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By Kat Chen Please wait while flipbook is loading. For more related info, FAQs and issues please refer to DearFlip WordPress Flipbook Plugin Help documentation. #December2020

By Mary Elizabeth Dawson. “Great sex,” said Verily Veritas as he rolled over to check the time on his phone. “Well, I really must be going. I’m afraid I haven’t got time for pillow talk today.” There is nothing like a night—and morning, as Verily would vehemently add—of unprotected coitus to lift the spirits of our dear hero. Yet a waning beam of languid mid-autumn sunlight was beckoning Verily for a contemplative stroll through Riverside Park. Maybe it was time for him to try rolling his own cigarettes again. “Verily, my darling, if it’s not too troublesome, could you pick up something for me when you go? I can’t bear the thought of never seeing you again, and with this request, I hope to ensure your return to my abode,” his hookup said, blinking up at him through a curtain of self-cut bangs. Or, at least, Verily thought she said it. He hadn’t really been listening. “You rapscallion, you! If you wish so ardently for my return, all you must do is ask, you know,” he replied. “What? No, seriously. I need you to go buy me a Plan B.” Ah, so this request was genuine. Verily supposed he was somewhat obliged to comply with this one, and besides, he fancied himself quite the gentleman. The seldom-trod corners of Riverside, and the next entry in Verily’s little black book, would have to wait. Verily marched down Amsterdam, relishing the characteristic upper Manhattan gusts of wind and the crunch of leaves beneath his Nike Killshots. “A fine day on the Upper West Side! A fine day indeed!” Verily declared in his traffic-halting bellow. His fleeting gap semester fantasies were now long in the past—after all, what was Morningside Heights without its dictator of taste? Verily ultimately felt obligated to return to the plague-ridden streets of New York, citing worries that the neighborhood might regress in his absence. In his cheerful state, Verily felt that a stop at the Hungarian Pastry Shop was in order. Yes, a bit of the old brew would do Verily well right now. Surely he deserved a reward for the (forthcoming) completion of his onerous yet valiant task. Stopping to admire his debonair appearance in the window of the café, Verily grew even more elated. What a lucky dog I am, he mused. I’ve put just the right amount of gel in my hair today. Verily leaned closer and closer to his reflection in the glass, absolutely entranced. Was it possible the organic cotton face mask made him look even more attractive than usual? Just as Verily was about to inflict self-harm of grossly Narcissian proportions, something stopped him. Inside, a girl stood at the counter, pointing at a slice of lemon cake. In her non-gesticulating hand, she clutched a strategically spine-cracked copy of Wuthering Heights. Certainly, Verily had time for a chat. After all, this lover of gothic literature and citrus confection was practically begging to be noticed. Verily was just reaching for the door handle when the vibration of an incoming text, and then another, and yet another, jarred him from his internal monologue. did you get it yet? i’ve been waiting for like almost an hour ?? With an inward groan, Verily managed to type out a response. It occurred to him that he had become entirely too reachable. He would have gladly spurned his smartphone in favor of a vintage, ideally only semi-functional flip phone long ago if it weren’t for the many young academics and aspiring Francophiles pining for him through the screens and algorithms of Tinder. Yes, it wouldn’t be fair to leave them, thought Verily. Back to the task at hand. Verily swept into Duane Reade with perfect posture and an air of superiority. Oh, Duane Reade. A bit of a pedestrian establishment, really, but Verily knew from previous experience that emergency contraception was generally unavailable at his preferred local apothecary. Unfortunately, he had found neither tonic nor tincture to achieve the same desired effect. Verily sauntered up to the pharmacist’s counter, leaning in with utter disregard for social distancing regulations to convey the purpose of his visit in a necessarily hushed tone. “Right, so you need Plan B,” the pharmacist announced. Did she intend to reveal the object of Verily’s quest to the entire store? So much for confidentiality! Quite flustered, Verily pulled out his embossed leather billfold. Best to pay and exit as quickly as possible. But—it can’t be—was the correct balance displayed? Either the price of Plan B had gone up, or Verily had gotten a bit too used to borrowing money from his romantic encounters. “All this for one little pill? I’m shocked. Nay, I’m positively indignant! I’m afraid I am no longer able to frequent this establishment, as you clearly wish to take advantage of those in this terribly stressful situation! I bid you good day, madam!” Verily stormed through Duane Reade’s automatic doors with all the histrionics he could muster. As he stalked home, he yanked out his phone to record a brief but damning voice memo: “Duane Reade. Never again!” Perhaps the smartphone was good for something else after all. Then, before he could forget, he typed out and sent a text message. It wasn’t in stock. So sorry. Perhaps you can handle this one yourself? Verily thought he deserved the rest of the day off. #December2020

