Schedule your homework: Before I found iProcrastinate (free), I only remembered the week’s assignments if I pasted a giant pink Post-It note to my computer. The iPhone boasts an impressive cadre of to-do list managers and personal organizers, but iProcrastinate dominates when it comes to managing the readings, tests, quizzes, essays, blah, blah, blah that come hand-in-hand with NU classes. You can divide homework by class and set the priority level of assignments – you know, so you skip that clearly irrelevant sociology reading when there’s a five-page essay on the horizon.

Silence your neighbors: My neighbors hold late-night cookouts in their backyard. Fine and dandy for them, I’m sure, but I work at 9 a.m. and appreciate sleep. Enter Ambiance ($0.99), an amped-up white noise generator. I usually select a calming thunderstorm, but their massive library of sounds appeals to anyone. Want to fall asleep listening to a distant revolutionary battle? A womb? Someone brushing their teeth? Go for it. I’ll stick with rain.

Skip the line: Thanks to Northwestern’s collective hard-on for Chipotle, the line typically stretches out the door at 5 p.m., the height of my post-class hunger. But now, equipped with Chipotle Mobile Ordering (free), I no longer wait in line behind hordes of hungry football players. (Really!? Two burritos?) From the comfort of my couch, I build the perfect burrito. Then after sitting around a little longer playing PS2, I bike to Chipotle and grab my food. Done.

Travel downtown: I fell in love with the iTrans series of iPhone apps during my two-month stay in NYC. Inexperienced with the complicated mess that is the Manhattan Transit Authority, iTrans NYC got me to work on time and home from LaGuardia without a hitch. I have less difficulty with the El, but iTrans CTA ($1.99) still helps out with its handy time charts (minimizing waits at the Davis El stop) and simple directions to any location in the CTA system – handy if you ever want to graduate from the Red Line.

Eliminate stress: Some may consider this a little sadistic, but if your classes are stressing you out, download Pocket God ($0.99). There, you have free reign of a tiny island inhabited by cute little pygmies. Feed them coconuts. Teach them to fish. Or, ideally, enjoy the many ways the creators have devised to kill the little buggers: pygmies eaten by sharks, Pygmies thrown into a volcano. Even revive them as zombie pygmies.

Melissa Anelli will be speaking at Northwestern Sept. 18. Photo by Michael McWeeney.

In the years between 2000 and 2003, the Internet was evolving. Blogging platforms, predecessors to modern technology such as Facebook, Blogger and Twitter ruled the Web. Finally, everyone was connected, and for Harry Potter fans, in the throes of a three-year-long wait in between the fourth and fifth book in the world’s most popular series, the connection was a godsend.

The Leaky Cauldron emerged from the online obsession as the number one Harry Potter news source, helmed by webmistress Melissa Anelli. In 2008, Anelli released Harry, A History describing the evolution of the online Harry Potter fandom, as well as her own personal experience at the forefront of the movement.

“[The Internet] connected a global network of very impatient people so that they could wait together,” Anelli says. She will be speaking in Cahn Auditorium at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 18. A former journalist for MTV and the Staten Island Advance, she transformed her interest in Harry Potter into a profitable career. She currently works as a freelance journalist while working on her second book.

Anelli has been following the Potter phenomenon since shortly after the release of the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, watching the “Harry Potter fandom” grow into the online behemoth it is today. Even years after the release of the last new material (Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released in the summer of 2007), fans lined up to make Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince the biggest box-office hit of the summer.

At the height of the Harry Potter phenomenon existed an underground world of fan fiction (stories written about the Harry Potter universe by fans — some abysmal, some approaching readable), fan art and RPGs. But as the fans waited for the fifth book’s release, the hype increased and the community grew to massive proportions.

“We had this very long incubation period where we had no new books. All the publicity and word of mouth had been growing and growing, and the release of the fourth book just made things explode,” Anelli says. “All we could really do is spend time together online and make fan creations.”

The Harry Potter fandom may not be a unique phenomenon — after all, fan-made Star Wars and Star Trek books and movies have been churned out for years. But the addition of the Internet transformed the underground world of Harry Potter to a legitimate business enterprise approved and endorsed by the creator herself.

