Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again: Halloween Party '07

Legend has it that the Constantine Halloween party is famous throughout the University of York for being a really big deal. I’m not sure if this is entirely true, but it’s certainly a Thing among the Manor-based crew, and since this year it was the first party of the year, everyone really wanted to make it a proper do. Last year I got very excited about it and involved in the planning and everything; this year I just don’t have the time, energy, or, quite honestly, the caring. I just can’t get excited about much of anything this year; I feel completely out of the loop, and I don’t even care. But this is one of the rare times when everyone in the house is working on something together, and since I haven’t got to know the new people as well as perhaps I should, I decided to try and do at least something towards the community effort.

Jaclyn, who’s from Canada (this continually surprises me- she is so very American) and who might be best described as a sorority cheerleader in personality, took charge with a vengeance. To her credit, she’s very organised, is capable of being diplomatic (a necessity with Claire Inman, the evil and moronic house-manager, breathing down our necks), and really is tremendously enthusiastic. Her baby was the decorations, which, in my opinion, is perhaps the least consideration when it comes to university parties. (People come to hang out, dance, and most of all drink.) I took over the food committee, and Louisa was in charge of drinks. We managed to cadge £200 from the GSA and Wentworth budgets combined, which is a considerable leap from last year, so we had mulled wine and punch and beer to offer. I made a slew of sponge cakes and sandwiches, and that was my chief contribution to the organisational effort.

I can’t say I was tremendously excited about the whole thing. I’m so tired all the time and I’m so wrapped up in my work, that when I do have time to kick back and relax, I’d rather hang out quietly with a couple of good friends than spend the night at a loud, drunken party. And try though I might not to make comparisons, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking how different it was from last year. By this time last year we were all pretty good friends, and certainly I had figured out who my close friends were going to be. The party was exciting because it was getting ready together, and hanging out before everyone else arrived, and then all just being crazy and having memories together. This year isn’t like that for me at all. My close friends in York don’t live here, and we don’t really spend time together as a house. Part of that is that, while last year we were almost all King’s Manor based, this year there are several people in different departments on campus. And those who are at the Manor have chosen to spend a lot of time down on campus at events and making friends there, so the pool of people is much larger and more diversified, and the house is, by result, not as closely united. We’re too early in the Lords season for that to be having much effect on the overall dynamic.

Still, I wanted to go in costume this year- I hate crapweasling out due to lack of time, as happened last year- but it had to be something that would require minimal effort. So I went as a New England gravestone. I took some cardboard and made wings for the side of my head, painted my face white and blacked out my eyes, and then, on another piece of cardboard which hung around my neck, wrote out an epitaph. It took all of about forty-five minutes to make, which was really all the time I had. Jaclyn had everyone running around like chickens with their heads off right up until about an hour before the party started.

I will say that people really went all out with costumes. Louisa was a mummy, which was fantastic, except that her bandages kept falling off in rather important places, so halfway through the evening she put on the PVC nun suit again. I don’t know what Dave was but his head makeup, courtesy of Louisa, was amazing. Spalding and Russell were a dance-competition duo- their outfits were fabulous. The Minster House ladies and some others came as a set- Claire’s boyfriend was Henry VIII and the others were his wives, so Ashley was Katherine of Aragon, Christina was Anne Boleyn, Lauly (who came back for the party) was Katherine Howard (I think), and Ehren was Anne of Cleves, complete in Apollonius-gold heels. I’m not sure if Claire was Jane Seymour or Katherine Howard. Michelle and Garrett were zombies. Gerrard (also in town for the event) wore a lot of Dutch-flag themed clothing and a trench coat and came as a Dutch Rapist (which, for anyone reading this who didn’t live here last year, is pretty much an inside joke).

Of the new people: Carolyn, the other American (she’s from Boston- it’s weird that our New England contingent is so small this year), was Katherine Howard, but her dress was about eighty year too late (I was the only one who noticed, apparently). Katie came as Margaret Clitherow, and her boyfriend Tom was Dick Turpin, so they get points for keeping with the York theme. Johnny was a teabag- he made it out of tulle stuffed with leaves; he won for best costume. Strasz was Sweeney Todd (I think I was the only one who guessed it- he is the other musicals buff in the house this year). Charlotte threw on a wimple, but left off the rest of the nun’s habit. Catherine was a witch in corset and skirt, and Lucy rented a French maid outfit. I’ll be getting the photos up on the other website hopefully tomorrow, so you can see it all.

