Deception, Double-Crossing, and Dirty (Or Clean) Socks

“There will be no deals or negotiations. Never drop your vigilance. Take no prisoners.”

I received this e-mail last week from Alpha-Assassin 001, and I knew it had begun. It, of course, being JE Assassins. JE Assassins is more than just a game – for one day to one week, depending on how soon you’re eliminated, it is a lifestyle. You will walk everywhere carrying a pair of socks in one pocket and your umbrella in the other. (Offense and defense, respectively. Socks are weapons, umbrellas can be shields.) You will run from your bedroom through the common room to the bathroom, aware that the common room is not a safe space and anyone could be lurking there. You may attempt to make deals with “friends.” Beware: for these few days, no one is your friend. Deals mean nothing and can and should be broken. Double-crossing = encouraged.

Some will tell you that it’s all good fun, to relax, to enjoy yourself. The others, the more committed assassins, will tell you the truth – there are no deals or negotiations, never drop your vigilance, and take no prisoners.

Walkway out of the JE common room/dining hall. A prime bottleneck for catching targets.

Safe zones include bathrooms, your bedroom, the dining hall, and intramural sports. But the common room outside the dining hall is absolutely not safe and is a prime bottleneck for catching the unsuspecting diner. Some people choose to eat where they can see their targets, then follow them out and tap them with a sock as soon as they cross the threshold into the common room. Others leave before their targets do and then wait in the common room, “reading a newspaper” or “playing piano,” bundle of socks carefully hidden out of sight . Still others, the ones who can’t win on their own and must recruit suitemates as spies (yes, I’m talking about YOU, my would-be assassin), ask friends to sit in the common room, “doing homework,” who will alert them via text when you leave the dining hall, so that they can catch you outside.

Assassins is a magnificent game. It’s also prone to induce extreme paranoia in its players. For the first round, you have no idea who is playing or who your assassin might be, and so everyone is a potential assassin. Best to creep from your room to the dhall and back and to spend time exclusively with friends from other colleges. Or, if you must spend time with friends from your own college, avoid people outside your immediate friend group. Loyalties are fickle and all but your closest friends are liable to be deceptive double agents.

My bedroom. A safe zone.

When only seven assassins remain, the second round begins: a free-for-all, which is even more intense. Now you have six people to stalk and six people to avoid, and crossed paths in the courtyard that lead to three-way standoffs are not uncommon. My only advice, if you make it this far, is: there are no deals or negotiations, never drop your vigilance, and take no prisoners.

However, as much as I might mock others for their “rookie mistakes” – not looking behind them when they leave the dining hall or lingering too long in the common room – I have to admit that immediately before Round 2, I was prey to one myself. The majority of my good friends had already been killed and I was beginning to feel just the tiniest bit creepy as the junior assassin whose sole mission was to eliminate multiple freshmen, many of whom lived in the same suite. The paranoid fear and competitive drive that had kept me alive began to wane.

A lovely piece of winter art, or a cover/hiding place for a potential assassin? You decide.

And so I slipped up. I believed that I knew who my assassin was, having thwarted a previous assassination attempt (see above: bungled common room killing), and so I went to study in the JE library. I had my socks at the ready and raised them at nearly every passerby, but let down my guard when they were not my suspected assassin. When one girl walked past and I recognized her as what I thought of as a friendly, sweet sophomore, I lowered my sock arm. I was rewarded with a sock tap on the shoulder and the words, “… Sorry!”

Oh, well. Now at least I can go back to studying in my library, eating in my dining hall, and walking through my courtyard without constantly glancing around in paranoia. Although to be perfectly honest, I kind of miss it already.

Are you ....

-exhausted from skiing all day?
-excited that you finally found a friend who responds appropriately to the quote "Feed me, Seymour!" ? (For the record, the answer is "Feed me all night long," from Little Shop of Horrors.)
-hoping your skiing exhaustion won't affect your performance in the long-awaited FIRST IM INNER TUBE WATER POLO MATCH OF THE SEASON?!
-still annoyed that you didn't immediately guess the "childhood pop star who has recently made a comeback" whose last name starts with "S" ? (Britney Spears -- such a lowball!)

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then I'm going to have to guess you are:
Me, after playing Botticelli for two hours on the bus ride home from Okemo Mountain, VT, where JE hosted its annual ski trip this year.

Okemo Mountain.

Botticelli is a fantastic game that I first learned on my FOOT (Freshman Outdoor Orientation Trip, www.yale.edu/foot) pre-orientation hike. The point of Botticelli is to guess a person whom one of your friends (let's say Sam) has selected. Sam gives you the first letter of the person's last name, and then the game begins. In order to ask "yes/no" questions about the mysterious person, which you need in order to figure out anything, you first have to break into the "inner circle." To get to this inner circle, you have to stump your friend by thinking of another person whose last name shares the same first letter as the mysterious person. If Sam can't guess who that person is, then you're into the inner circle.