Anelli, a graduate of Georgetown University, used her contacts from the school’s newspaper The Hoya to reach out to Warner Bros. representatives, hoping to attend press junkets and answer questions from the fans. “Harry Potter was really the first fandom to take the Internet and use it for its purposes,” Anelli says. “Nobody really appreciated the value yet because no one really had a test case.” But once Warner Brothers began to realize the inherent value in reaching out to the online community, Anelli began receiving invitations to press junkets. By 2004, she was standing on the red carpet at the premiere of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Work on Harry: A History began a few years ago. While Anelli had a good relationship with J.K. Rowling prior to writing the book, she was still intimidated by the Potter scribe, who had previously turned down interviews with the likes of Oprah.

“I realized that I had to just buck up and ask her if she wanted to be interviewed for the book,” Anelli says. Rowling agreed, and after a two-day interview agreed to write the forward for the book.

“I just asked. It’s awesome.”

Proceeds from the book allowed Anelli to quit her job at the Staten Island Advance, and she is currently working on another, non-Potter-related book. While trained as a journalist, she said she has, by far, had the most success combining her career training with her personal interests.

“I think that people have to stop thinking about journalism as a byline on page A1,” she says. ” Journalism now is so much more than that. And if you find something, no matter what it is, that you want to write about, report on, you’ve got to just focus yourself on it. It will take creativity and help, but when you find the thing that you’re willing to go above and beyond on, that’s the key, that’s always the key.”

Anelli will relate more about her experiences with journalism and the Harry Potter phenomenon Friday night.

“I’m excited to speak in the places where the people have been most affected by the Harry Potter phenomenon,” Anelli said.

A story in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette incorrectly reported that the parents of Jeffrey B. Mullan, who was named acting executive director of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, still lived in Worcester. Both parents are deceased.

Jeffrey B. Mullan thought his parents were dead. Twenty years ago, Bernard and Deborah Mullan disappeared on a research expedition in the Canadian Northwest Territories. Both were employed by the United States government, and were thought to be working on energy research. The details of the project, however, were kept under utmost secrecy.

After Bernard and Deborah made no contact for a year, they were declared deceased. Mullan, then 18 and a freshman at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., studying law and economics, began informal research into his parents’ death. The situation seemed suspicious — government officials had only offered only modest condolences and refused to entertain any further investigations.

Mullan graduated with honors from Clark and attended law school at Boston College. He began an illustrious career of public works, working at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Transportation, where he instituted an $8.7 billion bailout of state transportation. He never gave up the search for his parents’ whereabouts, although since his marriage in June 2001 and the birth of his son in 2003, the hunt has fallen by the wayside. His wife, Elizabeth, did mention the “hundreds of sleepless nights” that he spent in his home library, researching, Google-ing and making exasperated phone calls to a man known only as Charles X, the manager of his parents presumed energy research project.

So, Mullan was surprised when an article about his recent promotion to acting executive director of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette mentioned his parents still lived in Worcester. He initially blew it off as a factual error, but suspicion lingered.

“I’ve been suspicious about their disappearance for years. I couldn’t shake the itchy feeling that the Telegram found what I’ve been unable to,” Mullan said.

He called up the paper, and editor Harry Whitin directed him to Charlotte Tanner, a 23-year-old copy editor. Tanner was recently hired by the paper and assigned to check over the article. The author originally did say that Mullan’s parents were deceased, as stated by public record, but Tanner thought to double-check. She called Patricia Skogan, Deborah’s mother.

“In retrospect, it wasn’t the best decision,” Tanner said, as Skogan was diagnosed with dementia three years ago. When Tanner asked her if Bernard and Deborah were indeed deceased, she said no, and gave Tanner the couple’s cell phone number. When contacted, the two — shocked that the paper had tracked them down — admitted they were indeed Mullan’s parents, now known by the monikers Ross and Lola Smuchneitz.

Mullan believed his parents were working on a nuclear energy project; the truth is much more frightening. After a top-secret military experiment in the Yukon went drastically awry (the government has restricted relevant files), Lola and Ross were relocated to southern Manitoba and given their new identities. After 20 years (and, it has been speculated, the deaths of the four dangerous rebels involved in the program), the two were allowed to relocate back to their hometown of Worcester.

“We didn’t know how to tell Jeff,” Lola said. “We only had been in Worcester one day when the fact-checker called us up. Mom was supposed to keep it a secret, but the nurses hadn’t made me fully aware of her condition.”

The two had planned to surprise Mullan on his first day at his new job, May 20. But after speaking to Tanner, Mullan tracked his parents down and immediately drove to Worcester from his home near Boston.

