tuition-free model is based on that of Community

Music Works in Providence, Rhode Island, and Music Haven has a sister organization in Boston called musiConnects, but beyond those three, no other organization in the country follows this model.

Tina Lee Hadari MUS ’04 founded the organization in 2006 to address a dual need: local kids had few options available for musical education, and artists wanted to give back.

“The summer before I got here in 2006, there had been a whole wave of crime committed by teenagers in the communities,” Hadari says. “A lot of people were saying that there were no opportunities for them to engage in positive learning outside school.”

By founding Music Haven, Hadari hoped to provide such an opportunity. When the program opened in 2006, it enrolled 24 students. Today there are 80. Hadari describes the organization’s progress as “slow and steady,” and attributes it to the “highly rigorous” educational program and great individual engagement with the students.

Music Haven’s growth hasn’t gone unnoticed: Hadari describes the response to it as overwhelmingly positive. It has been named by the President’s Committee of Arts and Humanities as one of the top 50 after-school programs in the country, and just this past Friday, Music Haven received the Champion in Actions Award from Citizens Bank.

But as a non-profit program that doesn’t charge its students tuition, Music Haven can’t get by on its own. It relies on donations and volunteers to keep the operation afloat. And when volunteers free up funding that can go towards Music Haven’s mission, donations can be easier to come by.

“When you’re a non-profit you want as much of your funding as possible to go to what your service is,” Tompkins says, “partially because that’s what brings more donors on board — you can show that most of your funding goes to what they want to be funding.”

In other words, small acts — like painting a wall — might have

FOUR NATIONS ENSEMBLE

Yale Collection of Musical Instruments // 3:00 p.m.

You know that building that’s never, ever open? Well, guess what.

an actual impact on the lives of Music Haven students.

Students like Noel Mitchell.

Mitchell, 15 years old, is a freshmen at Wilbur Cross High School and a student at Music Haven.

He’s been involved with the organization since elementary school and now, in addition to his violin classes, he works as Hadari’s assistant after school. I asked what Music Haven has meant to him.

“I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now if it wasn’t for Music Haven,” he replied. “I wouldn’t be able to travel and to play violin.” *** But Music Haven is just one of a number of organizations Yalies volunteered at on MLK Day. The roughly 250 students who signed up — double the previous year’s number — went on to volunteer at 25 sites around New Haven, from public park clean-ups to the Jewish Community Center to neighborhood housing services. Alec Hoeschel ’17, community service chair on the Yale Student-Athlete College Council and the friend that got me to volunteer last Monday, worked at a local soup kitchen, where he cleaned out the pantry and helped organize and shelve their inventory.

Akintunde Ahmad ’18 worked with the Black Men’s Union at a local middle school. There, he and other members put on workshops to help kids with the college process, or with transitions to middle or high school.

Both Hoeschel and Ahmad found personal value in their experiences on MLK Day. Ahmad, who is from Oakland, Calif., says his background makes volunteerism particularly important to him.

“It’s important to remember where you came from,” he says.

“Me personally, I couldn’t have been in the position that I am today if it hadn’t been for people giving back time.”

Hoeschel says he feels it’s important to give back, and the hundreds who made their way to Dwight Hall at 9 a.m. on a day

off suggest that he’s not the only one. Part of that turnout was due to Hoeschel’s own work: his influence helped get the Student-Athlete Council involved with the Day of Service, which was one of the main reasons for this year’s marked increase in turnout.

“It was great to see everyone from all the different groups come together on this special day and volunteer for the community,” he says.

Briana Burroughs ’17, who as the Institutional Service Coordinator at Dwight Hall was responsible for organizing the Day of Service, says she loves seeing Yalies who feel compelled to give back to the city around them.

“People want to come in and sign up,” she says. “It’s exciting for people to think their impact can be so great or so big in one day.” *** Back at Music Haven on Monday, the tarps were wrapped and thrown away, paint cans hammered shut, and the sunflower and mustard yellow walls had begun to dry. All five of us stood in front of the bright walls, scratching our heads and hoping our limited painting abilities had proved up to the task.

I broke from the huddle and went to wash my paint-stained hands in the bathroom. When I walked out I saw Tina stick her head in through the door to the hallway. Her face lit up. “Wow! Thank you guys so so much! It looks amazing.”

