They claim to love bacon, the numbers four and nine, and know that the answer to the trivia questions during games is always “C.” Their behavior borders on cultish but has the air of a friendship woven through and through with the thread of a common commitment. The fact that they spend the majority of their time playing instruments and wearing purple seems to be beside the point. And although they don’t come right out and say it, it’s clear that whatever it is they’re actually doing, they’re not doing it only for themselves.

The Northwestern University Marching Band is more than just a “band.” It’s a piece of university history — an artifact that evolves with each football season, no matter how good or bad the ‘Cats prove to be. And at the center of the group are two students, filled to the brim with school spirit and knowledge of all things Northwestern. They are the “SpiriTeam” (and yes, it’s with one “t”) – Juniors Jed Feder and Zack Moy as the “Spirit leader” and “Grynder” respectively.

“Hear Ye, Hear Ye. This band’s in session.”

It’s the opening cry that brings the band to order in Trienens Hall. And delivered by Feder, it’s also what sets the tone for the “spirit session” — a pep rally for the band, by the band — which follows.

Since the creation of the roles that now make up the SpiriTeam in the 1960s, the “Here Ye” has been an important responsibility of the Spirit Leader. It began as a way to introduce band personnel and instrumental sections to the opposing team’s band. Over time it has become increasingly dependent on the creativity of the current Spirit Leader. With Feder, it’s a forum for social commentary, inside jokes and other humorous anecdotes.

“The great thing about Jed is that he’s a really good performer,” says Moy. “His lines are really great too but his delivery makes the performance for him, no matter what.”

Pete Friedmann has had a front seat in the role’s transition. Friedmann spent the fall of 1978, his senior year, as the Spirit Leader. He returned to Northwestern two years after graduating and has been the band’s announcer ever since. Despite the growing complexity of the role he once had, he has enjoyed watching it change.

“It’s been a gradual and very natural evolution and just a lot of fun to be a fly on the wall and watch it happen,” he says.

Friedmann often attends the “spirit sessions” and knows first-hand the amount of work Feder and Moy put into their roles. After all, he was once in their shoes making up cheers, rewriting opponents’ fight songs, and giving his own “Here Ye” all in the name of, as he says, “getting the band psyched up.”

“These guys are great,” he said. “I think they’re under a lot of pressure because every year, every spirit team … wants to outdo what the previous spirit team did.”

But can they Growl?

Zack Moy. Photo courtesy of Tom McGrath.

Together the two bookend the session, Feder with his “Here Ye” and Moy with what in band lore is known as “The Grynd” — a two or so minute slam poetry reading that also invokes the upcoming game and jokes pertaining to the band.

From the start, Moy knew that he wanted to be the Grynder. Unlike the Spirit Leader, which requires an audition process, this position is passed down. As a sophomore, Moy asked the Grynder, then a senior, what he would need to do to secure his spot. Although he knew that the position had a history of staying within his instrumental section, the mellophones, he felt that would make things too easy. He wanted to deserve the position.

“I basically did as many spirited, crazy, ridiculous things as I possibly could. Whether it was the most extreme dress-up day or just being really quirky and loud and like being a presence in the band during rehearsals,” says Moy.

Moy eventually got the position and quickly went to work.

If it’s Feder that gets the group laughing, it’s Moy that gets them, well, growling. At the end of every Grynd, the Grynder asks for a little help. He starts off asking, “Wildcat Band, can you growl?” They do, but not loud enough to satisfy him. There’s a woman on his mind and she must hear it too. “That was pretty good,” he’ll say. “But there’s one person who couldn’t hear you, it was my mother.” The two groups banter back and forth a little more before Moy’s final call, “She couldn’t hear you, so Wildcat band, can you growl?”

And they growl, in the fashion of the “claw” done at football games. This satisfies Moy and the session ends with a performance by the drum line.

How do you like your Badger meat?

But their respective roles in the spirit sessions are only a small part of their leadership within the band. From standing on the ladders in front of the band during football games to preparing “spirit sheets” complete with jokes and football team reviews for the rest of the band to leading specific cheers, the roles are both a symbolic honor and a time consuming task.

It all converges into one idea: P & G, or “pride and guts.”

“It’s one of our mantras,” says Moy, “meaning pride in the school and the football team, [and] guts as [in] you will do everything perfect for the team.”

