You know those dreams where you are running like crazy and not getting anywhere and your voice is hoarse from yelling and you fall down in some impossibly contorted position and hell’s minions crowd around you and smite you with sticks while people chant and cheer incoherently? Well in my case it was not a dream, but actually the annual broomball tournament on the ice pond last weekend. Yup, 11 teams, with bodacious names like Anarkids and Hez-Balla and Walter Hendrix Experience and Iron Phallus, all competed in a slippery, sloppy, double-elimination tournament over two days.

In the end team Evil, actually a nice bunch of students well versed in irony, claimed the coveted golden broom after reaching the final round undefeated. They also won some very fashionable Marlboro “Dead Tree” medallions and gift certificates for the bowling alley. Another highly favored team, Chewbacca Flocka Flame, lost to Evil in the first round, and was eliminated in the third round. A surprise showing was made by the Movies from Marlboro crew, known as Jay Craven’s Chain Gang, which made it to the fourth round before falling to Tequila Mockingbird. This team chanted the 1958 pop hit “Tequila” so many times that fans longed for their demise, which finally came in the fifth round. The winner in the costume category was the Newsies, named after the Disney flop cult hit where everyone apparently wears vests, barely beating out the Climb’n Lobstahs.

But the real story was the staff/faculty team, Shiva and the Benevolent Destroyers, who won their first game against the Anarkids in quadruple overtime (apparently the first time that’s happened) and went all the way to the final, apocalyptic match against Evil. This is despite losing their co-captain and star “sweeper” William Edelglass, philosophy professor, who broke his wrist playing broomball earlier in the week to demonstrate the First Noble Truth of Buddhism, dukkha or “suffering.” William was there on the sidelines, taunting team Evil with such zingers as “You know that evil has no ontological existence, it’s just the absence of good!” Shiva and the Benevolent Destroyers mustered all the superhuman moves a Hindu deity could manage while sliding helplessly on the ice, with star performances by faculty members Kyhl Lyndgaard, Adam Franklin-Lyons and Martina Lantin. Evil prevailed this time, but beware. I mean, just wait until next year when Shiva dissolves the universe for the creation of the next cycle, and restores the balance of good and evil to free liberated souls from bondage with the physical world. Maybe it won’t be so slippery, too.

I used to think of libraries as dark rows of dusty old books that nobody looks at, where someone keeps saying “shhh.” Of course the Potash Hill o’ Books is something else again: Did you know that the number of books checked out of the Rice-Aron Library is 40 per student per year, five times the national average for small colleges? Here you’ll find well-lit bookshelves and comfy chairs where even a page-turner like the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata could not keep you awake. And I have never heard anyone say “shhh.”

Yesterday I had a crash course in doing library research, as part of the class called Finding Stuff: Research Methods in the Humanities, taught by history professor Adam Franklin-Lyons and Amber Hunt, reference and technology librarian. We sat around what I like to call the library latte bar, the marble counter in the main hall recently outfitted with comfy stools and a digital projector and, despite all my valuable advice, no espresso machine. We threw around some big words like “metadata” and “controlled vocabulary” and “keyword searches,” which Adam likened to a steamroller when compare to what he called “focused browsing.” Here’s the cool thing: the students used the library’s fleet of green netbooks (we nicknamed them the “turtles,” because they look pretty rugged) to share what tasty new books their particular focus browsed on.

Each student, or pair of students, followed a “subject field” search to a particular book of personal interest, sort of a mini field trip into the bowels of the Dewey decimal system. Then they browsed the group of adjacent books for other titles that struck their fancy, and took a photo of the shelf to share with the group back at the latte bar. There were some great finds out there in the areas of Indian history, ethnography, mushroom taxonomy, Mayan culture and appropriate technology. As Adam and Amber pointed out, we have all done this kind of browsing before, but we learned how to use the catalog to our best advantage and make our browsing less like a steamroller.

To learn more about what’s new at the library, check out the Rice-Aron Library Blog.

Did you know there was a class offered in the fall 2010 semester titled How Sustainable is Marlboro College? Well, that’s okay because you’re not too late to miss the sequel, Sustainability 2, Son of Sustainability, or Sustainability Strikes Back. Actually, the new class this spring semester is called Campus Sustainability: Analysis and Action, and is taught by the dynamic duo of math professor Matt Ollis and student life coordinator Clare Hipschman. The class picks up where Matt’s tutorial left off last spring, when it calculated Marlboro’s “ecological footprint” and found it was quite a bit bigger than a Birkenstock.