Many of the organizations Yalies worked for on Monday depend upon goodwill.

“We wouldn’t survive without volunteers,” Greg says of Music Haven.

On Monday, I painted onefifth of a wall. And although it can sometimes feel like our individual contributions are infinitesimal, taken together, they help organizations that make a great difference. Just ask Noel.

Contact DAVID MCCULLOUGH at david.mccullough@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS: The heel of a stale baguette. Microwave it with a damp paper towel to soften it.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND COLUMNS

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS: GYM-GOING EDITION // BY LEAF ARBUTHNOT

The New Year offers what looks like an unspoiled slope, a glittering stretch of fresh powder upon which the invigorated skier can glide. There may be moguls lying in wait, but they’ll surely not be as choppy as those encountered yesteryear, and if there are blizzards, today the weather is fine.

This year, the world found itself poised on the edge of a new demi-decade, 2015–2020. Would it be successful a successful one?

Cataclysmic? Would Venice sink to the bottom of the sea; would Kim Kardashian make Congress?

But not all changes need be so seismic. Faced with the New Year, some resolve to call their parents more. Others vow to call them less. And many promise to visit the gym, diverting time they may usually spend in cafes to hours heaving and pushing in a roomful of machines.

In an abstract sense, setting oneself on the path to fitness is

no bad thing. The festive season is, after all, no health trip: rich foods, family arguments and an overwhelming affection for the couch are not great for the body.

Let the people exercise if they desire to do so; let degenerating muscle become sinew again, and thighs become svelte once more.

The problem is, the normal January upsurge in gym attendance seems this year to have gone hand-in-hand with a nosedive in gym etiquette. I go to Payne Whitney, whose gargantuan gym is on the fourth floor.

This month has been busier than ever; at rush hour (5 till 7 p.m.), you have to queue for a treadmill, or settle for a seat on one of the exercise bikes. There are many new faces, and luminous sneakers that have never set foot outdoors. The gym in Payne Whitney is swelteringly hot, and tinkles with the sound of metal on metal. Finding a spot to stash one’s coat is now well-nigh

impossible.

What’s more, the Ten Commandments of gym-going — invented by me, and listed below

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

for your delectation — are being consistently flouted. You’d think that the masses were unaware of their authority. As an aide-mem-

Thou shalt wipe down the machines that thou hast used Thou shalt not leave the magazines in disarray on the table Thou shalt not swagger around as if thou wert Obama Thou shalt not hover by the thirsty soul using the drinking fountain; let him or her rehydrate in peace Thou shalt not grunt as if thou wert the Hulk Thou shalt not walk extremely slowly on tread mills at peak hours Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s abs / arms / outfit Thou shalt sign in if thou art expected to do so Thou shalt place thy rubbish in the correct trash cans, and never on the floor Thou shalt not read academic papers whilst using equipment — it lowers the morale of all in the vicinity

oire, these commandments are reproduced here.

I’m not saying that all those who are breaking these rules are new-fangled gym-goers. The most heinous crimes at Payne Whitney are often committed by those who know the system best. One patron I often glowered at last semester sweats all over his machine and leaves it aglint once he is done, without bothering to wipe it down. A girl I used to smile at (but no longer do) rips pages from magazines meant for communal use. She folds her stolen sheets into fours and stashes them in her bra. I nearly fell off my treadmill in fury the other day when I saw her tear out a perfume sample from an old Vogue.

So clearly, a lot of the criminals are old hands.

Still, January will not last forever, and soon the gym will empty out again. Resolutions made in the ferment of late December will quietly expire. Sneakers will lie

unused in lockers as their owners abandon them for the comfort of the couch; thighs that once dreamt of svelte-ness will be rudely awakened. My promise to my future self — that I would learn to do the splits — is looking increasingly extravagant.

But at least I will have the gym to myself.

One storm cloud, however, does loom stubbornly on the horizon. In 2017, Yale will open two new residential colleges, swelling the undergraduate population by 800 students. There is as yet not a whisper from the sports administration as to how Yale will cope with the influx. I fear that unless steps are taken to increase Payne Whitney’s capacity, every month in the gym will feel like a January — chaotic and panicky, with few free machines and absolutely no esprit de corps.

Contact LEAF ARBUTHNOT at leaf.arbuthnot@googlemail.com .