This means hitting the right notes, marching in the right step and being the loudest and proudest Wildcat supporters in the stands. Aside from leading the post-touchdown fight song both Moy and Feder have their own cheers or chants that they lead with band with.

“Even if it’s like for 20 seconds, we’re doing some dumb cheer,” says Moy.

Listen hard enough on Saturday and you might hear something like this: “Badger meat! Badger meat! How do we like it? How do we like it? Raw! Raw! Raw!”

Mark Woodsum, a 5th year member of the Wildcat football team, understands the band’s commitment in their support of the ‘Cats. He is often a guest at the spirit sessions, keeping up the recent practice by members of the football team.

“They’re great guys,” he says of Feder and Moy. “They’ve obviously got a lot of passion not only for Northwestern, the band and football but they generate and incredible amount of time.”

“The greatest band in the whole damn land”

And just as their commitment is recognized outside the band, neither does it go unnoticed within.

In his tenth year as the band’s director, Dan Farris has experienced the efforts of a number of different spirit teams.

“It’s an interesting history and what it’s kind of evolved to,” he says. “When I first came here, I was like ‘who are these people and what are they doing?’”

He quickly found out. Now, it’s not the band without them. Although this is the first year in their role for both of them, Farris is impressed with their leadership ability.

“I think it’s a really unique team and this is essential to bring spirit and unity to the band in the stands and during rehearsals … ” he says.

While Feder, Moy and the rest of the Wildcat marching band don’t seem to have any trouble generating school spirit, they keep their sessions closed to non-members.

“I suppose if tons of students were like ‘we want to see this’ then Jed and I might do things a little differently, I don’t know,” Moy says. “But the thing is you’ll think we’re a cult. And in some aspects we are.”

So maybe they are a little selfish. Still, you can’t deny that their blood runs purple.

“You can join it for any reason,” he said. “Everyone’s different in there, but everyone’s also the same [in] that they just love that organization for what it does for the school and the community.”

He continues, “the fact [is] that we are the best fans for the Northwestern football team and for Northwestern in general.”

As Feder notes at the conclusion of his “Hear Ye,” they just might be “the greatest band in the whole damn land.”

Jerred Roggensack, Chika Nwosu and Wade Askew. Photo by Natalie Krebs / North by Northwestern.

Between them, they possess potent love for Beyonce, dreams of learning to breakdance, and a weakness for dropping gs from the end of words. Meet Wade Askew, Chika Nwosu and Jerred Roggensack, DM’s newest emcees. We played 20 questions with them. Note: Roggensack was interviewed separately due to scheduling conflicts.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Wade Askew: 30-hour long dance party.

Chika Nwosu: Living in a candy store.

Jerred Roggensack: I see perfect happiness as like being with people that I love. You know what? Dancing with people that I love.

What is your greatest fear?

Chika: Being stuck in an elevator. I don’t like crammed spaces.

Wade: I’ll go with being stuck in a cage of all tarantulas, scorpions and snakes. All at the same time. That’s number one.

Jerred: I’d say to look back at my life at the end and just have a lot of regrets.

Which living person do you most admire?

Chika: Beyonce. She’s a baller.

Wade: Beyonce is a baller. I can’t believe you took Beyonce, what’s left now? I’ll go with Alicia Keys.

Jerred: My roommate, Speedy, who’s in Scotland – he’s a baller. He’s the man.

Which living person do you most despise?

Wade: I’m full of love. But I’d say the Grinch. He stole Christmas, and I’m not down with that.

Chika: Well, I’m gonna have to say Miley. Even though I love her music. She’s supposed to be a sweet little Disney star, and she’s not. But her music’s good. I love “Party in the USA.”

Jerred: I’d probably say the lead singer from Nickelback.

What is your greatest extravagance?

Wade: Gosh, I’m a pretty simple man. You see how I dress, I wear sweatpants and slippers. I’d say free lodging, wherever I can get with my free flights.

Chika: Getting to go backstage and be VIP for any concert. To be able to walk in and just be like, “Hey, Miley Cyrus, what’s up?”

Jerred: My Macbook. It’s my baby.

What is your current state of mind?

Chika: Should I go to my next class?

