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UNDERGRADUATE gling disco ball, and pulsing European techno music. Lines dividing past, present, and future blur at Harvard. Cole Porter coexists har- moniously with Coolio; backgammon Cole Porter to Coolio with beer-pong; tailcoats with thongs. by lee hudson teslik ’05 Pianos serve as makeshift hip-hop dance floors, then later the same day fill a room with Rachmanino≠ or Liszt. Back at the They’re dancing on the Steinway Architecturally, at least, the suite is final club, in a dark corner, sunk deep in piano. And on the parquet, the Persian classic Harvard. Adams A-entry was armchairs and apparently oblivious to the rugs, and the oak tables. The room is re- originally Westmorely Court, part of blasting beats of the chorus—“E’erybody verberating to a song called “Tipsy”— Cambridge’s “Gold Coast”—luxurious in the club gettin’ tipsy”—two tweed-clad raspy rap lyrics laid over a chopped-down, apartments sought out by Harvard’s sophomores, having debated the finer no-nonsense backbeat and laced with most a±uent undergraduates. Wood points of Montesquieu, tire intellectually rhythmic sexual panting. The dance floor floors, intricate wall detailing, and a large and decide to head downstairs to watch is a zoo of gators and ponies, Lacoste and fireplace adorn what was once a splendid Futurama on TiVo. Polo. On the walls are real animals: hunt- private apartment. The decorations in ing trophies. Cigar smoke and spilled the suite’s common-room today seem The thought hit me in New Haven. I scotch and sweat. It’s somewhere be- schizophrenic, as if torn between in- was at Yale for “The Game,” pacing among tween Saturday night and Sunday morn- stincts to acknowledge this history and the tailgates with my 18-year-old brother, ing and Harvard is “out.” to eschew it. The e≠ect of an antique- William, then a prospective Harvard pre- A group of students stumbles from the looking globe and a mahogany humidor is frosh. It was his first Harvard-Yale game door of one of the outwardly unassuming undermined by a big-screen TV, a dan- and he had driven up from D.C. for the oc- final clubs, onto Mount Auburn casion. I was introducing him to Street. From the street, you can friends as we wove our way see members playing pool through the lineup of open- through an upstairs window. backed U-Haul vans with One is wearing a red smoking their smoking barbeque jacket. The scene feels like grills. something out of a dated William and I settled novel: slightly over the top, on a couch in front of the slightly unreal. The crew tailgate, chatting sounds coming from with my freshman-year the windows of the roommate, now a varsity clubs—hip-hop from rower. The heavyweights one, classical from an- had raced that morning, other—blend into a had won, and were in high din with the light form. Several were wearing growl of taxi tra∞c and old-fashioned V-neck ten- the occasional shrieks of nis sweaters with a large partygoers. The students “H” emblazoned on the angle up Bow Street toward chest. Equally prevalent Adams House. were plastic-mesh “trucker” They find their way to a caps crested with the same room party in A-entry “H”—opposite fashion state- where many of the guests ments, same symbol. have wine bottles duct- The football started at taped to their hands. One 12:30. William asked can remove the tape, the why nobody was leaving host explains, when the the tailgates. “Oh, every- wine is finished. His tape body goes in late,” I said. has been o≠ for some time “Most people don’t come and he has moved on to to watch the game, any- other methods of alcohol way.” I had always just consumption. taken it for granted that The

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Game was as much a social tradition as an and a junior, piled into the back seat. We night on my sofa and drive back to Wash- athletic competition. Why else would so talked about Larry Summers’s plans for ington in the morning. The tra∞c was many students—who would never think of curricular review, and then for a while backed up in front of the First Congrega- going to a regular Saturday home game in about what we would do di≠erently if we tional Church. There was a rally in sup- Cambridge, who indeed do not know the could start over again at Harvard. Cer- port of gay marriage and drivers were rub- first thing about football—make this bien- tainly we gave William a lot to keep in bernecking as everybody tried to catch a nial migration to New Haven? mind—perhaps too much. His Harvard glimpse. I told William that this was one We made it into the stadium for the experience, after all, would be his for the of the oldest congregations in Cambridge. halftime show. In a familiar spectacle, the making. William