Getting Tangled Up in Blue // BY NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH I don’t remember the first time I heard “Tangled Up In Blue.” Bob Dylan was one of those artists I grew up with, like Woody Guthrie and Paul Simon, and it was my mother’s favorite song of his. “Tangled Up In Blue” begins “Blood on the Tracks,” Dylan’s greatest album, which turns 40 this week. As a work of musical genius, the song shines especially bright today, having gone untarnished by the decades. It is a work of singular wonder and beauty, and although Dylan wrote great songs before and after “Tangled Up in Blue,” it remains perhaps the closest to perfection he has ever come.

Although the instrumentals themselves are nothing technically notable, they do their job: the guitar’s small circular pattern pulls in the listener, and once the drums and bass kick in a second later, there’s no chance of escape. There’s a certain calm to this song, partly a result of the laid-back groove and partly from Dylan’s voice, which sounds smooth and refined in a way that it never had before, echoing with a sort of omniscience. He sings with the weariness of a man who knows he has seen all there is to see; he carries supreme confidence in his own awareness. This might be Dylan’s finest vocal: He abandons both the rough-hewn folk-singer persona of his early career and the electric rockstar he played in the mid-’60s, when his voice, full of scorn and spite, crashed and broke in cresting waves upon the protests of viciously hostile crowds. No — this is Dylan in total, quiet command, and his voice rings with an indelible permanence through the song and the entire album.

Despite the song’s sublime sound, its greatest strengths lie in its lyrics. Dylan is the modern Bard, and this is his masterpiece. His lyrics ramble from a tumultuous Brooklyn Heights to a seedy Midwestern strip club, from the Great North Woods all the way down the Mississippi to Delacroix, from the past to the present and back again, switching at whim between the first person and the third. Each verse is a vignette of incredible power and vividness, and the unforgettable details jump out like embers shining in the dark. “I just kept looking at the side of her face/In the spotlight so clear,” he sings, carrying the pain of loss and the joy of rediscovery in two short lines. Or maybe the grim resignation of departure weighs heaviest: “We drove that car as far as we could/Abandoned it

SUND AY JANUARY

25

out West/Split up on the docks that night/Both agreeing it was best.” These lyrics create images far greater than the words themselves. They evoke an entire era — the glorious, glamorous 1960s, full of revolution and madness and aspirations to utopia, quickly fading from view in the cultural chaos of the mid-1970s. It is a hesitant lament to a time most of us never knew, whose legacy remains uncomfortably uncertain.

But in some sense, it’s wrong to talk about “Tangled Up In Blue” as a single song. Dylan has officially released at least four versions of the track, and bootlegs of other live performances abound. And each time he performs it, something different emerges — maybe he’s tweaked the lyrics a bit, or changed the melody around, or decided to add one instrument and remove another. The album version of “Tangled Up In Blue” has a certain hope to it: Even though his relationships have fallen apart over the years at the mercy of cultural shifts, there’s still some unreached promised land out there. On his European tour in 1984, he changed around most of the lyrics, and while the essential message remained unchanged, the images are richer and darker.

He and his lover still encounter each other at a strip club, but this time the experience is uncomfortably visceral: “I could feel the heat and the pulse of her/As she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe,” he sings. In this version, sailors come close to drowning, and widows go penniless. Dylan claims he likes this version best, and maybe that’s because the visions are eerier. They’re starkly uncompromising; they carry more of the ages with them.

But Dylan’s greatest reinterpretation of his own song came before he decided to alter the lyrics. On June 7, 1978, at the Los Angeles Coliseum, he played a version of “Tangled Up In Blue” so profoundly haunting as to be an entirely different work altogether. Gone is the powerful strumming; absent is the gleaming twinkle of hope. Instead, a soft guitar slowly marks the beat behind a mournful, beautiful interplay between the organ and tenor saxophone. No light seeps into this version of the song, no chance of reunion or redemption. The lyrics, now, are in the third-person, as Dylan distances himself from the events, a conscious attempt to put it all behind him. Perhaps, in the middle of the national tumult of the Carter

// ZISHI LI

presidency, Dylan just couldn’t bear the heavy burden of the memories of previous years.

Perhaps he needed to move on, reinvent his music and persona, change his clothes, his hair, his face. Whatever happened, happened, this version says — it is irretrievably past.

But time must go on, as it does, and the present never ends.