Wade: I would just say my mind is just a continually bubbly, happy place that is kind of like bunnies prancing through a meadow with blooming flowers everywhere. And I’m just bouncing around in that happy meadow – with the bunnies.

Jerred: I’ve got an Empire State of Mind.

What is the quality you most like in a person of the opposite sex?

Chika: Someone who likes me just the way I am.

Wade: A genuine caring person with a big smile.

Jerred: Someone who’s passionate about helping other people.

Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

Chika: I always say, “You da bomb dot com.” That’s like my tagline.

Wade: I feel like being around Jerred just makes me say things like “homes” and “tight.”

Chika: “Ballin’” – he always says ballin’.

Wade: Jerred really does rub off on you. He’s like a hybrid between California surfer and ghetto language. So mesh those two together and if anything falls in those categories, it’s starting to rub off on me. But I’ll go with “y’all.” That’s my official answer. I’m from Georgia.

Jerred: Oh gosh, you’re gonna get a couple here. “Dude,” “man,” “ballin’,” “homie,” “dawg,” “whatup whatup” – the double. I call my parents “dudes” sometimes. It’s just the weirdest thing. For a while they resisted, but now, they accept it.

Which talent would you most like to have?

Wade: I would love to be able to do back flips and back handsprings on command. That would be ballin’.

Chika: I wish I could be super flexible and be a human pretzel.

Wade: Wait – are superpowers in play here? That changes everything.

Chika: I think to be invisible.

Wade: Flying is kinda cliché, who doesn’t want to fly? I would love to just be smart. To have some intelligence, that would be great.

Jerred: I wish I was an amazing break dancer.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Chika: This. Being a DM emcee.

Wade: Yeah, Dance Marathon.

Jerred: I just don’t like looking at stuff I’ve done like achievements. I’d say becoming an Evans Scholar.

If you were to die, what would you want to come back as?

Chika: I already said Beyonce…

Wade: I would probably be the bunnies in my state of mind.

Chika: I think I want to come back as the president.

Jerred: Actually, I’ve had this conversation. But my answer always switches. I would really love to fly. Because of Space Jam, I want to fly like an eagle. So an eagle.

Where would you most like to live?

Wade: Atlanta, Ga.

Chika: Somewhere really warm, like Jamaica.

Wade: I feel like I should do something better than just my hometown. I would probably say the British Virgin Islands.

Chika: Ooh, snazzy.

Jerred: This is tough, I want to live everywhere. I’d say top three are the Canadian Rockies, I’ve heard awesome things about Kenya, and then you gotta Chi-town dude. You gotta say Chi-town. Chi-town’s where it’s at.

What is your most treasured possession?

Wade: Jerred Roggensack.

Chika: I would say my phone. I always lose it, but I really love it.

Jerred: It’s probably my baby. My MacBook.

What is your favorite occupation?

Wade: Choreographer of Beyonce’s music videos.

Chika: Back-up dancer for Beyonce’s music videos.

Wade: Can we both be back-up dancers for “Single Ladies?”

Jerred: Being Bono.

What’s your most marked characteristic?

Chika: I’m always jumping, moving, I can’t sit still.

Wade: I’ll just say upbeat, optimistic. Smiley. That’ll be the official adjective.

Jerred: I’m an extremely positive and energetic person, and on the dance floor, I always look like I just got done swimming in Lake Michigan. (I sweat. A lot.)

Who are your favorite writers?

Wade: I’m illiterate, so…

Chika: I haven’t read a regular book in so long – like not for school…

Jerred: C.S. Lewis, Dostoyevsky and Phillip Yancy.

Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Chika: All I can think of are celebrities that are not historical figures…

Wade: I’ll go with the guy who invented the Harlem Shake.

Jerred: Can I say Will Smith? That dude’s the man. I wish I was more like Will Smith.

What is your greatest regret?

Chika: That I didn’t meet Wade sooner.

Wade: Same.

Jerred: Not starting a band sooner.

How would you like to die?

Wade: Yes, good question. A lot of thought has been put into this.

Chika: I think in my sleep, cause then you can’t feel it.

Wade: I think I would like to be –

Chika: Oh dear.