This year’s class will build on those footprint findings by wiggling the toes of particular areas of environmental impact, say energy use, or solid waste, or generating massive amounts of hot air debating phenomenology and perception on the smoking porch. But even better, the class will look for ways to conserve resources and implement these ideas right now—that’s the “action” part of the course, naturally. I mean, harnessing methane from the compost pile? Insulating the OP with shredded junk mail? Raising emus on the campus center lawn? Turning the soccer field into a solar farm? Who knows what outlandish ideas students will come up with, but it is sure to be better than most sequels.

Of course you know that the Plan of Concentration is the hallowed rite of passage for Marlboro juniors and seniors, an integrated course of study going where no student has gone before. It’s Marlboro’s version of a vision quest, scarification ceremony, lion hunt, Bar Mitzvah, Sun Dance, Ethiopian cow jumping ritual and master’s thesis all rolled into one. But did you know this academic mountain called Plan was not always part of the Marlboro landscape, and that in the beginning it involved traditional three-hour written exams? I didn’t until I sat down with former president Tom Ragle in his cozy old farmhouse in Guilford.

Tom and I chatted about everything from construction projects at Marlboro to parietal rules, which actually had nothing to do with the brain’s parietal lobe as I had suspected. It had instead to do with arcane laws to regulate boys visiting girls’ dorms, and visa versa, something that now seems as old-fashioned as the Florida law against showering naked (I’m not kidding). But the part that really struck me was Tom’s description of coming up with the idea for the Plan, starting with when he came to Marlboro in 1958. Just like today, the faculty back then was trying to teach students to think critically and independently, even if they had to hunt lions or jump cows to get there. As Tom says, “We were not graduating students who were round pegs to go in round holes.” You can hear it from himself below.

You probably think that when all the students are away for winter break that Potash Hill is as cold and lifeless as Dante’s frozen Lake Cocytus, where treacherous sinners are buried in ice up to their necks, but you’re only half right. Sure it’s cold, I mean, what do you expect in January in Vermont? The fire pond is solid ice, the foursquare court is dusted with snow and the farm is frozen under a mulch of hay. But lifeless it is not: many of the buildings on campus are busy, bustling beehives of activity, as Marlboro prepares for another semester of academic fervor.

For starters, the dining hall (above) is being transformed by workers with massive forearms who are scrubbing the walls to remove 60 years of grease, smoke, food, soda-pop and other liquids and semi-liquids. Who knew that somewhere under all that culinary history the walls were a beautiful golden pine paneling? The dining hall floor is also getting a fresh finish, and the building has new radiators that are part of the conversion to a more efficient furnace. Renovations to the interior of the admissions building (right) are almost complete, the basement of Dalrymple is getting an extreme makeover and the first floor hall of the library is now carpeted so you can hear yourself think there.

But the upgrade that is most arresting to me, and the reason for my oblique title, is the new paint job on the floor of the campus center game room. I’m not kidding, it is so blue and shimmery and shiny that my first impulse was to take my sandles off and wade in. It gives the impression of an open-air beach cafe somewhere in the Caribbean, you know, where you can hear steel drums playing and eat mahi mahi with jerk sauce, whatever that is. I’m sure that once the new pool table and ping-pong and foosball are installed it will magnify the illusion of tropical leisure. What with cozy new furniture for the coffee shop upstairs, the campus center will once again be a welcoming spot for all the pawpaws and breadfruits and pigeon peas and “droppers” (dumplings) on this outlandish island we call Marlboro.

The end of the semester always hits this quiet hilltop campus like a brainchild blizzard, like the dawn of a new civilization or something. You know, all of a sudden, the creative labors of hundreds of students come to the surface and the place is on fire with new ideas and perspectives. Last Thursday, I mean all in one day, there was an open studio in all the art buildings, a Rapid Reviews featuring short, pithy book reviews by students, faculty and staff and a film festival of works by the Video Documentary class and other film students. On Saturday there were festive opening receptions for Plan exhibits by seniors Mara Eagle and Colby Silver and a Plan film world premier by senior Juliette Sutherland. But one of the biggest revelations to me was on Friday, when students in the Encounters and Revelations class presented their work.