Illustration by Joanne Park #December2020

Works by Mozambican artists shine brightest in the Wallach's sundry fall show. By Sam Needleman · Published October 3, 2019. Of the essential pieces in “After the End: Timing Socialism in Africa,” on view at Columbia’s Wallach Art Gallery until October 6, the most incisive might be a multi-media installation by the Mozambican artist Ângela Ferreira. “For Mozambique (Model no. 1 of Screen-Tribute-Kiosk Celebrating a Post-Independence Utopia),” from 2008, is a towering assemblage of wood, steel, and two projected videos. Makwayela, an anticolonial drama shot in Maputo by Jean Rouch and Jacques d’Arthuys in 1977, graces one side of the screen, and a live recording of Bob Dylan’s “Mozambique,” performed in Colorado in 1976, plays on the other. Ferreira deftly contrasts the videos, both made shortly after Mozambique gained independence from Portugal, to raise the stakes and terms of colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial story-telling—vital challenges that many of the exhibition’s radically insightful artists take upon themselves. Illustration by Lilly Cao Ferreira’s floor-to-ceiling geometries ascend to the scale of architecture and even infrastructure, particularly when the sculpture’s glorious slats pierce the projection of Bob Dylan’s stadium and nearly graze the gallery’s ceiling. The built environment, it turns out, permeates the whole exhibition, often as an instructive and productive palimpsest, as in a characteristically elaborate painting by Julie Mehretu, who is slated for a retrospective at the Whitney next year. In seven striking photographs of people at work, Filipe Branquinho, also Mozambican, almost splays buildings across his backgrounds, temporarily relieving them from their functions to foreground their beauty and, crucially, their near-seamless continuities with boundless sidewalks and oceans. Other gems from this undersung exhibit—a step in the right direction for the freshly minted Wallach, which ought to emerge as an Uptown art destination for everyone—include the Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda’s witty series of prints that portray a mission to the Sun, and the Ethiopian painter Mezgebu Tesema’s ominous “Weekend,” from 2016. The show’s curator, Álvaro Luís Lima, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology, suspends not time but rather our ideas about temporality and its politics, which the artists help us interrogate, shatter, and if we’re lucky, reconstruct. Rather than distill one contiguous chronology or ideology—ever a fraught pursuit for small shows with grand political schemes, at Columbia or elsewhere—the show launches us into a constellation. It’s a pleasure to pick a bright star and gaze.

Buell brings the brilliant Torkwase Dyson to campus. By Sam Needleman · Published November 11, 2019. While dogged administrators implore us to fête the Core Curriculum’s hundredth birthday, a more critical, urgent, and altogether illuminating centennial is on view at GSAPP’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, located in Buell Hall, until December. In “1919: Black Water,” the multidisciplinary artist Torkwase Dyson presents new pictorial sculptures and sculptural paintings concerned with the Chicago riots that followed the death of Eugene Williams in that year. Williams, a black teenager, entered a segregated section of Lake Michigan on a summer day and was murdered by white stone-throwers. Illustration by Lilly Cao Dyson’s most immediate and tangible interest relating to that “Red Summer” is the raft that Williams and his four black friends constructed from found materials to float on the lake. Circular pieces like “Plantationocene” and “Being-Seeing-Drifting” incorporate wood with an aesthetic and thematic precision at once seamless and disorienting. Four GSAPP student-curators provide rich wall text: “The exhibition advances Dyson’s research on the ways that water, historically and in the present, operates as a contest geography and how climate change disproportionately affects people of color around the world.” The show’s anchors, three plexiglass sculptures entitled “Black Shoreline,” are hollow trapezoidal prisms that pull the viewer toward them at every turn. They distill the paradoxical proximity between liberation and oppression. Where a less creative artist might stop at surveying architecture’s role in the events and ideas that they have summoned for scrutiny, Dyson consistently returns to the raw and striking fact of its omnipresence; rather than resign herself to parsing a form, she asserts one. This task is aided by a booklet featuring, among other instructive supplements, a conversation with Columbia professor Mabel Wilson. After an exchange about The Bluest Eye, Wilson says, “Somebody should write a book about the architecture of Toni Morrison.” “We should do it,” Dyson replies. “We should collaborate.” One can’t help but imagine a subsequent joint lecture, perhaps on the other side of Buell—a Core Centennial event worth booking a ticket for.