Mullan said he paced outside his parents’ new home for “hours” before going inside. “What if these people weren’t my parents? What if they were impostors, designed to trick me into giving information? I know a lot,” he said. “And even if they were my parents… Why wouldn’t I be the first person they called?”

But when he finally entered the home last Friday, all enmity was erased. “These are my parents!” Ross recalls him shouting.

“It’s true,” Mullan laughed. “They were, even if they were much wrinklier than I remember.”

As an intern for Asian American Studies and former chair of the Latino Studies Program in Alianza, Northwestern’s Hispanic/Latino student organization, Medill junior Arianna Hermosillo spends much of her time in the office. It’s a close community, she says: “Everyone’s super friendly. Talk turns into long conversations in this office.”

But it took nine years for Hermosillo and the Latino Studies department to get that office. The initiative to create a Latino Studies program began nine years ago, in April 2000, when members held a protest at the Rock. More than 800 students signed a petition for Hispanic studies. Six years later, Alianza created the Latino Studies Program ¡Ahora! initiative, and the ASG Senate passed a bill of support.

Three years passed until the Northwestern Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences faculty senate approved the program in an unanimous vote on March 11 of this year.

“That’s not cool. It shouldn’t take nine years,” says Muhammad Safdari, ASG academic director, who is working on installing measures in ASG that would shorten the wait for student groups hoping to start their own programs.

Alianza isn’t the only student group that grappled with the administration over the creation of a new program of studies. Since For Members Only took over the bursar’s office in 1968, tough sells and long waits are indicative of the grueling process to bring the concept for a new program into the classroom. While the administration argues that financial problems prevent them from implementing new programs, student group leaders say the university shouldn’t push the student body’s needs aside for financial reasons.

Taking a stand

In the Rebecca Crown Center on April 12, 1995, 60 students rallied. They stood outside President Henry Bienen’s office and waited, shouting for the president to come out and face the mob. At the least, they wanted him to acknowledge their presence.

Bienen didn’t emerge. At the same time, 17 students began to fast. They set up fort, camping in tents around the Rock. Bienen called the hunger strike “coercion and intimidation,” but it lasted for 23 days before he agreed to look into their demand — a proposal to create an Asian American Studies program.

Only a few months beforehand, Bienen had rejected the Asian American Advisory Board’s (AAAB) proposal, citing budgetary worries. Plans were put in motion to expand Northwestern’s Asian American course offerings, but that wasn’t enough for the AAAB, which wanted its own department — just like Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford or any number of other peer institutions. So they fought.

In May of 1998, before the program logistics had yet been finalized, Bienen told The Daily Northwestern, “It’s gone more slowly than I would have liked. It may be there were good reasons, it may be there weren’t such good reasons.”

“Slowly” was a bit of an exaggeration: The university didn’t hire Ji-Yeon Yuh to be the director of the Asian-American Studies Program until 1999, four years after the hunger strike.

At the For Member’s Only protest. Photo courtesy of the Northwestern archives.

In 1968, For Member’s Only took over the bursar’s office. Students sat outside the office doors holding signs: “Black students occupy this building because the administration has turned a deaf ear.” After 38 hours, the university agreed to settle most of their demands: They committed to enrolling more black students and agreed to provide courses.

However, as with Latino Studies and Asian American Studies, it took several years before President J. Roscoe Miller established the Department of African American Studies. The first classes opened to students in 1972.

The longer it takes to approve a program, the more frustrated students become. “What do we have to do? Do we have to take over the bursar’s office? Do we have to go on a hunger strike?” says Usman Mian, Weinberg senior and creator of the Islamic Studies initiative.

Creating an alliance

Safdari is working with the ASG Academic Committee to set up guidelines and advisers that will make it easier for students to push through academic initiatives. However, even that looks to be a lengthy process: “I’m going to try not to have preconceptions,” Safdari says. As a Weinberg junior, he hopes to set up up a committee to work with student groups that can function after he graduates. The committee will help students create proposals, talk to interested faculty members and work with the administration to speed up the department-creation process.

Until ASG figures out how to help groups appeal to the administration, students are left on their own to plan logistics. The process can be lengthy, but the university doesn’t take a proactive approach in the development, instead appearing to sit back and wait for students and professors to arrange the details.

“As students, there’s only so much that we can do,” Hermosillo says. “I definitely feel that there’s a break in the relationship between administration and students.”