And then there were about two hundred other people who showed up, almost all of them in costume. I have no idea who any of them were, to be honest. It was the most massively enormous party we have ever had here at Constantine, again the result of having people based on campus, which spread the word far and wide. We violated pretty much every promise we made to Claire Inman about keeping it small, but when the Manor security came by (per our request, to try and make a compromise with the Evil Inman) they were quite satisfied that all was well (possibly because they only walked around the back garden, and didn’t see the melee inside). We were diligent about making people sign in, and we did have a (relatively) sober person around (me- not by choice).

I did not intend to be the sober guardian of the drunken masses. In fact, that was exactly what I didn’t want to be. But someone, early on, had the arguably wise/arguably foolish idea to use Charlotte’s room (Gerrard’s old Room 3) for the coatroom. This was okay, because the room had just been mould-treated and painted, and so Charlotte is temporarily up in Virginia’s old room (which had that treatment a week ago). But some of her stuff is still in 03, so she was uneasy about people going in and out. The promise was made to her that someone would be there all night to keep an eye on it, and the idea was that everyone would take shifts at the sign-in/food/coat-check table. The problem was that everyone got progressively less interested in this duty, while getting progressively more intoxicated. Well, it might not’ve been my idea, but someone clearly had to step up to being responsibly, so I ended up doing it, simply because it was obvious that no one else would. (It started because, with my headdress on, behind the table was the safest place for me.) And I ended up getting stuck there almost all night.

The truth is, I don’t know how much fun I would’ve had out in the crowd anyway. There were just way too many strangers there, and way too many people in general. I don’t like not feeling able to breathe in a mob. And the moments that were fun were the few when I managed to sneak away from the table and hang out with the Old Guard, who were all bunched up in a corner by the DJ table. There it was comfortable and familiar, although even that wasn’t perfect: in being surrounded by the remains of last year’s crowd, I missed everyone who wasn’t there that much more (which is saying a lot, because there are people I miss terribly pretty much 24/7 anyway).

My only real break from it was to take care of the drunks. We had more people who were really, truly, falling down drunk at last night’s party than at any I have ever been to in my life. Apart from the people I knew who got quite tanked, there were a lot of strangers bumping into things and falling over. I have, it would seem, a particular talent for coping with them, so I was the one escorting people outside to get air and convincing them to drink some water and generally trying to keep an eye on things. One guy was absolutely falling over himself, so I walked him out to the back garden. He yelled at me for pointing out that the steps were coming up, because he “wasn’t stupid or so drunk he couldn’t figure that out”. Immediately after which he pitched down them on his arse. I was oddly unsympathetic, and people that plastered don’t usually get hurt (beyond what I’m sure are some lovely bruises today). (He was sober enough by the end of the evening to say thank you to me before stumbling, quite literally, out the front door.)

I think I stayed up until about three-thirty, four o’clock, at which point I was practically dead on my feet from exhaustion, and all I really wanted to do was go down to my room, have a really good cry, and go to bed. (No, I was not drunk. I didn’t even achieve tipsy. Which is sad- you’d think that two Black Russians heavy on the vodka, a glass of cider, a glass of wine, a screwdriver, and a pint of equal parts vodka and cola, would do something, if only because it’s a hideous shmay of booze. Nope. Not so much as a tingle.) I found Charlotte, got permission to abandon her room to its fate, went downstairs, and did exactly as I planned.

This morning I slept until about noon, and then had breakfast with the reunion crowd- Louisa and David, Gerrard and Ehren, Ashley and Lauly, and Michelle and Garrett. It was absolutely lovely and felt just so… more like the way life is supposed to be. (I wonder if I am ever going to adjust to it not being the way life is supposed to be anymore.)

Then it was off to clean up. Jaclyn had planned on having everyone do cleanup on Sunday, but the house was such an indescribably shit-sty that it really did have to tackled right away. Honestly, I have never seen a house this filthy in all my life. Wait, that’s not true- I have, after a couple of really ghastly frat parties I got dragged to with friends. I remember being at them and thinking, God, I feel so horrible for whoever has to clean this up tomorrow. Well, now I am who has to clean up tomorrow. Johnny, his brother, Lucy, and I started rounding up the stray bottles and cans and throwing out the general garbage. It took a couple hours, but we managed to get to hooverable before I went out for tea with Lauly. The common room is mostly presentable at this point, although we still need to wash the walls. The foyer is better, but needs to be hoovered, and the loo, which is so revolting I actually will not set foot in it, still needs to be tackled, but I wash my hands of it. I did enough pick-up, and most of the dishes, and I’m done for. (The only good part of this was that someone left unopened bottles of fairly good rum and peach schnapps lying about, which I squirreled away into my growing liquor cabinet, along with some cheap beer for baking bread.) We really should wash the steps and hoover the stairs, because they are repellently sticky, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. The real question is whether or not the cleaners will get to it.