Although it sounds like it might also be the title of an evangelical TV show, Encounters and Revelations is the scriptwriting workshop led by theater professor Paul Nelsen. Eight students worked with Paul—developing their voices, their senses of timing and place and humor and irony, their diverse and sometimes bizarre characters—to create short scripts that would be appropriate for stage or screen. The result was a scintillating series of readings that included embattled siblings, reunited lovers, rivalrous comediennes and rampaging Mongolian horses. In short, I’m telling you it was way more moving and inspirational than any evangelical TV show.

I know you’re probably wondering about the rampaging Mongolian horses, and with good reason. These were in sophomore Zebulon Goertzel’s “The Horse in the Shadows,” the absurdist story of an animal psychologist who finds his girlfriend is replaced by a Mongolian horse that is ransacking his apartment. The script also includes a depressed turtle and other demented wildlife, a “head” doctor and, somehow not surprisingly, the end of the world. Also on the lighter side, senior Mercedes Lake’s “Bad Will Hunting” is a humorous look at life after college for a young woman and her unemployed roommate who is bent on romance, and freshman Reily Mumpton’s “The Grandfather Maple” is told from a child’s point of view.

Just so you don’t think the reading was all fun and games, two of the scripts, sophomore Mike McIvor’s “The Bouncing Betty” and junior Jesse Nesser’s “The Messenger,” were on the serious theme of casualties of war. But you know, even more than the subject matter of the eight scripts, which ranged from the mundane to the ridiculous, I was blown away by their quality and the range of emotions they evoked in yours truly. Okay, so I also cried at the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows, but that was because it was the midnight premier and I was overtired and had consumed too many Junior Mints.

For those of us who have a hard time touching our toes without grunting audibly, dancing seems like such an unlikely art form. You know, when you get winded playing Wii tennis or chasing a cab or pushing a heavy shopping cart, it’s hard to imagine prancing and leaping and squirming with enough poise to conjure up any feelings in an audience other than sympathy. But more than 40 Marlboro students had no such problems, conjuring up feelings of angst, love, sadness and joy—without grunting audibly—at this semester’s “Dances in the Rough” performance last weekend.

It all broke loose with the first presentation by the Beginning Modern Dance class, 28 students prancing, leaping and squirming in complex arrangements to the upbeat music of Rani Arbo. Already at that point I was so exhilarated that I could have done a few laps at Price Chopper with a heavy shopping cart, and it just kept getting better and better. Several advanced students shared their own choreography and moves in solo or small ensemble acts, including senior Cookie Harrist’s amazing tour de force in three acts called “Present, Present, Present.” This was was so powerfully energetic it had me wondering what they put in the breakfast cereal at the dining hall. But perhaps my favorite was a collaboration between junior Hannah Ruth Brothers and sophomore Esperanza Friel that involved flinging handfuls of paint on a sheet of paper in a dancerly way that would have made Jackson Pollock spattered green with envy.

The final act by the Repertory class was the culmination of a semester-long study of the concept of ecological footprints, part of an ongoing effort to find common ground between the arts and sciences. “Now What?” was an eye-popping look at the resource gluttony we have all come to know and love, and aptly included a bicycle-powered stage light designed by senior Ben Lieberson and human-propelled cello music by freshman Liana Nuse. Brightly clad dancers seemed to struggle out of a post-apocalyptic hellfire, like an evolutionary leap from busy, egocentric, resource-guzzling humans to way-more-enlightened mudpuppies. Working together, they found ways to stand again, leaning on each other, carrying each other and helpfully squirming into human knots, even going so far as to wear teeny weeny ballet toe shoes to reduce their impact. I mean, it was all I could do not to throw myself on the mercy of the dance floor, pleading “guilty.”

History has usually been a thorny subject for me because it’s about memory. I mean, I have the same trouble memorizing when the War of 1812 was fought, or why Ivan was so Terrible, or how long the 100-Year War lasted, as I do remembering what I had for breakfast. So I felt like a regular born-again historian last night at an awesome presentation by students in the class called The Presence of the Past, which takes a fresh-as-a-jump-in-South-Pond look at local history.

For starters, freshman Nina Rodwin talked about Elizabeth Whitmore, one of Marlboro’s first settlers and a midwife who apparently delivered a stunning 2,000 babies without a single mortality. But histories are written by people with their own quirky memories, and the parts that are left out are often as significant as the parts called “history.” In this spirit, the students were encouraged to be creative with their own interpretations, to turn over stones, to rake the muck, to boldly go where no quirky historian has gone. So Nina had created a “diary,” scratched with a quill pen on paper died yellow and crinkly with black tea, based on what she had learned about the remarkable Ms. Whitmore, day-to-day life during the period and the life of midwives in particular.