GREAT ORGAN MUSIC AT YALE: DAVID HIGGS

For me, one of the later lyrics in the original version hits hardest: “The only thing I knew how to do/Was keep on keeping on/ Like a bird that flew/Tangled up in blue.” Is there any better expression of solidity and endurance? Dylan’s world has collapsed around him, the friends he once loved have moved on, he can no longer recognize this placed called America. Never

mind, though — he’ll keep on keeping on.

And that’s all you can do when you hear this song. At first listen, “Tangled Up In Blue” might not sound so remarkable, but as you listen to it more and more, as the lyrics light their slow-burning fuse in your heart, as Dylan’s voice etches his words into your soul, and as the characters appear increasingly alive, this song

becomes real like few others are.

Its inescapable story lives on in the mind or somewhere deeper, as integral to human experience as anything Shakespeare or Yeats ever wrote, and the many reinterpretations only expand its reach. Eventually we all get tangled up in blue.

Contact NOAH DAPONTE-SMITH at noah.daponte-smith@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS:

Woolsey Hall // 7:30 p.m.

The world-famous Newberry Organ whirs to life.

The bruised apple you bought to reach the credit card minimum at Atticus.

YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

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WEEKEND THEATER

The Liberation of the Shrew? // BY JON VICTOR A feminist adaptation of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” is an ambitious goal. The play has a reputation for reaffirming old, patriarchal attitudes and exalting the subjection of women in a marriage. So as I watched, I considered the following question: have Kate Pincus ’15 and Miranda Rizzolo ’15, for whom the play is a senior English project, succeeded in transforming one of Shakespeare’s most misogynistic works into a statement for female empowerment?

Before I get into that, it should be said that a major strength of this play is the nine-person cast: each performer has a moment when they are either hilarious or captivating. The three stars of the show were Rizzolo as Kate, Ben Symons ’15 as Petruchio and Ivan KirwanTaylor ’18 as Tranio. The roles were exceptionally well cast. KirwanTaylor’s British accent and facial expressions when not speaking added depth to the part; Petruchio was energetic and eccentric; Kate was accurately over-the-top. The best moments of the play happen with Kate and Petruchio onstage together, as when Petruchio brings his new wife home for the first time (the food-throwing was an added bonus).

Even the play’s title makes a feminist reading difficult — giving a woman the label of a ‘shrew’ who needs to be ‘tamed’ because she is too unruly, too disobedient,

is obviously archaic. In this interpretation, however, Petruchio does not ‘tame’ Kate — at least not in the sense that we normally think. At the beginning of the play, Kate is wild and empowered. She appears to have no desire to be won over by a man, and expresses disdain towards every one of her potential suitors. And when Petruchio begins his attempt to woo her, the dynamic onstage feels like he is pining for her acceptance, rather than trying to destroy her independent spirit.

With Bianca and her suitors as well, it seems as though it is actually the women who have the upper hand. Hortensio and Lucentio vie for her love but, for a good chunk of the play, she remains unmoved by their advances. Marianna Gailus’ ’17 height intensifies this feeling; as Bianca, she towers over Hortensio (Miles Walter ’18) and Lucentio (Laurence Bashford ’18), adding a physical aspect to her position of power. Still, all this interpretation requires that we ignore the arrangements for marriage that are being made by the two sisters’ father — deals that will change the two daughters’ lives, but in which they have no say.

However, at the end of the play, Kate doesn’t just seem placated by Petruchio’s antics — she appears to be genuinely in love with him.

The moment when he asks her to kiss him in the middle of the street is well-acted, and as a result very

Saying the Un-Sayable // BY KELSI CAYWOOD

MOND AY JANUARY

26

FERGUSON AND BEYOND: RACE, POLICING AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

// JANE KIM

effective. At this point, I was sold on the idea that Kate and Petruchio could be equals in the relationship.

But when he shows off her obedience, some of this started to slip away and I wasn’t so sure. Lines like “Place your hand below your husband’s foot,” and “Tell these headstrong women what duty they do owe their lords and husbands,” are hard to reshape into a feminist narrative. Yet I am still very conflicted about this; at the end, Kate seems happy with her husband and willing to be gracious towards him because she genuinely loves him.

Kate’s final monologue can be taken to affirm the respect that a wife should have for her husband.