For Latino Studies, the need to connect with the administration meant bringing on anthropology lecturer Monica Russel y Rodriguez as interim director. In order to do the meticulous planning the university requires — finding professors, drafting a budget, planning potential classes — students need a faculty member to mediate the process.

Rüdiger Seesemann, an assistant professor in the religion department, has been helping Mian and Weinberg junior Dulce Acosta-Licea, current head of the initiative, organize and plan a potential Islamic Studies program. But having a faculty member on your side isn’t a guarantee the administration will fast-track your proposal. “I’m really not in a position to take the lead because I’m a non-tenured senior faculty,” Seesemann says.

Keeping up with the economy

The university is not being “antagonistic” with its approach to students’ proposals, says Safdari. “I don’t think they’re making it hard,” he says. The essential problem is a budgetary one — if students were able to find funding for new departments, the process would be shorter.

The costs certainly are high: Safdari estimates it takes about $3 million to start one new program. The university has to bring in new professors and department heads, provide office space and spend significant time planning a new program’s details.

Right now, the university is “being realistic,” Safdari says, citing the shrinking economy and the high cost of starting a new program.

Still, Hermosillo feels the university is being “a little stingy with money.”

Even in a struggling economy, the arguments for allocating funds to support a new, vital program are strong: Northwestern students and faculty consider the school a top-tier research institution, ranked number 12 in the U.S. News & World Report. If it aspires to be a leader in its field, why hasn’t it implemented Islamic Studies, which eight of the top 12 universities already have, and why did it only recently approve Latino Studies, which exists at nine?

“As Northwestern students, we want to see our university be on top. Whether it’s Islamic Studies, science, chemistry, whatever the subject may be — when you go to Northwestern and you pay $50,000 a year, you expect it to have any subject that you want to study,” Mian says.

Mian and Acosta-Licea think the university should keep up with the programs that are offered at comparable institutions and implement them immediately. The university hasn’t stopped the creation of all new programs because of financial problems, and when faculty does establish a new department, it is done quickly. Seesemann notes that though the new Catholic Studies minor took several years to be implemented, it still moved from conceptualization to actualization much quicker than any student-initiated program.

Creating Islamic Studies

Mian is working hand-in-hand with faculty such as Seesemann to create the Islamic Studies program. “The administration does take the students very seriously. It’s not us against the administration, it’s us working with the administration,” says Mian.

One struggle has been the administration’s hesitance to recognize the need for the program. It’s not that the university thinks the program is a bad idea — rather, they don’t necessarily feel it needs to exist outside of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Acosta-Licea has been working to refute that assumption. “[Asian and Middle Eastern Studies] doesn’t give you a complete understanding, so to do that is to very much undermine not only your understanding of Islam but to perpetuate the ignorance that’s in our society,” she says.

The program also suffered a setback after The Daily Northwestern published an editorial that Acosta-Licea, Mian and Seesemann claim implied the program would exist to aid Muslim students’ spiritual growth.

“That is really ridiculous. The idea of this program is to increase the knowledge of all Northwestern students, regardless of their background and whether they’re religious or not,” Acosta-Licea says.

She plans to focus on raising student awareness next year, but Safdari says he’s been impressed with the level of student support that already exists. The creation of an Islamic Studies program was a central tenet of Safdari’s campaign. “There are a lot of open ears… I’m surprised at how receptive other groups are,” he says.

An Islamic Studies program should have been established “yesterday,” Mian says, but he will wait as long as it takes for the university to recognize the need and give Islamic Studies an office. “I think it’s time for the university to definitely step up and endorse this program.”

“I’m pretty sure that Islamic studies program will get established. It’s just a matter of time. Obviously, we’d rather have it sooner than later,” says Mian.

Here are the highlights (obligatory hot dog suit included), in photos.

Every spring, from third through fifth grade, I would race to the kitchen each morning and tear through the paper in hopes of finding out that the Medallion Hunt had begun. Finally, on one glorious Monday every year, after flipping the Wichita Eagle open to page 1A of the Local & State section, I’d find the four-line rhyming clue I had waited for so patiently.

Once the clues started showing up in the paper — one a day, for two weeks — my friend Amy and I staked claim to a table in the cafeteria, laid them out and pored over them, one at a time, looking for patterns and rhythms and anything that may lead us to the prize. The rules were simple: Officials hid a small, golden medallion somewhere within city limits, on public property. Using only the clues and their mental prowess, readers were to deduce the location and find the medallion. The first to bring the medallion to the Wichita Eagle offices won $3,000, money Amy and I were determined to win.