Not to be out-interpreted, sophomore Esperanza Friel wrote a book of letters between a Marlboro student and her boyfriend, who was mysteriously time-warped back to 1961, when everyone on campus wore tweed jackets and “facebook” meant falling asleep in the library. Sophomore Alexia Boggs thoughtfully wrote a speech for George Bush to have read if he had ever visited Vermont, and senior Alex Tolstoi created a “primary document” based on items in the final estate of early Marlboro settler and ardent “Yorker” Charles Phelps. Senior Mercedes Lake wrote a whole blooming play about a small Vermont town in the 1850s—including uplifting historical tidbits like tuberculosis, livestock depredation by wolves and emigration to points west that had actual soil—to be part of her Plan of Concentration.

The most intriguing to me was the work of sophomore Kara Hamilton, who displayed a series of yellowed newspaper front pages showing changes in the local economy and layers of memory. It was kind of like reading the newspaper after being transported, along with someone really good at paper cutouts, by Esperanza’s time warp. But all of these fine works of art, memory, imagination and, yup, history, were heartily appreciated by several members of the town community who ventured to the campus center. The cookies didn’t hurt either.

At lunch on Wednesday, our very own Health and Wellness Committee presented a table with condoms and health information, part of the kick-off for their AIDS Awareness and Sexual Wellness Week. The week is an ambitious line-up of events, during an already busy time on campus, in the hopes that students will find lots of awareness to be thankful for by Thanksgiving Break.

For example, Wednesday night Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, television producer and radio broadcaster John Scagliotti presented the director’s cut of his 1999 documentary After Stonewall. John is an outspoken advocate of LGBT rights and the very same John Scagliotti who received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters at Marlboro’s commencement last May. The amazing chronicle of lesbian and gay life from the 1969 riots at New York City’s Stonewall Inn to recent years, After Stonewall left students with a clear sense of how AIDS has changed the course of gay liberation and how far there is still to go.

Other highlights of the week include free HIV testing, sexual health games, a burlesque dancing workshop with Elizabeth Hallett ’05 and, everybody’s favorite, Queer Homecoming. There is also a talk by Paul Brogan, author of Was That a Name I Dropped?, who was misdiagnosed as HIV-positive and has spent much of his life caring for those who are. But the really amazing thing will be the arrival of three panels from the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, each one three feet by six feet and celebrating the life of someone lost to the AIDS pandemic. The whole quilt, considered the largest piece of folk art in the world, weighs an estimated 54 tons and could cover 20 acres, so it’s probably best that we only get three panels. They will be displayed in the dining hall for three days, just before Thanksgiving—a very poignant image to take home with us, no?

Last Saturday, hoards of impassioned family members took to the paths and lawns of Marlboro, chanting things like “Occupy South Road!” and “We’re the 99 percent for liberal arts!” and “What do we want—grilled cheese. When do we want it—now!” They didn’t really chant, of course, but there was a fairly large-scale invasion of moms, dads, sisters and brothers who brightened up a gray day on campus for Family Day. They ate meals together, pressed cider together, watched a soccer game together and generally got a sense of what living in the People’s Republic of Marlboro is all about.

A highlight for many parents was the chance to hear directly from the remarkable and colorful and clever faculty members they hear so much about. Literature professor Geraldine Pittman de Batlle and students talked about the Plan process, anthropology professor Carol Hendrickson talked about global study opportunities, politics professor talked about African studies and writing professor John Sheehy talked about, duh, writing. Biology professor Jaime Tanner and chemistry professor Todd Smith took parents through a hands-on activity in the DNA lab, and Chinese language professor Grant Li talked about languages at Marlboro. I mean, even the new music professor Matan Rubinstein got into the action and talked about Le Invisibili, his modular composition for electronic sounds and chamber ensemble that can be combined 27,300 ways if you are very, very patient.

This amazing day wrapped up with the latest installment of Queen City Radio, produced and directed by film studies professor Jay Craven. This variety show of music and comedy, recorded for later broadcast, included episodes of Slender Picken’s Rural Dating & Mating Service, Congressman Rivet’s Fireside Apologies, Alexander Graham Bell’s Second Phone Call and special musical guest Antje Duvekot. A highlight for students was the reappearance of Amber Schaefer ’10 as part of the performance. In the end, Family Day was just like any other very busy day on campus, but without the homework.