This makes sense, given Kate’s independent nature at the beginning of the play and her gradual acceptance of marriage by the end.

In any case, the play’s solid acting, especially by Rizzolo, sells very well the possibility that “The Taming of the Shrew” might not be as misogynistic as is generally thought.

Simply because of that, this production is successful. Pincus and Rizzolo manipulate the script and re-imagine the relationships between characters to cast one of the Bard’s best-known works in a new light. See the play and gauge for yourself just how equal Kate and Petruchio’s relationship really is — you might be surprised.

Contact JON VICTOR at jon.victor@yale.edu .

“Imagine your secrets in a box.

Everyday you have the choice of what do with them,” began Frank Warren, the founder of PostSecret. PostSecret is the world’s largest ad-free blog and an ongoing community art project, updated weekly with anonymous postcards displaying secrets sent from all over the world. From whimsical stories to somber confessions, the diverse postcards sent to Warren’s home address have drawn a consistent and sizeable readership, prompting a play of the same name and a best-selling book series.

Warren visited Southern Connecticut State University’s John Lyman Center last week as part of PostSecret Live, an interactive multi-media show that allows him to publicly share some of the 500,000 secrets he’s received.

I have followed PostSecret since my teen years. The project’s aims — sharing secrets and building community around the healing power of revealing them — made a lot of sense when my world consisted primarily of pre-calc, prom and pimples. And though PostSecret Live did not resonate with me as the site once did, it was still an emotionally powerful and well-intentioned performance.

Most striking about the PostSecret project is the way it turns a private and emotional process into a visceral and shared one.

This particular strength was further showcased in PostSecret Live, where interaction with the audience and visual displays augment Warren’s discussions.

Warren asks the audience questions, breaking down the wall between audience and per-

former: Members of the audience reacted to his queries, interacted with audience members nearby and shared their secrets in an open mic session at the end of the night.

Warren successfully created an atmosphere of mutual respect in which the audience felt comfortable but also compelled to share their secrets. Similarly, the audience maintained an appropriate tone and attitude while listening to open mic participants.

A series of voicemail recordings played to the audience provided a particularly climactic moment.

The voicemails included a grandmother singing an off-tune happy birthday, a grandfather congratulating a grandchild on a college acceptance and a brother calling to simply share an article with his sister. But the sign-offs — “I will see you soon,” “ I love you” and “Miss you” — were haunting: These voicemails were the vestiges of people that had since died, moved away or otherwise become unreachable.

Despite its intense moments, the show provoked as much collective laughter as it did personal reflection. Warren moved from a discussion on suicide, something often indirectly or directly implied in the secrets sent to him, to a joke about a man considering suicide. And while I’m still not sure how I feel about this particular instance, the general success of humor in PostSecret Live reminds us that the confidential can often be the most laughable.

Dealing with such a touchy subject, it’s easy to fall into clichés. But if anyone has earned the right to be cliché, it is Frank War-

Contact KELSI CAYWOOD at kelsi.caywood@yale.edu .

WKND RECOMMENDS:

Sudler Hall // 7:30 p.m.

Worth discussing.

ren. He describes wandering the streets of Washington D.C. soliciting secrets; he claims that PostSecret ultimately reminded him of one of his own long-forgotten secrets; he believes that secrets are “the currency of intimacy.”

When Warren asserts that “We think we keep secrets, but really it’s the secrets that keep us,” he’s not pandering to the audience — he truly believes what he says.

Still, it is easy to doubt the enduring power of the confessional open mic at the show’s closing. Though sharing secrets might seem valuable and cathartic for those at the microphone, it is not an assurance of resolution or final emotional peace, and it feels misleading that the show suggests otherwise. Secrets often involve ongoing negotiation for genuine reconciliation. My hesitations about this aspect of the performance are likely to some extent a reflection of my own discomfort in addressing intense emotional issues in public venues.

PostSecret’s success capitalizes on the opportunity provided by social media — it gives people a venue and immediate audience for thoughts, feelings and inquiries. As shown by the many Yalies who use Yale PostSecret to share secrets, humorous moments and personal demons, we sometimes need to say things that we feel we can’t say publicly. It’s a need that, by definition, few recognize. And for all its imperfections, PostSecret Live succeeded by acknowledging the need to say the unspeakable.

Duck confit.