How to Do Fall Like a Brooklyn Alt-Indie Chick. The complete guide to looking like you’ve attended every LCD Soundsystem show. By Malia Simon. The pumpkin spice latte-drinking, UGG boots-donning Basic White Girl is a mere relic of the past. In her place is a new archetype that comes from the “underground” scene of anything you’ve ever heard of. To be clear, she is without a doubt much cooler than me. But that won’t stop me from trying to replicate her entire being in a short list of aesthetic motifs. Here’s everything you need to tackle the season like your favorite semi-Twitter-famous icons. Jackets that just keep getting bigger + corduroy pants. Playlist with some made-up word in the title, like “nightroom.” Loneliness tweets ( if loneliness is not currently being experienced). Male movie character Halloween costume. Tote bag that’s self-referential about being a tote bag. “Socially distant” hangouts on fire escape. Reductress internship application. Tweets about Reductress internship application. Whatever cool type of beer you guys drink, but in 30-degree weather. Rooftop comedy shows in the dark. Mirror selfies in which you look kind of mad. Laughter at this and similar lists, because you’re just that cool Brooklyn alt-Indie chick. <3 #November2020

Illustration by Maya Weed #November2020

PANHELLENIC PANIC. A sorority’s failed reforms prompt a mass exodus. By Gabe Garon. This summer, as Black Lives Matter protests filled streets nationwide and calls to social distance and ‘flatten the curve’ filled social media feeds, a new call reverberated on college campuses nationwide: abolish Greek life. The call quickly became a movement, circulating through school-specific, student-run Instagram accounts—@abolishgreekusc, @abolishvandyifcandpanhellenic, @abolishgreeklifecu, and others. They posted anonymous reports of racism, homophobia, sexism, sexual assault, ableism, and other forms of discrimination that students experienced in the world of Greek life—at rushes, parties, and events. Articles, informational resources, and suggestions for direct actions toward abolition accompanied many posts, cementing the accounts’ missions. At Northwestern University and Washington University in St. Louis, among other schools, mass disaffiliations and chapter disbandments followed. Columbia was no exception. In August, around 50 members of the Barnard-Columbia Gamma Tau chapter of Sigma Delta Tau (SDT) disaffiliated or went inactive (not paying dues or participating in the organization for the semester) after weeks of discussion about reform and disbandment—a local iteration of the national conversation about systemic anti-Black racism. A disaffiliation of this size was unprecedented in the history of Greek life at Columbia. Columbia is home to six Panhellenic sororities, ten fraternities recognized by the International Fraternity Council (IFC), and 11 multicultural Greek organizations. The sororities are composed of students from all four of Columbia’s undergraduate colleges. All IFC and Panhellenic Greek organizations have experienced dramatic increase in membership and participation over the last ten years, according to the Columbia Spectator and Columbia’s office of University Student Life. This may be due to many students seeing Greek life as a solution to the ‘community problem’ that plagues life at Columbia–frats and sororities provide friends, communities, and even networking opportunities. To understand SDT’s mass exodus, I spoke with three former members who led the conversations about reform and disbandment: Kayla Koffler, BC ‘21; Ibby O’Carroll, CC ‘21; and Sidney Rojas, BC ‘21. Aja Johnson, CC ‘21, was also a primary leader, but declined to be interviewed. The exodus began in June as a casual conversation between Johnson and Koffler. Both were frustrated by the organization’s handling of a racist Instagram post made in response to protests in Minneapolis by a new member on Juneteenth. “This summer, everyone thought about the communities they were in and the harm that those communities were doing,” Koffler recalled. “And with this conversation, I was like, ‘Oh my God, why am I a part of this?’ And I was thinking about disaffiliating but I’d put so much time and energy into this, and I didn’t want to silently leave. This shouldn’t exist anymore.” Rojas agreed. “It was a tipping point for me,” she said. “Previously, all of us knew that there were problematic members in our sorority and recognized that, but I think it exposed that there was a systemic issue in our chapter in terms of holding people accountable. People would immediately jump up and get defensive, and say that people were bullying members by calling them out.” After talking with Johnson, who Koffler mentioned had already been vocal about wanting to disaffiliate, Koffler and Johnson decided to start the conversation about SDT’s role in perpetuating racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression. With Johnson and Rojas, they organized a series of four chapter-wide discussions on Zoom. The topics—money and wealth, SDT’s relationship with fraternities, race, event