edged around a car that was bands battled. Harvard hauled an enor- Nonetheless, he listened with the gen- blocking the way. The tra∞c cleared mous bulldog e∞gy onto the field and, eral attentiveness one might expect of a ahead and he pressed the gas-pedal, accel- with terrific ado, beheaded it. The Crim- Harvard hopeful. As we drove around erating toward his first night at Harvard. son Crazies whooped with delight. A Yale Harvard Square, he did his best to notice There was something very exciting about announcer mocked Harvard over the everything: the final clubs, the Lampoon that feeling—our backs pressed against loudspeaker. The Harvard cheering sec- castle, the Gold Coast housing; the the seats, the wind in our hair, moving for- tion broke into chants of “Safety school.” Charles Hotel, the Coop, the Common. ward. All the same, I’m embarrassed to A formalized performance, refined through As we passed Johnston Gate I pointed admit that I had no idea what lay ahead of years of repetition. out Massachusetts Hall, Harvard’s oldest us. My eyes were focused squarely on the A group of alumni, huddled under a building. “And freshmen live there?” rear view mirror. class flag, broke spontaneously into song, he asked. “That’s pretty cool.” and soon much of the Harvard cheering After dropping o≠ my friends at their Lee Hudson Teslik ’05 is looking forward to Sep- section was belting “Ten Thousand Men Houses, we headed up Garden Street to- tember, when his brother, William, will be joining of Harvard.” One wizened alumnus, from ward the Quad. William would spend the Harvard’s class of 2008. the forthcoming reunion class of ’39, joined hands with a group of undergradu- ates, chanting away, raspily, proudly. I was charmed by the image of the old PERFORMING ARTS man singing, but gradually my focus shifted to the students around him. Tra- ditions, after all, persist only so long as they are celebrated. The old man was just singing. It was the students—with their The Wizard of Backstage rapt attention—who made the scene Peyton Sherwood creates a theatrical world out of a “big black box.” such a poignant spectacle. Harvard tradi- tion cannot be greater than ordinary Last november, when the Harvard- zaccio’s technical director, Peyton Sher- Harvard students. Alumni celebrate tra- Radcli≠e Dramatic Club (HRDC) pro- wood ’04, explains that being “TD” of a dition, even endow it. But it is students duced the French Romantic play Lorenzac- mainstage show is “one of the biggest the- who engage tradition, and it is students cio on the Loeb Drama Center’s main ater jobs. For Lorenzaccio, I was in the the- who carry the all-important pruning stage, director Jay Scheib made liberal use ater 62 hours one week. I spent several shears. It is students who have the power of new electronic media. Two video-cam- hundred hours on the show. You have to to simply ignore what no longer seems era operators roamed onstage; they fed a think hard about saying yes.” Sherwood relevant. video projector that displayed these im- has uttered many yeses; he estimates that Harvard beat Yale that day. On our way ages on a billboard-like screen atop a Chi- he’s worked on 80 percent of the shows out of the stadium, William and I bumped nese restaurant on the set. Scheib choreo- mounted on the main stage since his into another acquaintance of mine, an ac- graphed the media people into the scene. freshman year, when he was TD for Into the tivist, handing out fliers promoting the in- Their cameras poked through windows in Woods; he also handled technical direction crease of wages for workers on college a ranch-style house on the set and added for Cabaret in 2002, making him the only campuses. I asked him about the group he two visual perspectives to the one the au- student in recent history who has been was with and he launched into an impas- dience had from their seats. The ranch TD for three mainstage shows. “Because sioned tirade against administrative injus- house rolled around on casters and had I’m insane,” he explains. tices. “But things will change,” he said. working electricity and plumbing; its This kind of insanity built Sherwood a “We will make them change. Just like bathtub had to be filled up and drained. reputation as the preeminent technical 1969; just like 2001.” The house also split into three pieces as whiz of undergraduate theater. “He’s con- the play’s action reached its climax. tinuing the long and honorable tradition William gave me a ride back to Har- Organizing such a technical tour de of the backstage person who does every- vard and three of my friends, two seniors force almost makes acting look easy. Loren- thing,” says Alan Symonds ’69, technical

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