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YALE DAILY NEWS · FRIDAY, JANUARY 23, 2015 · yaledailynews.com

WEEKEND BACKSTAGE

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD // BY DIXE SCHILLACI

P

astor Carlton Lee, who lived in Ferguson, Missouri, as a kid, is the Brown’s family pastor. His church, Flood Christian

Church, was burned down during the riots following the decision of the Michael Brown court case. He was at Yale as the keynote speaker for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration, Let Us Break Bread Together. In his interview with WKND, Pastor Lee showed photos of flaming buildings, lifted his jeans to reveal rubber bullet marks and recounted grim anecdotes that portrayed Ferguson realistically, yet with infectious hope for

// TEVIN MICKENS

the future.

A: I never wanted to be a pastor. I grew up in the church. I actually really wanted to go into theater. And then, all of a sudden, maybe when I got older, I was like, “Mmm, this is not for me.” I like doing plays here and there, but memorizing lines never worked well for me. But that’s what I wanted to do.

My mom suggested, “You really need to be a lawyer.” And I’m like, “No, Mom, I really don’t like school like that.” But my background is education, believe it or not, go figure, the guy who does not like school.

But you know, I don’t get involved in school in that I’m a teacher, but I do love being around kids. I love helping kids.

“

Q: So, you have four kids — how does Christianity influence the way you talk about race to your children? What do you want them to learn about it?

kill all of you niggers, throw you all in the church and set you on fire.” Also, three weeks before the church fire, my dog was poisoned. A six-month-old pit bull, fully trained. We had to put her to sleep because she bled out.

Q: Correct me if I’m wrong, but other news sites are reporting that Flood Christian Church [Lee’s church] was three miles outside the downtown city of Ferguson, where most of the violence was taking place.

A: That’s incorrect, it wasn’t three miles outside of Ferguson. Ferguson is only a stone’s throw away. It would be like the equivalent of right here [the Study Hotel] to [Battell Chapel], where I did the speech.

The thing is, there was a police barricade blocking any way to get there. I was having problems getting to my church because of the streets [being] blocked off. So how the hell did someone get there? That was my question for the longest time: How did

WHEN HE FOUND OUT WHAT HAPPENED, MY 12-YEAR-OLD SON STARTED TO GET REAL ANGRY. AND I TOLD HIM, “MAN, WE DON’T HATE. WE DON’T HATE THEM; WE STILL LOVE THEM.”

A: Well, number one, I never want them to get any type of hate in their heart. I tried to shelter my kids from seeing the news at home, because it showed so much, but it didn’t really work out that well because my oldest son is 12. Someone came up to him and said he saw his dad on the news.

So, when he found out what happened, my 12-year-old son started to get real angry.

And I told him, “Man, we don’t hate. We don’t hate them; we still love them. It’s my love of Christ. God gets up on the cross and says, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.”

Q: A lot of news sites have recorded you saying you believe it was white supremacists who caused the fire. Why do you believe that?

Why do you think they did that?

A: Well, we received so many death threats, 70-plus. Three weeks prior we had someone show up to the church and say, “I will

“

Q: Can you tell me a little about your background? Did you always want to be a pastor? What obstacles did you face in becoming a pastor?

someone get there? And it just so happened that a police officer passed, saw some chairs in my church on fire, and was like, “Holy crap, they have set this dude’s church on fire.” And he called me and said, “Get your tail down here right now.” And I said, “No man, I’m out here trying to put out fires.”

I was literally trying to run in and put out fires with my coat.

[Later] I was beating the hell out of the looters who came up to mom-and-pop stores. Listen, I can’t protect these big businesses. They’re fine — they have better insurance policies that will cover them, but these mom-and-pop stores that are struggling? Come on, guys, chill out with that.

They broke in to a cleaners, and stole all of the clothes from the cleaners. They broke in to an auto-tire store and drove off with a car. It was that kind of stuff; it was just that crazy.

Q: What is your congregation doing to support

a positive environment after the events that have happened?

A: We still continue to do our weekly outreach events. We go out and feed the hungry. We minister the people in the community. We’re still doing those things. People know our church is a safe place.

Q: For those in your congregation, you preach non-violence. Yet some people in Ferguson have been violent, and that’s what a lot of the media covers. In what ways do you encourage non-violence?

