For the past two weeks or so, a troupe of students has been hard at work tearing up the lawn between Olin and Boliou.  It started with cutting up all the grass in a lima-bean-shaped patch of ground and hauling it away, then students hoed the earth to soften it and made paths winding between raised beds.  A painted wood sign in the middle of the plot reads “Eat the Lawn.”

What that means...

Miracle of miracles – it didn't rain for Spring Concert! (This is the first time in three years, those of you who are freshmen.)  Students took advantage of the sunshine to lounge around on the grass, play beanbag toss, and enjoy some cotton candy and Chapati's.  And, of course, listen to great music.

Click here for photos of the event.

A bunch of people, two large inflatable excercise balls, one college campus, and one huge forest.  These are the necessary components for a game of Capture the Ball, a very large-scale Capture the Flag-style game which was played across Carleton last weekend.

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It seems that every spring term odd things start popping up around campus.  Like giant tables.  Now it’s happening again: one morning, a couple of weeks ago, there appeared to be a bunch of tentacles attempting to crawl out of the ground in front of the library.  Was it something from the Tunnels trying to take revenge on us all?

International Fest, or ProFusion, is an annual chance for Carleton students to show off their talents from cultures all around the world.  The festival utterly took over the inside of Sayles for an afternoon last Saturday, with food up on the balcony, and activities and entertainment below.  The food was incredibly popular – so popular, in fact, that festival organizers had to make sure that people took the right set of stairs up to Upper Sayles so they would not disrupt the lines up there.  Back downstairs, there were activities such as origami, Burmese face-painting, calligraphy, and henna.

But that's not all that went on...

Nowadays, May Day is an obscure holiday, kind of like “Root Canal Appreciation Day” that is listed in the student planner (May 14, by the way).  “May Day” is actually the modernized name for Beltane, an ancient Pagan holiday that celebrated the coming of spring and fertility.  You do know what May poles really stood for, right?

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When the lights came up on the stage and revealed a pensive-looking Alsa Bruno '12 in very small red underwear, it was clear that this would not be an ordinary night at Little Nourse.

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Cheese.  Why should it be so funny?  Sadly, this food product is much maligned, probably because we’ve been brought up on too many gluey Kraft singles.  Last weekend, the students of Slow Food gave themselves the mission to educate us about what cheese has the potential to be.

More information inside...

How often do you get to set fire to a piano to fulfill your comps requirement?  Pretty much all of campus knows by now that the performance art piece “Piano Burning” happened last Thursday.  A flaming piano in the middle of the Bald Spot is somehow harder to miss than a 20-page paper.

About the piano...

This past weekend, what was probably the majority of the student body flooded West Gym to watch the spring performance of Ebony II. Apparently, it was one of the best Ebonys in recent memory. This reporter, however, was crammed into the men's locker room with the hundreds of other dancers waiting for their turn on the makeshift stage. This is what it was like to be on the other side of the curtain.

The inside story...

At 445 years old, William Shakespeare is still going strong.  The Carleton English department threw him a birthday party to celebrate the work of the old Bard.  At least, we’re reasonably sure that April 23, 1564 was his birthday.  There are a lot of things that we don’t know about this writer, but we do know that he wrote a body of really good plays (Christopher Marlowe conspiracy theories aside).  For the occasion, the English department performed some of his most famous scenes.

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Brainstorming.  Plot-mapping.  Scriptwriting.  Snack-eating.  Script-editing.  Nap-taking.  Prop-finding.  Line-memorizing.  Costume-crafting.  Script-interpreting.  Action-directing.  Dress-rehearsing.  Last-minute-panicking.  PERFORMANCE!

The 24 Hour Show completes all of these stages of show-production in, as you might suspect, 24 hours.  The basic plot of the show is not even conceived at 8:00 Friday evening, and at 8:00 Saturday evening, the curtain rises and it is performed.

Here's a look at the planning, practicing, and production of this year's 24 Hour Show.