attendance—drew on the responses to an anonymous form sent out to members, a strategy Koffler borrowed from a friend working on a similar project at Wash U. The goal, Koffler said, was clear: “What are the things we need to be talking about? Let’s have a conversation about things we don’t talk about in this chapter. The conclusion won’t necessarily be ‘disband,’ but we need to talk about why people disaffiliate or why people want to disband.” Through the form, Johnson and Koffler gathered information about harm that their organization had inflicted on its members. Some responses detailed SDT’s ableism through their use of spaces that weren’t accessible to everyone. Others expressed discomfort about the organization’s relationship with fraternities due to their homophobia, racism, and sexism. A large issue for many in the organization was the racism, elitism, and classism they saw and experienced in the recruitment process. “The way you’re supposed to dress is according to a very white, wealthy standard,” Rojas said, adding that various events required straightened hair and a specific color of dress, jewelry, or shoes, with the expectation that all potential new members (PNMs) owned these or were able to procure them on short-notice. Speaking about the conversations that PNMs have with current members during recruitment, Koffler said, “You just rate the conversations based on a ‘vibe’ you have with someone. It’s just up to your discretion. So a mostly white sorority recruits a mostly white pledge class, both because people of color might not rush as much for obvious reasons and because for the people of color that do rush, the way that rush goes allows people’s worst biases to come out… If you’re rushing a sorority, whether you get accepted or not is based on race and money.” Racism at SDT didn’t only plague the recruitment process. In the past calendar year, two presidents of the sorority–both women of color–stepped down from their posts, citing microaggressions from other Executive Board members. The current president of SDT, Sarina Maurice, BC ‘21, is white. (Maurice did not respond to multiple interview requests.) In addition to hosting the conversations in June, Koffler, Johnson, Rojas, and O’Carroll circulated a document containing links to Instagram posts and articles that detailed the arguments for reform and disbanding, as well as a number of articles published in the Spectator and the Huffington Post describing racist incidents at Columbia’s Greek life organizations.Their report also outlined the history of Greek life’s complicity in ableism, elitism, classism, homophobia, and sexual assault. At the very bottom of the document are three talking points: “Why do people join SDT? To find community on a campus seen as severely lacking one. That is not to be understated or dismissed. I ask you to consider, however—is the community to which you belong worsening the campus climate for others? Are you seeking inclusivity and “sisterhood” at the expense of your peers outside of greek life? The national SDT organization does not accept nor recognize trans women and non-binary people. How can we, as individuals, continue to support an organization so heavily steeped in transphobia and heteronormative gender dynamics? What does that say about our values and willingness to be true allies? The issue of diversity: To my knowledge, there was only one black woman in the 2019-2020 pledge class. Out of 40-plus people.” The conversations, however, did not go as the four had hoped. “I don’t think any concrete things came out of it,” O’Carroll said. “Every time we asked what the reforms were going to be, there was nothing that I saw that was a solution.” Their disappointment was perhaps most pronounced on the topic of fraternities. Survey respondents and conversation participants pointed to SDT’s relationships with frats as sources of heteronormativity and a risk for sexual assault. During a discussion, Black members of SDT shared their experiences of racism at events involving fraternities–frat members giving them dirty looks, or not believing that they were a part of SDT. Members also wondered if mixers with frats were safe. As Koffler pointed out, “We have a risk manager and a risk team–we force people in our sorority to manage risk and make sure nothing bad happens, but that’s conceding that there is inherently a risk. Why are we throwing parties where there are risks? Why don’t we just make these spaces safer?” But when the idea of severing ties with fraternities was proposed, leadership ultimately shot it down. This seemed to be a common occurrence. Whenever an issue was brought up, whether with the members of the Columbia SDT chapter or with their national advisor, discussions would ensue, but no actions would be taken. Rojas first experienced this when trying to talk to the chapter’s nationally-appointed advisor about legacy admission policies. “There was this wall that was in a lot of ways impenetrable, and it was going to be impossible to make any kind of systemic change while we were still a part of this organization that was taking hundreds of dollars