Editor’s Note: Andrew Crimer is the current chair of SAC’s Friday Nights Live committee.
If you’re like me, you’ve been to, maybe, three Cro Dances ever. They’re not my thing. Too many people I don’t know quote-unquote dancing to music I don’t like, et cetera; these are all arguments you’ve heard and quite possibly made before. But that doesn’t mean I’m not grateful that they happen – evidently, many people find them perfectly acceptable and entertaining weekend activities. If it were me planning them, I’d definitely come up with a few wacker themes: post-apocalypse dance (trash can fires, costume = mud & rags), Soviet dance (brassband, long lines for nosnacks), and my much-maligned but constantly suggested Eras of Bowie dance. But it’s not, and probably if I were in charge of dances, far fewer people would come, or at least understand how they were supposed to dress for them.
- A Cro dance. File photo.
So I could understand why you might think you hate SAC, or that you could totally do without it, but truth is, you really couldn’t: we plan Floralia, for one thing, as well as about three events in any given week; we cosponsor event after event put on by clubs whose normal budgets can’t cover their ambitions; we provide tech rentals to countless dinners and concerts. There’s a lot going on.
As is par for the course for an organization that serves a population larger than, well, one person, every event leaves someone out in the cold. But every single one of those people has an opportunity to change what’s going on. For one thing, the emails you receive every week from your dorm rep provide you with a specific person to whom you can make suggestions, and, believe it or not, these suggestions actually make it into discussion at our weekly meetings. You can come to those, by the way. They’re at 7:30 in Ernst Common Room.
Even before I was a SAC member, nobody seemed to like my dance themes, but I digress.
The best opportunity you have to change the way SAC does or does not address your dreams and desires occurs once a year, at your first dorm meeting: to get involved. I recognize that you might think you’re too busy, and you may even think that SAC is a totally lost cause, but I’d encourage you to reconsider.
The excellent thing about democracies in which the entire campaign takes place in fifteen minutes is that it’s incredibly easy to be elected. Many SAC members step up simply because nobody else does, as I did. Yet despite my opportunistic ascent to office, I immediately found a whole host of great openings in the SAC structure for me to step up and help out, and in each of these instances I earned a little more say in what was going on. I went from helping to lug the speakers around to booking a year’s worth of concerts basically because I wanted to.
For skeptics, I’d like to point out that the degree of involvement is mostly up to you. If you’re too busy to help out some week, we’re generally understanding, but if you want to throw your hat into the ring and take initiative, you can usually bring your brainchild idea to fruition (unless it’s Bowie-themed, as has been discussed). There’s also the resumé-building angle – employers are bound to be impressed when they find out that you’ve proven your ability to manage thousands of dollars of someone else’s money.
But to my mind, the most rewarding aspect of being on SAC is the knowledge that I tried. It’s really, really easy not to go to a dance, and maybe it’s even fun to smugly drink elsewhere and consider yourself too good for it (I know! I’ve been there! It can be great!) At the same time, it’s definitely more rawsome to spend your night watching something you’ve planned come together, to watch people come into the door and not immediately wheel around on their three-inch heels and stalk off in search of mozzarella sticks, and to know that you didn’t waste your night, even if you aren’t the target audience for the event you helped with.
It’s not our money, it’s yours. It’s not our event, it’s yours. We’re not here because we wanted to ruin your Saturday, we’re here because, if we weren’t, you wouldn’t even have anyone to complain to. If you feel unsatisfied, you owe it to yourself to try to change what’s going on. So next September, just raise your hand and give it a shot. The worst that could happen is that you’d wind up just as bored as you are already – and let’s be honest, you’re not really all that bored – or better yet, you could wind up like me, and be leaving with a tidy resumé credit and two years of Fridays spent working to keep you and I from being bored in the first place.
And if you are bored, maybe you should come see The Hood Internet in the 1962 room on Friday at 10:30? Like nearly everything else SAC puts on, it’s free, and if you don’t like it, we still don’t have an FNL Chair for next year. So there’s your opportunity. You owe it to yourself and all your friends to see what you can do. •