We never found the medallion. But not for lack of trying. One afternoon, swearing I’d decoded the riddle, my mother drove me south to a tiny, ill-kept park. I gave up after an hour of searching, visions of dancing with Cinderella and riding Space Mountain popping like bubbles in my 10-year-old head. A few days later a man found the medallion close to where I’d been, hidden in a Barney coin purse.

Even though I never found the medallion, the hunt served only as a lead-in to the Greatest Event of the Year — the Wichita River Festival. For nine days, almost 400,000 people gathered in downtown Wichita, crossing the Douglas St. bridge to attend the carnival on the other side, and laying in the grass beside the Arkansas River. Most only attend the first day of the Festival (the Sundown Parade) and the last (fireworks over the Arkansas to the musical stylings of the Wichita Symphony Orchestra). I wanted to attend them all, spending as much time downtown as possible, sitting in the sun with a tank top and shorts, watching goofy barefoot water-skiers fall off their six-man pyramids. Downtown Wichita is wonderful in a way that no city can perfect, and even though it’s a 15-minute drive from my house, it’s the only part of the city I miss painfully, because it was that vibrant taste of freedom and individuality always missing in suburban life.

Take a left out of my high school’s parking lot, follow Douglas St. under I-135. Pass the QuikTrip that served me a 98-cent mocha every morning before school. To the right stand the red brick warehouses that make up Old Town. I spent last summer working in Old Town Square, taking my lunchtime to call Northwestern friends while walking the puppies that commuted with their owners to the office. To the left is Wichita’s half-hearted attempt at skyscrapers — in my sophomore year, I watched the River Festival fireworks from the penthouse of our tallest building before racing my best friends down all 26 flights of stairs. The elevator had broken during the hour we were upstairs.

Cross the Arkansas River to Delano, historic Wichita, where local bands rented a skate park for concerts that one summer I pretended to be a scene kid. After shows we migrated to the Vagabond, the smoky little bar next door that let us sit in the back playing board games as the cooler kids finished their packs of cigarettes.

Come early May — May 8 this year — this little stretch of Douglas is transformed into the River Festival. A large outdoor food court pops up near my old office. The bridge over the Arkansas River is blocked off.

When I was at home, these little changes meant the most exciting time of the year was coming. The River Festival was about to begin. But because Northwestern is in session so late into summer, I’ll miss it this year and the next, and likely the years after that. My last memory of it, then, will be climbing up a hill on the west side of the river with blankets and sandwiches, cuddling into the blanket to fend off the last spring chills, and laying against the hill as the fireworks exploded above us. For an hour, we owned the city. We didn’t realize the city owned us — and wouldn’t let us escape its grasp quite that easily.

I can hate some of Wichita, with its strange, backward policies and hyper-Christian populace, but I can never fault downtown. As the River Festival approaches in spring, and I can only sit anxiously in the library awaiting one midterm or another, my throat clenches and my heart beats faster. It hurts me not to be home, just for those nine days.

The Medallion Hunt, which stopped running in 2001, is being revived this year with one small alteration: instead of hiding a real medallion, the Eagle will ask readers to name the location in Wichita where it is virtually “hidden” based on a series of clues. Were I home, I would resent this stupid change, as half the fun is the hunt. But since I live elsewhere now, I fully intend to take home the $3,000 I should have won 10 years ago.

Searle Hall, the building that currently houses the pharmacy. Photo by Jared T. Miller / North by Northwestern.

No one wants to get sick at college. I’ve been through the illness routine twice at Northwestern: after ignoring my symptoms for several days (or a week) the pain grows too strong to bear, so I shuffle a few blocks north to 633 Emerson St. There, kindly, doctors take my vitals and offer me helpful but depressing advice like “Don’t drink while taking this medication.” Then a prescription is written, I meander to the pharmacy and take my medicine home with me for a fun evening of lying in bed and watching 30 Rock on Hulu. Thanks to The Powers That Be, getting sick at Northwestern won’t be as fun next year.

News of Searle’s pharmacy’s impending closure became public on April 3. The closing comes as a surprise after the university originally planned to expand the pharmacy during the Searle Hall renovations. Instead of building a larger pharmacy, the university decided to discontinue all pharmaceutical services indefinitely.