Wade: I have to be doing something awesome at the time. So at the time of my death, I will be saving a school bus of children while the bus is on fire. And at that point, somebody’s going to try to attack the children, and I will simultaneously disarm them, and catch fire from the flaming school bus while I do, lighting the people who killed the children on fire. So I take them out and save the children. That didn’t make any sense. I need to start over. I would like to die in a ball of flaming glory.

Jerred: Skydiving. That’s gotta be it. Only way to go.

What is your motto?

Wade: Pop, lock and drop it. I don’t even know what that would mean.

Chika: Better light a candle in the curse of darkness.

Jerred: Don’t worry, everything’s gonn be alright. “Gonn’.”

CAESAR. Just hearing the word makes Northwestern students bristle.

The slow search engine, the shopping cart process, making sense of time conflicts and accidentally pressing back on a page makes registration week a hassle. University of Massachusetts at Amherst senior Tom Petr faced similar frustrations and decided to solve the problem with Schedr.

“It was created because our registration system called SPIRE — it’s really similar to your CAESAR — was really awful,” Petr says. “I just wanted to make a solution that saves time and makes more sense to people. Letting people visualize what they want to do instead of making them think in terms of numbers just makes things easier.”

Schedr streamlines the course registration process by letting students search and schedule classes on one page. Brought to Northwestern in August 2008 at the request of McCormick senior Andrew Reiter, the site resembles calendar applications such as Google Calendar with blocks of time representing selected classes on a weekly schedule. All course data is pulled from CAESAR’s database, so students don’t have to worry about missing classes.

“I really just like how it puts out the whole schedule in a block format,” says Weinberg sophomore Michael Nussbaum, who is a Schedr user. “So I can see everything I have for that one day.”

After running for two years, Schedr has 2,000 registered users, most from University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Northwestern is only the second school that the program serves.

Petr plans to monetize the site but decided to stay away from ads on the main page to save space. He plans to license the product to other schools.

Although the site requires registration, Petr protects the privacy of all users. Schedr requires a school e-mail address to identify college students.

Users have responded positively to Schedr, and Petr welcomes additional feedback on how to improve the website.

“CTEC integration would be great,” says McCormick senior Ethan Altman, who is a Schedr user. “Right now you’re going between two systems inside and outside CAESAR. Scheduling all in one system — that’d be very useful.”

Petr appreciates suggestions and plans to implement additional features such as CTECs and narrowing down classes by distribution requirements, so Northwestern students can look forward to complete freedom from the shackles of CAESAR.

This cold Evanston winter, Anoop Jain will be homeless.

“I plan on sleeping outside when the weather is not too miserable and crashing at people’s apartments so that I can put whatever I am saving on rent straight in to the donation fund,” Jain says.

“Donation fund” is what Jain, who graduated from McCormick in June, is tending to alongside his engineering career. Since graduation the 22-year-old has been heading a $25,000 fundraiser through GiveForward.org, a local Chicago organization, to build a community kitchen for Tibetan refugees who have escaped to India. So far he has raised nearly $3,000.

“The community kitchen would basically be a place for the Tibetan refugees to come get really cheap healthy food, and then also they could work in the kitchen,” Jain says, “the idea being that if you work in the kitchen or clean dishes, then your food could be even cheaper. It would also serve as a community center for women and children.”

“One of the big ideas for this organization is Tibetan cultural preservation, so it would really encourage people to cook traditional Tibet food which I think is really important because there’s less and less people cooking that food,” Jain says. “It would be a great place for them to practice it or even give foreigners cooking lessons.”

Jain’s fundraising path to helping others, though, first began with destruction in his own hometown.

“I’m from New Orleans and so after Katrina, I felt the refugee experience first-hand and I was really lucky,” Jain says.

Jain was fortunate enough to have family in Houston, Texas to provide him shelter, but despite his protection, Jain could not stop thinking about those who were not as lucky.

Soon after Katrina, Jain spent the first two months of the summer helping gut houses in New Orleans. There he found a volunteer organization based out of Tulane University that would allow him to teach English to Tibetan refugees in India.

“It was sort of an accident that it happened to be Tibetan refugees,” Jain says. “It didn’t matter to me who the people were.”

Jain spent the summer of 2006 in a town located in the Himalayas named McLeod Ganj, a spot for refugees to escape to during this period of Tibetan and Chinese struggle. He came back to Northwestern with a passion for their cause, which he carried with him through graduation.