I think the party would be considered a resounding success. Everyone seems to think that the general state of filth is proof of that, although I’m not sure I equate minging revulsion with a party well thrown. But everyone seems quite pleased with it, so I’m not going to argue. I’m just glad it’s over, and I get to worrying about the next event looming on the horizon- not the dissertation, but my upcoming formal Samhain dinner this Wednesday. I am way more excited about that than I was about the Halloween party, maybe because I think anyone can throw drunken debauchery pretty successfully, but a formal dinner part is an art form. And Samhain, as opposed to Halloween, has been a more solemn, less debauched holiday in my world for many years now, so that’s more comfortable for me.

If I didn’t miss everyone so damn much, it probably would have been quite a fun party. As it is, it was a good party. It an okay night. Now onward and upward to quieter, smaller, better things.

Dissertation Narration

Every now and then I am reminded that I am here for a reason that is not theatre, or everyday drama, that I am here to get my MA and write my dissertation. That this should not be the thing central to my heart isn’t terribly surprising; people have always been at the core of my heart and I have never been very good at diversifying my attentions or affections. While my friends here continue to be more important than it, the friends to whom I was the closest have left, and so the dissertation has moved up in the ranks of importance.

That’s not to say that I wasn’t working. Actually, I was doing a ton of reading and trying to work up my lit review. The trouble is that the thing was metastasizing all over the place, and I choose that word very deliberately, because it was strangling itself off. You can’t very well talk about the mystery plays without talking about the guilds, but how much is enough? It’s important to acknowledge Continental sources of comparison, but they aren’t truly analogous and it’s hard to determine how much to put in and how much to leave out. Can I safely assume that my reader knows about the Corpus Christi rituals, or do I need to get into a lot of religious history? Because my natural tendency is to assume that people are either monumentally daft or that my topic is sufficiently obscure as to require a great deal of explanation, I probably erred heavily on the side of caution and got myself going in a thousand different directions at once. The thing is, there are so many ways you can look at the mystery plays. Unfortunately, none of them are archaeological.

That was the conclusion I was finally forced to face. What’s been done from an archaeological angle, albeit by literary scholars or historians, mostly, is about all that can be done. Having scraps of (theoretically) proper archaeological training won’t offer up that much different of a perspective, because there’s just nothing left. You could theorise till the cows come home, and maybe come up with some different theories, but they would forever remain in the land of fantasy I had suspected this, but as I finished my readings I realised that it really was true, and there were no ways for me to go at things differently. Nothing had been overlooked, even though archaeology has really ignored the mystery plays. Actually, archaeology has ignored medieval theatre pretty much totally. there is a lot done with prehistoric “theatre”, almost invariably meaning presumed ritual practice (‘when in doubt, it’s ritual’, is sort of a statement we joke about in archaeology, but there is a lot of truth to it), which is incredibly speculative. But we’re okay with being speculative from very little when it comes to prehistory- we haven’t any other way to be. There is also a big trend toward archaeology of modern and historic theatre, primarily the former. In this case, we have enough material or documentation to make it comfortable, particularly with contemporary productions that can be recorded. Medieval theatre lives in a limbo between the two- too documented, too historically close for anyone to be comfortable imposing potentially inaccurate assumptions on the period, but without enough left to make really educated statements, either. And since medieval theatre was pretty decentralised in terms of performance space (the mystery plays being on wagons, for example) there’s nothing to be dug up or retrieved. Materially, they might never have existed.

Well, you have to go where the data leads you, and in this case it was telling me that the medieval productions were a pretty dead end. Having to go in and talk to Kate, my supervisor, about this had me terrified, because in a way it’s like saying my entire dissertation is dead. I also didn’t have much to show her on paper- I had started writing the lit review, but the problems of its sprawl tendency and the niggling suspicion that a lot of my reading was going to prove irrelevant, given the brick wall, were not encouraging me to write much. The conclusion I kept reaching was that the only remaining avenue was to look at the modern productions, and how could I justify that as medieval archaeology?