Executive Director of University Health Services Donald Misch is disappointed with the university’s decision to close the pharmacy. “I think it will be a shame,” Misch said. “We’re losing something that provides a good service.” Closing the pharmacy — which Misch said provided “one-stop shopping” to busy college students — is the university thrusting its giant middle finger at the students, blatantly choosing their own finances over students’ health and safety.

President Obama just signed a bill allowing university health centers to negotiate for significantly discounted birth control, making Searle’s closing ever more unfortunate. When Northwestern receives a discount on birth control prices solely by virtue of being a university, it’s a shame they deem to close students’ only outlet to these cheap and easy prescriptions. While students can certainly fill their prescriptions at CVS, Misch worries that the distance from North Campus will put off some students from getting medicine and keeping healthy. Similar birth control prices can be found at Planned Parenthood, but the closest office is in Rogers Park — 11 miles away.

Northwestern has decided that their “full-service university” doesn’t need a pharmacy. Never mind the costly, ever-expanding Technological Institute. Never mind the cheap birth control. Never mind that Misch insists, “the harder you make [picking up a prescription], the less likely people are to do it.”

Misch said Health Services doctors might mention cheaper alternatives for prescriptions, but “it depends on what’s close and what students can get to. It’s easy to say certain things are available, but so what if you can’t get there? A lot of students don’t have cars.”

He fears even the use of everyday prescription drugs — penicillin, painkillers, antibiotics — will fall off once students are no longer able to pick up their prescription at Searle. Sure, we could blame students that are too lazy to walk to CVS to pick up a prescription for whatever health problems may befall them, but the fault should lie with Northwestern.

“When you have convenience, people are more likely to follow medical recommendations. I expect that some compliance will drop,” Misch said. “It’s not just about making life easy, but it’s also about getting people to follow up with their help. The harder you make that, the less likely people are to do it.”

The decision to close Searle was made on a financial basis, Misch said. The pharmacy was losing money, so the university closed it. But things are more complex than they seem: budgeting discussions that led to the pharmacy’s closing led to a “disagreement” about its profitability. Misch doesn’t agree that the pharmacy is in dire financial straits — and even if it were losing money, he said it should stay open.

“I’d like to point out that a lot of things at NU lose money,” Misch said. “I would guess that the Department of Philosophy doesn’t make money. I would guess the English Department doesn’t make money. Why would you keep them? Because they’re part of a full-service university.”

It’s not the first time (nor the last, I’m sure) that Northwestern has chosen its finances over its students. Budgetary woes have hampered the successful Saturday intercampus shuttle since its inception, and the university hasn’t offered to step in with aid. Fraternity members living in university housing are required to pay for a meal plan in a much-criticized move that will bring the school a financial windfall — but these funds will be lifted directly from fraternities’ pockets.

We’ve already discussed how meal plans waste students’ money while providing a significant amount of income to the university. Nationwide, grocery stores and food retailers are dropping prices in response to the recession. Overall, food prices have dropped 5.5 percent in the first quarter of 2009. You might think you could get more bang for your buck with the meal plan — at the least you should be able to pick up a few more bread biscuits for your $8.50 Block D meal conversion. No such luck. When Northwestern has the opportunity to pass on its savings to students, it elects to keep the cash for itself.

Running a functional university in tight economic times clearly comes with its fair share of budgetary issues, but Northwestern is shirking its responsibility to lessen students’ loads. Certainly the university has exerted some effort in an attempt to increase quality of life in the midst of a recession: Next year’s tuition increase (note: the tuition is still increasing) is the smallest percentage increase since 1967. Scholarship funds increased 10 percent. The financial aid office has undertaken the No-Loan Pledge, which may not be everything its name implies, but is certainly a step in the right direction.

Northwestern spends significant chunks of money on “maintaining prestige,” dropping millions of dollars on attracting professors and giving out grants. Clearly the university listens to students on occasion: student/university budget meetings have led to the Norris renovations and the Saturday shuttle. But why spend money on these amenities while at the same time closing such a vital aid to campus health?

However, when it comes to easing the everyday life of the 8,000-plus students that mill around campus each day, Northwestern is greedy with its money. The problems start with Searle’s closing and echo throughout the administration’s treatment of students. Need birth control? Now it’s difficult to get it cheaply and efficiently. As Misch says, a “full-service university” should offer easy prescriptions and pass along food discounts. But for some reason, Northwestern hesitates.

Caitlin Collins, left, with Cliff Chamberlain in Magnolia. Publicity photo by Liz Lauren.