Jain works an engineering day job in Northbrook, but has found the balance between work and this fundraising project easier than expected.

“I have always had multiple things going on in life. While I was in school, I was very involved with ASB and WNUR and on top of that I was in McCormick,” Jain says.

“I see working on this project as a break from my day job. I think that working in the corporate world gets very monotonous and so at the end of the day, or even during the day, if I have some time, I always am working on ways to collect more money or spread the word.”

“Originally, I wanted to help them build a radio station,” Jain says. “But my contact there, Ngawang, the program director in India, said, “look, right now what we really need is a kitchen.’”

Because the town is the official home of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile, it’s a very popular tourist site — which drives up the price of food, Jain says. Refugees can’t pay tourist prices, and the high altitude makes transporting food difficult.

That’s where Jain comes in. Essentially a one-man fundraiser, Jain has tried to find ways to contact others to spread the word about his cause, but it has been his former and current Northwestern peers whom he has looked to for the most support.

“I just started emailing 90 of my closest friends,” he says. “I just said, ‘look, put this on your Facebook or whatever social network.’ Any working media outlets you use, please use [them]. I just started about a month ago, so it’s in its very early stages.”

Even with this support from friends and a large NU network, though, Jain still faces monetary challenges and realizes that students can only provide to a certain extent.

“I think right now my biggest obstacle is getting people involved. A lot of my good friends are abroad, and while they want to help, there is not much they can do sitting so far away,” Jain says. “Also, since most of the people I have reached out to are either recent graduates or still in school, money is not something they have a lot of.”

While the project is still in the early stages, donations can be made on the its Web site, http://www.giveforward.org/kitchenproject.

If and when the fundraising goal is reached, Jain will be leaving the Midwest altogether.

“I told my friends in India,” Jain says, “‘Look, once I raise the money, I’m not just sending you the check, I will come with the money and I’m going to stay there until this thing is finished.’”

Communication 2008 alumna Cate Smierciak, currently residing in Berlin, calls the city “confused about its identity” as it cannot be entirely considered a historically East German or a West German city. However, this urban confusion has led to a freethinking and artistic culture that is responsible for a creative atmosphere featuring projects such as the wall of dominoes, painted by various international artists and Berlin schoolchildren, lining the old East-West German border.

The alumna in Berlin
The night before the anniversary of the Wende, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Smierciak stood among crowds of people looking at the dominoes during the last few hours they were to remain standing. Smierciak attends film school at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen Konrad Wolf (HFF) Potsdam Babelsberg. Smierciak finds Berlin fascinating because of the history of the Wall: “It just feels like bizarro world. It’s so different than any other European or American city.”

Though not a German native, Smierciak considers the history of the Berlin wall an important part of her life. After spending several months learning German in Cologne and Berlin, Smierciak got a job with Fat Tire Bike Tours giving bicycle tours of Berlin, specializing in tours about the history of the Cold War and German reunification. As a tour guide and a student in Berlin, Smierciak gained insight into both foreign and German perceptions of reunification.

Smierciak hopes the 20th anniversary of the Wende has inspired non-Germans to learn more about the event. Most of her tourists came from English-speaking countries such as the United States and Australia. In guiding tourists around Berlin, she received questions demonstrating a certain amount of ignorance about the history of the Berlin Wall, such as “Why did Hitler build the wall?”

The professor in Evanston
Smierciak is not alone — other members of the Northwestern community are actively educating Americans about the history of the Berlin Wall. In October, Northwestern’s German and History departments hosted a conference dedicated to the exploration of the Berlin Wall’s history, “The Fall of the Wall Reconsidered.” German Professor Franziska Lys, one of the organizers of the conference, showed a film she created featuring East German natives.

Professor Lys’ film, Drehort Neubrandenburg, depicted a set of video portraits of citizens in the East German city of Neubrandenburg. Shot in 1991, the first segment of the film illustrates Neubrandenburg’s reaction soon after the Wall came down. One portrait depicted an elderly couple, the owners of the oldest grocery store in Neubrandenburg — when asked whether they were optimistic about the new competition with West Germany markets, they said yes. According to the couple, if they survived communism, they could survive capitalism.

