BY SAMUEL ASARNOW

In print | October 5, 2006

I have a perverse love for Swarthmore Octobers.�I used to feel a little bad for little ol’ number 10, as it’s sandwiched between the year’s two most intense months: September, with the excitement of the new school year, new classes and old friends, and November, with the triple threat of colorful foliage, Thanksgiving and my birthday. It’s hard to top thrills like those.� �

But October has a trump card, and it’s called Halloween.�

Aficionados of Inter-national Talk Like a Pirate Day might disagree with me, but I think that there’s no holiday Swarthmore students get into like Halloween.�Freshman year, my roommate spent the entire two months preceding Halloween drawing a detail-for-detail re-creation of the Swarthmore logo on tri-cornered felt hat so he could dress up as a pirate from the Good Ship Swarthmore; every year I’ve heard stories of little kids from the borough trick-or-treating in Alice Paul.�

And then there’s the Mary Lyon Halloween Party.�

When I took “Theory of the Novel” last semester, we learned that the literary critic Georg Lukacs defined an “epic” as a story written not about an individual, but about a civilization.�The ML Halloween party, by that definition, was most assuredly epic, a true coming-together of the entire Swarthmore campus.�Sophomores, juniors and seniors most likely know what it was like; freshmen, just imagine your good friends, that senior on your hall and the two kids who never shut up in your Soc/Anth class all dressed up to the point where you can’t tell who they are and crammed into the Mary Lyon breakfast room.�Now imagine them singing “Like a Prayer.”�

What’s that?�You don’t know what the Mary Lyon breakfast room is?�Well, my friends, that’s because you’ve never been to the Halloween Party.�It’s always fun to make costumes, get sweaty and sing pop songs, it’s true.�But the real purpose of the Halloween Party was to get ordinary, unassuming folks who live on campus to make the 15 minute walk down Harvard Ave. and find out what exactly this whole “Mary Lyon” thing is about.�For a school as tightly-knit as Swarthmore, it’s always been kind of weird that such a huge number of students live so far off campus; the Halloween Party was a good faith attempt to try to make that community seem more of a whole.�

Unfortunately, however, there were some problems with the party. Lukacs might have called it an epic, to be sure, but I think Aristotle would have called it a tragedy: no matter what precautions the ML RAs and the Dean’s Office took, it always involved more than its fair share of suffering, both on the part of the dormitory’s neighbors (500 voices singing Madonna is a lot more fun when you’re one of them than when you’re next door trying to sleep), and on the part of the dormitory’s residents, who had to mop the floors the next morning. I think the decision for ML not to host the party again was a sound one.�

That doesn’t mean that the party won’t be missed or that this community as a whole won’t be worse off for its absence. Its awesomely grand scale meant that it really was epic and a common foundation for the community as a whole. The measure of tragic suffering it entailed for most (if not all) meant that the community as a whole also shared a moment of true Aristotelian catharsis; my two Halloween parties in ML involved two of the most emotional conversations of my life and solidified several of my closest friendships.�� �

So, what does October at Swarthmore look like post-ML-Halloween-Party? There’s a lot of potential, community-bonding – wise: SAC and Student Council have taken on the responsibility of throwing a party, and their status as ideologically neutral organizations means that if they take advantage of the Halloween party’s historical momentum they might re-create a party with the same kind of power to bring together people from all over campus.�

But what of Mary Lyon and the freshmen who might otherwise never get to see what it’s like?�Avoiding a Halloween-party – like tragedy is great, but the ML RAs desperately need to find another way to bring people to their dorm, whether through a concert, a dinner or some kind of other (hopefully dry) event that will bring people from farther away than just the second floor.�This time, they need to make it a comedy.

Samuel is a junior. You can reach him at sasarno1@swarthmore.edu.

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