For example, if the last name of Sam's person begins with an "S," I might ask, "Were you ever married to Carla Bruni?" Or "Did you duke it out with Mark McGwire to break the single-season record for number of home runs?" If Sam doesn't know that the person I'm thinking of is Nicolas Sarkozy or Sammy Sosa, well, I'm into the inner circle.




Charlotte Bronte, Nicolas Sarkozy, & Bill Belichick were just some of the names that came up in our game.

The three-hour bus ride home from VT flew by. It was hilarious to see who my friends chose and it was so indicative of the variety of interests my friends have -- we covered people from the Kennedys to Indian film actresses to British novelists to football coaches. But as much fun as Botticelli was, it was far from the highlight of my day. Because prior to Botticelli, I had spent 7 hours skiing on Okemo Mountain with 50 members of JE in a subsidized ski trip run by the college.

It was AMAZING! I've never gone before, and I can't believe that I missed out on this twice. For starters, we left JE at 4:30 am which made for a hilarious bus ride up there. 50 very sleepy JE Spiders crawled onto the bus, and either dealt with their exhaustion by being insanely awake and peppy or by falling asleep all over their neighbors. Once we got to the mountain, though, everyone woke up.

Gondola ride up the mountain!

People came who had never skiied before and they spent most of the days on the bunny slopes being coached by one of the JE sophomores. I also had a bunch of friends on the trip who have practically been skiing all over the country since age 4. I had mistakenly considered myself to be "intermediate" -- little did I know that after being convinced to come along with 4 of my friends who all fit into the second category (they make skiing look easier than walking), I would realize I still have a LOT to learn. The fact that my entire body is stiff today, including my arms (who knows how that happened?) is proof.

Ana and Ayaska on the mountain!

Beyond making it difficult for me to walk and challenging me to wrack my brain for political and pop culture trivia, the trip was fabulous because I got to spend a completely surreal day with some of my best friends in JE. I know I've said it before, but I absolutely love having the JE community as my home within my home at Yale and whether the people on my trip were my closest friends or my good acquaintances, we're all members of the JE family and I wouldn't trade my residential college for any other.

Speaking of which, the first JE IM inner tube water polo game of the season is tonight -- wish me luck in continuing JE's eternal climb toward the glory of the Tyng Cup!

My Education

During the last few months, I’ve taken to tossing around the acronym “CHE” and am surprised when my friends don’t instantly know what I’m talking about. For some reason, after explaining it once, I assumed that my friends should remember what it meant, seeing as how it has quickly grown from being my newest extracurricular activity to my favorite. (Or second-favorite … intramural inner-tube water polo might give it a run for its money, but that’s another story for another blog. Stay tuned.) CHE stands for Community Health Educators, one of Yale’s community service groups, which I joined at the beginning of this past semester (http://www.yale.edu/che/about.html). CHE was founded in 1999 as an answer to New Haven’s lack of an institutional health education program for middle and high school students. Health education is sometimes taught in science classes, sometimes in other classes, and sometimes not at all. After a New Haven high school counselor spoke with a Dwight Hall Public School Intern (Dwight Hall is Yale’s umbrella service organization, the largest of its kind in the world), CHE was formed. Today, more than 150 volunteers present workshops in 22 schools to address topics like nutrition, drug & alcohol use, and healthy relationships.

Dwight Hall

I joined CHE for a number of reasons. One of my main motivations was a conversation that I had last summer with a friend whom I met through a research internship in Lausanne, Switzerland. At one point I mentioned sex education, the at-times-excruciatingly-awkward-but-let’s-face-it-ultimately-important rite of passage through which every sixth, ninth, and twelfth grader underwent in my school system, and one of my friends asked, "What’s that?” I was somewhat baffled that someone as well-educated as my friend had never heard of sex ed. When I returned to campus in the fall, I decided to get involved in CHE.

As excited as I was, I could not have imagined how incredible teaching would be. It has been a growing experience, as I’ve learned to handle difficult questions and controversial topics, and to always remain non-judgmental. My job is to deliver accurate information and, as a college student, to do so as the students’ peer. Most exciting is the realization that I am making an impact on these students. Whether a student lingers after class to speak about something that clearly is burdening him or her, or an initially silent classroom, by the end, is buzzing with questions and answers, I realize that I am often one of the only reliable sources of sexual education in these students’ lives. I leave each classroom exhilarated and eager to return.

CHE is the type of program that could wash away any cynicism you might have toward community service. In fact, the program has been so eye-opening that, in combination with several other factors, it’s prompted me to consider a career in public health. While I’ve always wanted to be a doctor, I hadn’t looked into public health and now that I’ve begun exploring the field, it seems to be a perfect fit. I’ve been spending massive amounts of time over break looking into public health internships and graduate programs and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

Although it’s wonderful to be home on break, I can’t wait to get back and to begin teaching in classrooms again next semester. If I’m lucky, not only will I teach in receptive classrooms and know that I’ve made a difference, but I’ll be assigned to the high school that “looks like a spaceship,” according to the information sheet. What could be better?

A sneak peek at the spaceship-high school (it doesn't do it justice).