A: Number one, here’s the thing — it’s not as violent as the news is making it. They made it seem like there were just a million people out there [rallying]. No, there’s only a handful of people. On the night of the decision in Ferguson, there probably were about 15,000 to 20,000 people. Not even 10 percent, less than five percent of people that were [there were] causing violence. The majority of people were standing against it. What we teach at the church is, in order to keep acting in a non-violent way, don’t put your hands on anybody. My verbal approach has to be that of love. I can disagree with you all day long, but I can still do it in love.

Let me tell you, the movie “Selma” was like a fairytale compared to what we had to go through in Ferguson. The crap we went through in Ferguson, it was some serious, serious stuff. There was a police officer one time, she was so scared. She stood and she was shaking. I said “Ma’am, I can tell you’re very afraid, have them move you to the back of the line.” And she stood there with her riot stick: a wooden stick, with a metal piece inside of it. I said again, “Ma’am, you’re very afraid, and these guys over here can see that you’re afraid, move to the back.” She wouldn’t move to the back. So I called the captain over and I said, “Hey, do me a favor, and move her to the back.” He asked what was going on, and I said that she is very afraid and these guys are looking at her like savage dogs, and they want to get you guys, and they probably are going to go for her first. He moved her to the back.

Q: At a church service, Rev. Al Sharpton was quoted by the Washington Post saying, “What happened Monday was just a comma, not the end of a sentence.” What do you think we need to do to get to the end of the sentence, and what does the end of that sentence look like?

A: We have a list of several demands we have requested. The Michael Brown Law, which consists of all police officers in the state of Missouri having to wear body cameras — body cameras that they’re not able to turn off. They also have to spend some time out of their car. We’re not asking them to stand outside when it’s cold outside. What we are saying is to spend some time outside your car, in the schools and spending time in the community. We are asking for a civilian review board [with the power to subpoena officers]. In most police forces, the state has taken over. We’re saying that’s okay, but let us be a review board with some power to make suggestions that go into place. Also, we’re asking if there’s a shooting, a special prosecutor be brought in. The prosecutor has been there for 24 years, he’ll be there

for another four years. The police and prosecuting attorney, they’re in bed together all the time. How does that make sense?

Q: A while ago, there was a protest in New Haven about the Michael Brown decision.

There was woman in the street who got a loudspeaker and said something along the lines of, “I don’t care if you see me on the street and think I’m a slut, think I’m a whore, or judge me for my skin color. The problem is when you shoot me for it.” What I’m trying to get at is, do you think it is just about the way officers are trained, or is it a deeper social issue that needs to be addressed before we can see progress in this area? Is it just body cameras? Or is it the inequality underlying it all?

A: It really boils down to equality. Black kid, white kid, Asian kid, a life is a life. I am a pastor, these are my regular clothes, and I get pulled over and harassed by the police all the time. My wife asks all the time, “Why do they pull you over so much?” It’s not because I’m doing anything bad; we’re just not treated fairly. Treat us fair, that’s all we’re asking for. I got arrested, arrested for walking on the sidewalk. I told the police office, “You got to be the dumbest person ever. You’re really arresting me, for walking on the sidewalk?” My younger brother, who is 17, will pull out of my parents’ driveway and gets pulled over all the time. Everything on their car is legal, but he gets pulled over all the time.

Q: As a pastor, how do you get through to well-meaning sympathizers who can’t grasp what it’s like to be a minority facing discrimination?

A: You know what I tell them to do? Because I’ve done this several times in the last couple of weeks. I tell them, simply, to hang out with me for a day. Literally, hang out with me for a day, and you will see the life.

It’s a different type of life we live almost. A white guy told me [about] white privilege, and I asked him to explain it to me. He said, “If I drive drunk, I get a ticket. If you drive drunk, you get your tail beat and go to jail.”

Then he said, “If we were walking down the street together, holding the same things, wearing the same thing, both our hands in our pockets, you would fit the profile of a suspect or criminal. Me? I’m the guy that’s going to be the victim.” Then he told me, “How many times have you walked across the street and people start doing octopusarms: grabbing and holding their things close to them. And locking their doors.” I told him I never paid attention to that, but it happens quite often.

Q: What do you want Michael Brown to be remembered by?

A: He was a martyr. He was a martyr for social justice.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited.

Contact DIXE SCHILLACI at dixe. schillaci@yale.edu .