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Editorial: The Demise of the Freshman Show?
By Rachel Reynolds '07
EDITOR IN CHIEF

This year, the Freshman show may have reached a new low. Between the intermittent dancing, the inaudible lines, the short length, and the complete, total, absolute lack of anything resembling a joke, it was a colossal failure.

First, there simply was no original material. I’m told the “Camp Sweet Briar” skit was almost a word-for-word regurgitation of the ‘FYA Exposed!’ concurrent that the freshman all had to attend. Really, how funny is revisiting tired clichés about the “Sweet Briar girl”?

The whole show was disorganized and basically suggested that campus life revolves around nothing more than disreputable hobbies (breaking and entering, drug use, etc). Binge eating and other food-related problems (like dining at La Caretta) were also on full display.

Of course, they used the common trope of Hampden-Sydney escapades, including a few brilliantly witty skits about the power of Natty Light, a mysterious beverage that has the power to make girls take off all of their clothes and sleep with strange boys! Who knew?

It was also rather demoralizing to witness the ethnic stereotypes used as jokes in the absence of any actual comic material. The La Caretta skit was completely ridiculous and somewhat insulting in the way it portrayed both the very lascivious Mexican waiter and the dim-witted Sweet Briar girls.

It should also be mentioned that despite the past successes of ONE (read: ONE) very amusing interpretive dance number in the freshman show, the unfathomable and awkward dance intermissions that seemed constantly to punctuate the show were just idiotic and embarrassing to watch.

However, the girls who bravely threw themselves on swords to say the lines written for them (by whom? Richard Simmons? Michael Jackson? Mel Gibson? Some similarly clinically insane person?) are not completely to blame for the debacle. I have heard that the show was thrown together at the very, very last minute. It’s not a strategy that panned out very well.

I’m less irritated with the players themselves, or even the few girls who put the show together, than I am with the Freshman class as a whole. Come on, girls: get it together! Your class doesn’t often get the chance to play such an active role in Sweet Briar traditions, and the Freshman Show is really your first big chance to show the rest of us that you care. You’re about to be sophomores—it’s time to step up.

The ironic thing is that Freshman Show is one of the few traditions in which participants are valued more for their ability to be witty and smart than for their ability to humiliate themselves in public. We’d much rather see a skit that was clever than one in which a girl just takes off her shirt and runs around screaming. This is the second year in which Freshman Show has been primarily an exhibition of the later type of performance, rather than the former, and it’s too bad. I sincerely hope that next year’s freshman can reverse this trend and return a tradition to the valuable and entertaining exercise that it used to be.