Seven times a week, Caitlin Collins takes the Red Line down to State and Lake, gets in costume and steps onstage at the Goodman Theatre, one of the oldest and most historic theaters in Chicago.

Collins has performed in a prolific stable of plays at Northwestern, but she said her performance in Magnolia is understandably a huge change from student theater at Northwestern. The Goodman Theatre holds 856 patrons on two levels. Northwestern theaters tend to be considerably smaller: Wallis Theater and Shanley Pavilion struggle to hold 150 students. While Cahn and Pick-Staiger may hold over 1000 each, it’s rare for a student group to perform there.

While performing in Amadeus in the Theater and Interpretation Center last spring, Collins — a Communication junior — met Northwestern professor and Broadway director Anna Shapiro, who invited her to try out for Magnolia, a new play by award-winning playwright Regina Taylor set to open at the Goodman Theatre.

“I got extremely lucky, to be honest. It was a right place, right time sort of thing,” Collins said. For most actors, landing a role in a high-profile professional theater at such a young age is near impossible. Not for Collins: “The consistent level of her commitment is unique,” said Daniel Cantor, her acting professor.

“It’s really totally corny and cliché, but it’s a dream come true,” Collins said.

Producers have chosen an ideal time to perform Magnolia. A re-imagining of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, Taylor set the story in 1963 Atlanta at the precipice of the civil rights movement. Collins’ character, Anna, lives a sheltered life on a plantation until its foreclosure, when Anna is forced to confront what lies beyond the magnolia groves.

“It’s an incredibly relevant and topical play, and it raises a lot of important questions and issues,” Collins said. During rehearsals, Taylor told Collins, “When I first started writing this play, they did not have a black president. Now that it’s over and done with, we do.”

Magnolia runs eight times each week, including twice on Thursdays, when Collins is required to be at the theater by 1:30 p.m. The show begins 30 minutes later.

“For me, that’s too close for comfort,” Collins said. She leaves Evanston at noon, takes the Red Line to State and Lake and arrives at the theater by 1 p.m. every Thursday. Collins’ character in Magnolia, Anna, has a “crazy ‘60s hairstyle,” so she visits a stylist before getting into costume.

Five minutes before the curtain rises, the cast gathers backstage, holds hands, and “puts in good thoughts for the show,” Collins said. Alongside her stands Annette O’Toole, Academy Award nominee for songwriting, film and stage actress and probably best known among college students as Clark Kent’s mother in Smallville. Collins is the youngest of the 12 cast members, but she doesn’t feel intimidated. “There’s still moments of [intimidation] now and then, but everyone’s been so kind and wonderful. I’m just trying to be a big human sponge and take in as much as I can,” she said.

Collins first met O’Toole immediately after arriving at the Goodman Theatre for the show’s first rehearsal.

“[O'Toole] was the first person I saw and she said, ‘You must be playing my daughter,’” Collins said. O’Toole wrapped her in a giant hug. Then Collins realized, “Oh, okay, this is going to be okay,” she said. Despite their star power, the actors she works beside are “really wonderful people in addition to being amazing performers.”

Yet even after weeks of rehearsals, Collins still felt daunted by her fellow performers. In the first few performances, once the leads stepped off-stage she began to fret: “There was a little part of my brain going, ‘Oh no, the audience doesn’t want you! They want the other people to come back onstage! Why are you even up here and talking? They don’t deserve this,’” Collins said.

“Then I was like, okay, back up,” she said. “It’s actually not helpful and productive in any way, so I just have to shut up and do my best to help tell the story.”

And that she does well: reviewers have raved about her role as the conflicted Anna. Cantor calls Collins “very humble,” but she can certainly command attention onstage. Cheeky Chicago says Collins “proved that she had more than enough gusto and sparkle to stand amongst these fine actors.”

Collins, left, with Annette O’Toole. Publicity photo by Liz Lauren.

The play, which closes Apr. 19, has drawn in tremendous crowds from across Chicago and nationwide. She gestures across the table. “Say I’m sitting this far away from someone that I’m acting with, and it’s a very intimate moment. But there’s someone standing in the back row of the mezzanine,” Collins said. “How do I send my voice out to them? That’s just tricky. We struggle with that [at Northwestern], too, but in this space in particular the challenge is amped up.”

For someone achieving success so early in their career, Collins is still dedicated to performing in Northwestern shows.