from every member every semester and that has historically excluded marginalized people, especially women of color,” Rojas said. “I realized I was stuck in this whole bureaucratic system where [our advisor] was going to maybe bring it up in some meeting with the higher-ups and it was going to get shot down because the alums have too much power.” Koffler felt similarly frustrated about SDT’s shortcomings and complacency at the national level. “My narrative of SDT was always like, ‘Sororities are stupid, but Columbia’s are an exception,’” she said. “I never thought about the overall project of sororities as an institution. It took me a while to connect the fact that being a part of SDT at Columbia meant being a part of that whole thing.” At the local level, Koffler said, “The conversation was never able to be one where we talked about past wrongdoings. It was always, ‘We should disband because of this, we shouldn’t disband because of that.’ And I do think it did push some people over the edge towards disbanding” Nicole Kaiser, CC ‘20, a recent alum of SDT, is exactly the kind of person Koffler was talking about. At first, she’d felt uneasy about the concept of disbanding, reasoning, “If we really cared about this chapter or sisterhood we were going to have an internal reckoning and we were going to put the work into the chapter to make it right. Disbanding was the easy way out.” After participating in some of the conversations, her position changed. “That moment of ‘Let’s fix SDT!’ passed very quickly and it became ‘We need to burn this down and start again,’” she recalled. “It doesn’t take long to just be quiet and listen and catch up and get in the loop. I hadn’t read the bylaws because I didn’t care to. I didn’t know that half the stuff in the bylaws is stuff I would never stand behind.” These conversations were also an important way for information about the sorority’s inner workings to be shared with new members or those who hadn’t been in leadership positions. For one current SDT member, these conversations were especially enlightening. “The most shocking information I received was about recruitment,” the member, who asked to remain anonymous, told me. “It was really disheartening to hear. I knew that it was happening but I wasn’t truly made aware of it until I realized how many people were sworn to secrecy and not allowed to talk about it, and that it was finally coming out and we were finding out about it. It was really sad that there wasn’t transparency there.” Dialogue within SDT about reform and disbandment continued late into the summer. At some point, the latter became an impossibility for the time being. In order to fully disband the sorority, every member of the Executive Board of Columbia’s chapter would have to agree to reach out to the national SDT organization and petition to disband, or every member of the Columbia chapter would disaffiliate at the same time, as chapters of Greek organizations at Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Duke, and Wash U did. But at Columbia, when the August 23 deadline to disaffiliate passed, around 50 SDT members disaffiliated or went inactive. Many who wanted to disband left the chapter because they simply couldn’t imagine staying in the organization. “I think people were so much quicker to drop because of the pandemic,” Koffler clarified. “A lot of people were like, ‘What am I paying dues for?’” In addition to losing about half of their membership, most of SDT’s leadership changed as well, with many of the former Executive Board members disaffiliating or going inactive. For Kaiser, this break felt like a polarization of the two sides that had emerged during the conversations: reform versus disband. “The establishment protects itself. They closed the doors, they didn’t tell us when events were happening, they took us off listservs,” she said. “It wasn’t just alums, it was people that were disaffiliated too. The information doesn’t cross that line, you can no longer participate or share or call people out. It closed itself off to criticism if you chose to leave.” Within SDT, conversations have continued, albeit with fewer voices and perspectives. “It’s not that they are completely ignoring the issue,” said the anonymous member. “There are some members who are still active who still think reform is possible, who are trying to make a difference. They have made more of an effort to continue having talks about antiracism. They’ve also involved some of the Panhellenic leaders and they’ve been more involved with SDT specifically. Unfortunately, the turnout to those conversations have been very minimal. She added, “While these conversations are good and beneficial, they aren’t enough. After hearing how many bad things nationals have made us do and how much disagreement we’ve had with nationals in the past, the clear solution in my opinion is to try to separate from nationals, which would make us lose a lot of privileges. It was clear that members of e-board and members that stayed didn’t want to do that. In that sense, considering that they aren’t thinking about the best possible