Kate proved a saint for not bawling me out for not having been in touch sooner- I tend to curl up and go into hiding when I get upset about things, preferring infinitely to lick my wounds in private and find my way alone, applying the theory of ‘it will either get better or kill me’ that I also use with illness. It was silly of me to be so unnerved, though, because Kate is both infinitely rational and extremely kind, and she was completely amenable to my plan to look more closely at the modern plays. I will say this for myself- I went in there with the problem, and a game plan, and a timetable; I did my homework as best I could, and I had questions all laid out, so that it didn’t seem as if I’d done nothing for the past three months, even though tangibly that would be an easy conclusion to draw.

The general upshot is that now I’m looking almost exclusively at modern productions of the mystery plays. Through interviews with people who have involved, I’m hoping to address some of the experiences that might say something about the material possibilities of the Middle Age productions; but the bigger question will be about how they reflect the changing perception of medieval culture throughout the twentieth century. I’m not sure I see any archaeology in that part of it, but that is perfectly fine with me. I just hope it will be acceptable to the readers who have to grade it. That’s the sort of question that really interests me, though, so it’s a little easier to get enthused about my work now than it was when I was beating my head against an unproductive wall.

I’m still not sure if I like my dissertation or not- I’m rather exhausted with it, and looking forward to doing something else for a while, looking forward to a break from academia. But I’m not sure that equals the passionate loathing I was feeling earlier into things. It’s a love-hate relationship, I guess. Maybe when it’s all done I’ll look back on it with a certain fondness. Then again, maybe I’ll be happy to flip a copy of it onto the coals in the barbecue. We’ll see.

Another Year and I'm Still Here

My twenty-seventh birthday present was a one-way plane ticket to England. It was one of the best presents I ever got. And now it’s a year later. My memories of my first day in York are incredibly vivid, and it’s hard to believe it’s been a whole year.

The memories of the time between arriving and really getting settled into life here are, however, much more muddled and hazy. I’m glad I was keeping my diary fairly constantly then, because it’s really the only signpost I have to go by, as I try to navigate the beginning of another year.

Getting here last year was much easier. The house was, to me, empty- it didn’t have any memories, I didn’t have anything or anyone here, no preconcieved notions of how things should be, or what to expect. In my memory, the house gelled together as friends pretty quickly. My journals would, in some ways, contradict that memory. I am amused in a sad and ironic sort of way by how desperately I was trying to cling to my isolationist intentions when I got here… and by how quickly that went straight out the window… and how long I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t failing at it horribly, when all along I clearly knew it was already too late.

I can’t really use last year as a gauge, though, because everything this year is so different. I’m not fresh off a plane, just arriving from running away from my life. My life is here, I have a lot of tangled roots planted in York, and even if it might seem that they would have been sorted and pulled up by everyone leaving, it doesn’t really work that way. Everything here has changed so fast, and I don’t shift that quickly. Within a week I had to get used to the idea of watching my friends leave, a suddenly empty and quiet house, and suddenly it was full again, of strangers. Now there are people living in the rooms of friends whose departures I have barely begun to realise, and I’m definitely not ready yet to go out and make new friends.

Being one of the veterans is a strange feeling. I already have my place here, people I know, a definition of myself in relation to others, even if they’re not here anymore. Inevitably, I find myself comparing the new people to the old, and, as is usual with me, they do not measure up favourably. They seem perfectly nice, but not kindred spirits. Raise your hand if you’ve heard me say this before, and pray that this time it’s true.

One of the biggest differences is that we are not American-dominated this year. We’re very heavy on the women again, but this time we’re firmly tipped towards an English majority. I don’t know if it’s classic English reserve or just this crop of MAs in particular, but the general consensus is that they’re really bland and kind of boring. They seem terribly young and shiningly innocent; I look at them and find myself thinking, Oh, poor things, you have no idea what the year has in store, because grad school does take it out of you shockingly. I hope they get more interesting as the year goes on- not that I wish them trauma-drama or anything, but some modicum of excitement that isn’t mine would be nice. Hopefully once the year gets going and Lords starts and things like that, individual personalities will winnow out. For now, I would generally refer to them all as “nice”, by which I mean that no one thus far seems sufficiently interesting or unique enough to warrant a stronger adjective. Last year’s cast of characters was so dynamic, it’s hard to downshift into this rather pablem existence.

And so the Old Guard troops along. Louisa and I work on our dissertations. Ehren looks for a job and a flat. James and Adrienne go on with their work, Rachel and Luisa spend time with their respective boyfriends. Claire, Ashley, and Christina go to work and buy furniture for their new house. And through it all, we miss tremendously the folks who have gone home.