“She has a tremendous commitment to whatever she does, from the smallest exercise in class to a big role,” Cantor said.

But if the acting thing doesn’t work out, Collins has a back-up skill prepared: circus performing. Collins takes classes at the Actors Gymnasium, a school for circus and performing arts at the Noyes Cultural Arts Center in Evanston, where she learns trapeze, juggling and aerial and other circus skills.

Even though Collins claims she is “not particularly good at anything” circus-related, she still enjoys her time at the Gymnasium, which she uses as “stress release” to forget about Magnolia, homework and impending midterms.

“If you’re hanging from a trapeze, you can’t really be worried about anything else,” Collins said.

Cantor thinks Collins has the drive and ability to make it on her own. “She has very big eyes, and those big eyes are emblematic of who she is, because she just takes things in, is a sympathetic person and just wants to observe things,” he said. “Regardless of what kind of career she has, she has what she needs to do well in the world.”

Summary

• There are three people: Niflheim (a cold, icy bitch), Muspelt (a red-haired hothead) and Gunnungagap (hot but vapid). Ginnungagap is way hot, and Niflheim and Muspelt can’t resist him. So even though they’re BFFs, they are both way into Ginnungagap. The three go out to a bar and Niflheim starts pounding mead shots. Even though she’s pretty much a skanky whore I feel a little bad for her when Ginnungagap and Muspelt totally start hooking up while she’s blasted in the corner.
• OMG! So drunk wasty-waste Niflheim is taken to the hospital. She’s on life support and the diagnosis doesn’t look good. Her triplet brothers, Ymir and Buri, and younger sister, Audhumla, find out about Muspelt and Ginnungagap’s hookup and decide to avenge her, but Ginnungagap and Muspelt totally outsmart them.
• Buri and Bestla (Muspelt’s older sister) run off to Sweden to elope. Once they get back it turns out they only eloped because Bestla was pregnant with triplets! Oh shit — and Buri is already a baby-daddy (he had a son, Bor, with some rando princess earlier last season if you don’t remember). Bestla’s not just a little pregnant — she’s nine months pregnant, and within days of their elopement out pop Odin, Ve and Vili. Seriously, WTF. Then Niflheim dies.
• While Buri and Bestla are getting busy and poppin’ out babies, we find out that Ymir is a Bad Guy. Like, the worst of them all. It turns out he’s been in league with Ginnungagap and Muspelt the entire time. Once Niflheim dies, the whole sham is exposed. OMG. Is he seriously sleeping with Muspelt? I knew there was something fishy going on when they showed Muspelt and Ymir talking about taking a trip to Svalbard last week.
• Okay, so it turns out Odin, Ve and Vili are, like, these badass mutants that grow super quickly. A week passes and suddenly they’re ripped and shit and ready to actually avenge the death of Niflheim. So this tribe of redheads goes postal on fucking Ginnungagap and Muspelt and Ymir. I don’t see why they needed to show Ymir’s death so graphically. I mean, we get that he died. You don’t need to show us his head getting chopped off. I’ve been watching this show for, like, seventeen years and this is the grossest thing I’ve ever seen.
• OMG I LOVE ODIN. BEST NEW CHARACTER EVER. So when Ymir dies, all the other evil guys, like, kill themselves. So Odin is basically the king, and it turns out he’s, like, super artistic. He goes and sees wise grandpa Yggdrasil, who has totally been super annoyed with all the drama lately. But it looks like he and Odin will be BFFs (or would that be BRFs — Best Relatives Forever — LOL!), and together they, like, make the world. It’s pretty sweet.

Thoughts

• I can’t believe how many characters they killed off, OMG. Niflheim was totally not my favorite character but when she got drunk in the alley in Märsta on Rumspringa and Ginnungagap carries her out of the alleyway all ripped and hot and OMG best and hottest character ever, I thought she was dead. That was when my BF stopped watching because he said the show jumped the seal. Now she is actually dead (my BF Sven still isn’t watching), but so is Ginnungagap (my BFF and I are TOTES holding a funeral for him).
• So I know she died and shit but wasn’t Niflheim’s hair looking AWESOME this episode? SERIOUSLY. I will totally tell my hairdresser to give me that double-twisty-braid looks. Maybe I’ll bring in a carving of Niflheim from the episode. BAD. ASS.

Quote

Niflheim: (very drunk) I love you, G.
Ginnungagap: We’re mead for each other.

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