solution, they’re doing the best they can.” Illustration by Mwandeyi Kamwendo Now, a few months after their departure from the organization, Koffler, Rojas, and O’Carroll feel some disappointment with how their efforts turned out. According to Rojas, “We really expected it to take a few conversations, and then we’d disband. We thought the majority of members would be on board. I knew some members would be defensive, but I didn’t know to what degree they’d be defensive. That surprised me as well. It was hard for a lot of people to look inward and take stock of the organization that they were a part of.” For those dedicated to reform, it is difficult to let go of the SDT they know. “That’s what makes this so tough,” Kaiser said. “When people are benefiting from an established institution, they’re not going to want to get rid of it. Greek life protects a lot of systems that we should not want to uphold. Any time someone tries to ruffle the feathers, there isn’t space for it. It gets covered up. And that’s what’s been happening.” As fall semester has progressed, SDT has continued to operate almost as usual by holding an informal recruitment intended to increase enrollment to its previous heights. For the anonymous current member, this has also been a source of disappointment: “Most of the people recruited were friends, roommates, people they knew. I think that that was wrong. We had a chance to diversify our pledge class and the people present in SDT. We had a golden opportunity and we didn’t take advantage of that.” She also pointed to the national organization’s hand in recruitment, noting, “During recruitment, the advisor was pushing to get us to accept girls that looked a certain way or acted a certain way. There was a lot of conflict between our chapter and our advisor.” The chapter’s relationship with SDT’s national organization has been a sticking point for many who have advocated for disbandment. According to Yvonne Pitts, the Associate Director for Fraternity and Sorority Life at Undergraduate Student Life, if SDT were to break from the national organization, they would no longer be able to use their name and would have to apply as a new club or organization, just like any other new club. They also would lose access to their prized brownstone on West 114th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam. These are privileges that many current SDT leaders and members don’t want to lose. Even if every member of the organization were to disaffiliate as a means to disband or abolish the sorority, there would still be a four-semester time period during which the organization could be revived by any individual or group of individuals who wanted to revive it. Alumni and members of the national organization would have the ability to recruit current students, making permanent abolition all the more difficult. Like other Greek organizations, SDT is currently working with its advisors at Undergraduate Student Life to reform its organization, with a goal of inclusivity. Change, however, is slow. “We’ve been having conversations about diversity, inclusion, and representation for quite some time now,” Pitts said. “Change takes a lot of time, and what we’re really trying to focus on is not incremental change, but structural changes, which really take time to reflect on… Right now, it is really about identifying exactly what the issues are, where the gaps are, and then trying to fill in those missing pieces.” Though Koffler, Johnson, and others were not able to lead SDT toward a total disaffiliation and disbandment this summer, they too see their work as far from over, and they’re hopeful about the future. They have initiated conversations within other Panhellenic organizations at Columbia by circulating the information and literature they gathered for their efforts this summer. Despite her disappointments, Rojas was cautiously optimistic: “I think if you talk about it, you’ll be successful. It’s so obvious that it’ll be somewhat successful. I’m disappointed that it wasn’t everyone agreeing. I just don’t believe that if you have a genuine conversation about it that you won’t have what happened here. I don’t think there’s anything special about SDT.” #November2020

By Cy Gilman Print out or draw on this copy of the crossword (answers in bottom right corner) or play it online here. #November2020

“Open hands, open hands,” said Carolyn Friedman at the conclusion of our hour-long breakfast interview, still reeling from closing night of The Bacchae 2.1. She had directed the smash production with King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe (KCST), Columbia’s premier Shakespearean theater group. I had asked her to talk about the theater community she built at Columbia; “fucking extraordinary,” she had answered instantly, eyes alight. From them, she told me, she had learned that if you “walk through the world with open hands, be vulnerable, dare to suck, remain open to even the oddest offers, you will catch so much good.” Friedman has adapted this philosophy of “open hands” and carried it with her throughout her time as a student and director at