I Should Tell You

For years, I’ve had to hide a deep, dark secret from my friends. I’ve struggled with feelings of embarrassment, shame, and guilt. I’ve been confronted with laughter, confusion, and the occasional empathetic soul. My terrible secret is this: I am 100%, head-over-heels, obsessed with musical theater.

An actress or director might have no problem admitting this. But in high school, as a sensible science student uninvolved with theater, I learned that I am not expected to fall prey to the kitschy Broadway musical. Yet since the tender age of twelve, when my friends and I memorized Rent, this obsession has only grown. From Rent, I moved on to Bye Bye Birdie. Then I discovered Sondheim. “On the Steps of the Palace” became my shower song. (Anyone who enjoys that song as much as I do, COMMENT! We’ll chat.)

When I came to Yale, I was discreet at first. Sure, my alarm clock blared South Pacific, but that was it. Then came Jonathan Edwards Culture Draw. JE, my residential college, holds a lottery each semester that allows about 60 students to see a musical, play, opera, ballet, or concert in New York City, fully funded by the college. The only cost is the $28 round-trip Metro North train ticket. Well, that was the end of my secrecy.

I’ve been extremely lucky and through JE, I have now seen (in NYC):
-Sunday in the Park with George
-All My Sons
-and Aida (the opera).

Here in New Haven, I've gone to:
-Into the Woods at the Dramat (with a student cast)
-Death of a Salesman (with Charles Dutton) at the Yale Repertory Theater (where Meryl Streep and Edward Norton once played)
-and original plays by my classmates.

In past two weeks alone, I've seen (in New Haven/at Yale):
-The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
-Carousel
-A Chorus Line
-and Pop! (an original new musical at the Yale Rep.)

Finally, this semester, I decided to take – along with biochemistry, physics, physics lab, and physical chemistry – History of the American Musical Theater with Prof. Dan Egan. I had to fight against my instincts to take a “serious” fifth class. But taking this class was one of my best choices at Yale. It’s one of those courses people refer to when they say you should use college to explore, to take random classes to broaden your passions.

I’ve gained a deeper appreciation for the intricacies of the theater I’ve always loved. I can now defend myself when someone refers to musicals as “kitsch” and explain that, well, if you would just look at Joseph Swain’s theory regarding the inverted tritones in West Side Story, you’ll see that musicals are as thoroughly constructed as any thesis-based essay. (Obviously.) All pretentious joking aside, I look forward to doing my homework and I’m constantly glad I decided to take this course.

Speaking of which, it’s getting late and it’s time for me to crawl into bed and listen to Sweeney Todd, one of my assigned soundtracks for the week. I will simply leave you with this – no longer a confession, but a declaration – I, Hallie Rozansky, Yale Class of 2011, am a proud lover of musical theater.

My Crowning Achievement

(Miranda, on the left, as an upside-down tulip (she did a head stand for the official competition) and me, on the right, as the right-side-up version.)

October 25. The day has come. I wake up and scour my room for green tights. I rummage through the pile of clothes on the floor (parents, if you read this, I will deny that this pile exists) in search of anything brightly-colored that will substitute as a headdress. One block away, my best friend goes through the same routine. Five minutes later, we meet in the courtyard of JE. We’re ready. Covered in red and pink and green from head to foot, we have become tulips.

Today is Tulip Day in Jonathan Edwards College, our annual event filled with tulip planting, pumpkin carving, cake eating, and general merriness. The highlight of the day (at least for those of us in costume) is the crowning of the Tulip Queen and this year, my best friend and I are determined to win the title. Last year, we found out that as long as you a) are an adorable baby and b) have spirited parents (aka the Dean of the college and his wife), you’re a shoe-in. But as cute as Serena is, I couldn’t let her win Tulip Queen two years in a row – the success would go to her head. So instead, I spent five minutes in front of the mirror securing an umbrella to my head in the most petal-like arrangement I could manage, and off I went.

Luckily for me, even the threat of being dethroned couldn’t wake my Dean’s daughter from her nap and with the reigning champion asleep in her crib, my best friend and I achieved an easy victory, receiving fabulous JE fleece blankets as prizes. After taking our victory photo and cutting the tulip cake, I sat down for some tulip planting and pumpkin carving and was reminded again of why I’m obsessed with Jonathan Edwards College.

Yes, Jonathan Edwards has become my home and family within Yale. Yes, our intramural sports teams are basically legendary. (Contest that if you dare, Silliman and TD.) But most importantly, as a JE spider, I’ve learned to wear outlandish costumes with pride. Whether auditioning for our “mock-appella” group (that’s mock-a cappella, also known as lots of people singing loudly and badly), or dressing up for our annual JE Halloween costume contest, I love having the excuse to don that ugly floral dress with the shoulder pads, tie an umbrella to my head, or toss on that platinum blonde wig. And just in case the pride of winning Tulip Queen 2009 doesn’t last me my whole life (although I’m pretty sure it will), there’s always Tulip Day 2010.