Columbia. In building a creative team, she has worked to “dissolve” the typical hierarchies in show business into “as horizontal a creative power structure as possible.” Blushing, she humbly insisted that she couldn’t be sure had succeeded as director, but sincerely hoped so. Illustration by Sahra Denner No matter how lavishly I praised her work directing The Bacchae 2.1, which I maintain was truly extraordinary, she insisted emphatically that I should direct my praise elsewhere. “If you’re going to make really beautiful art,” she told me, “you have to have a team of people that is smarter, better, more creative in almost every way than you are. You can be good at one little thing, but bring in people who are far smarter than you in everything else. That’s how good theater gets made.” She raved about the other students involved in the show, aglow with admiration, describing actor Kristoff Smith as “beautifully captivating,” dramaturg Aditi Rao as possessing “such a brilliant mind … when we talk to her, our IQs go up 25 points,” costume designer Lexis Rangell-Onwuegbuzia as “a genius,” and so on. “I had, maybe, like, three percent of the job to do,” she told me. For the other 97, she refused to take credit, instead directing my admiration toward the talents of the rest of the creative team. After walking me through the show’s evolution from proposal to performance, she finally began speaking about herself. The Bacchae 2.1 was not Carolyn’s first rodeo. She began directing in high school after reading a play called A Public Reading of an Unproduced Play about the Death of Walt Disney by Lucas Hnath. She remembered thinking to herself: “I have to be in this play or do something with this play and nobody’s ever going to direct it here in Atlanta so I’ll just have to direct it myself because it needs to exist.” And that was that. But the department refused, citing lack of funding and considerable logistical obstacles. Her response: “What are the things that I have to do for you to let me direct this show?” They provided a list of Herculean tasks, confident she would fail. She didn’t. Carolyn told me she began acting as a young girl at the behest of her parents, who, she mimed, said, “She likes to be dramatic, let’s put her in theater class.” She soon took up dancing, years later, aerial silks, and finally directing. I asked what the future holds. Next semester, three months in Kenya studying environmental biology; next summer, working as an au pair in Spain and attending the British Academy of Dramatic Arts in London; after graduation, hopefully a few years of acting in the city and, one day, an MFA; long-term, forging “a creative space where I get to perform and I get to direct and I get to help create in a collaborative team space.” As soon as I stopped recording, Carolyn broke into laughter and told me she felt so guilty just talking about herself all that time– “can’t we talk about you?” Half an hour of chatter about the New York City arts scene later, she gathered her things and gave me a hug, told me her seminar had started twenty minutes ago and she was starting to feel guilty, promised to connect me with opportunities to dabble in playwriting, and whisked away. In the last moments before she disappeared, we talked about making participation in the dramatic arts more open and accessible to students. Aglow, she told me, “Acting is … literally just playing pretend. If you give people the space to play pretend they will play pretend all day, and they will do it beautifully in a way that other people are able to empathize and emote with.” I hope we can all find even a fraction of Carolyn’s open and imaginative spirit in ourselves, and play a little pretend. —Dominy Gallo

Welcome to the first episode of Blue Jay, the Blue and White’s podcast. Take a listen below!

from nancy’s charcoaled hands look – you can see from the street below. we have her rusted poppies on our wall in their olive stems i see her twig arms they shoot bullets through canvas  and writhe through still air her tapered fingers ink the fiery blossoms holes left by tungsten cartridges gape at their centers I have seen goats in bonnets etched intestine from her downtown room she warms our eggshell mantel above the hearth we have her poppies and her bleeding green grocery monster somewhere how odd how warm he makes me how warm he makes the the room – Sylvie Claire Epstein Anelle In time they shortened everything for me. It began with sleeves and hair, the edge of my fan, which grazed the watery dirt. It spread to my school, my meals, my lengthy plans to flee. When they saw that I danced, that too was banned– In time, they shortened it for me. It creeped upon me slowly. I was stricken and alert. I kept a wobbly pen in hand, which grazed the watery dirt. They cut apart my songs, my prized philosophy And everybody that I met, they flowed away from me. They shortened it for me. I’d like to say a word or two in praise of all of this But there waits the ghoul on my desk, clock and knife in hand In the watery dirt. In time, everything was shortened for me. In the watery dirt. – Carly Roth