When the film screened in Neubrandenburg for the first time in 1991, the audience reacted with silence. Lys remembers the audience’s general attitude of bitterness and being told, “I guess you made the film that you wanted.” Today, Lys believes she screened the film too soon — the people of Neubrandenburg were not ready to reflect.

Above all, the intention of the film was to teach the German language. Professor Lys believes that it is impossible to really understand a language without understanding the culture behind it, and that it is impossible to understand a culture simply by looking at words on a page. The voices and faces of native speakers can help students understand a language in its organic environment.

Lys got the idea for the second segment of the film when students began to wonder what had happened to all the people of Neubrandenburg, and the second segment was shot in 2002. At this point, the Neubrandenburg grocery store featured in the first part of the film was no longer in business.

After the second segment was completed, Drehort Neubrandenburg screened in Neubrandenburg again. This time, remembers Lys, the reaction was completely different: Many cried and some people left the audience, unable to handle their emotions. After the screening, Lys and other members of the film team were asked to sit together and discuss the film with the people of the town. Now that the citizens of Neubrandenburg had time to reflect on the fall of the Wall, they better understood how life had changed after unification with the West and were more willing to have an open discussion about their history.

As Lys became more deeply involved with the history of the separation of East and West Germany, she was surprised to learn of the extent to which people’s awareness of the world is filtered through other individuals’ biased presentations. Lys met a group of East German students following the fall of the Wall that believed the Wall did not exist to prevent them from learning about West Germany, but rather to protect them from it.

The Ossies and Wessies in Germany
In modern Berlin, Smierciak still notices remnants of the tensions between East and West Germany in the attitudes of German young adults in the form of lighthearted stereotypes about the difference between “Ossies” (East Germans) and “Wessies” (West Germans.) Though among young people, these stereotypes are merely jokes and do not carry malicious connotations. Still, they are very much a part of Berlin culture.

For example, for one of her first projects in Berlin film school, Cate and a group of German first-year students were asked to make a quick short film. The students decided to make a story about a “Wessie” who secretly preferred products exclusively sold in East Berlin, such as pickles, but was too embarrassed to buy them in front of his fellow West German friends.

However, Germans from older generations take the differences between East and West Germany more seriously. Smierciak knows West German families who refuse to go to their children’s soccer games held in the former East Germany.

Though Berlin is not often considered a global film-making hub, Smierciak chose to live in Berlin because she wanted a different experience. “I decided that [New York and LA] would always be there and that I wanted to have a bit of an adventure.” Now Smierciak has the opportunity to be at the heart of celebration of a pivotal point in both German and global history.

The set of Two By Pinter currently running at the Piven Theatre Workshop. Photo by Jamie Wiebe / North by Northwestern.

Joyce Piven leans toward me, looks me straight in the eye, and says in a raspy-but-loud voice, “Full… body… whisper.”

She pauses, sits back in her chair and says, “Slow motion.” The words roll sluggishly out of her mouth.

She straightens and raises her eyebrows. “Or double time,” she chatters quickly. “When you’re going fast, it shakes things up, keeps you out of your head and in play.”

“And play,” she pauses for emphasis, “is everything.”

As co-founder and art director emeritus of Piven Theatre Workshop, Joyce has plenty to say about “play,” or the state of being present and alive in the text. That’s why the actors at Piven Theatre Workshop play games like “full body whisper” — changing the tone and rhythm of lines to keep the audience and other actors engaged in a communal experience. After all, Piven Theatre Workshop, just two blocks away from campus, is nationally renowned not just for the abundance of talent that has emerged from under its wing, but its ensemble work and extensive community outreach.

Joyce and her husband Byrne Piven (who passed away in 2002) were both founding members of Playwright’s Theatre Club, which also spawned the Compass Players and Second City. In 1971, the Pivens founded Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston to cultivate talent in a positive environment for all aspects of theater. Along with their children, Shira and Jeremy (better known to most Northwesterners as Ari Gold in HBO’s Entourage), they were designated “Chicago’s first family of acting” by Stagebill magazine. The workshop is lauded as one of Chicago’s most successful theater training grounds, and has seen the likes of Kate Walsh, Lara Flynn Boyle, Joan and John Cusack, Jeff Garlin, and countless other directors, playwrights and producers. Piven alum Sarah Ruhl, who is returning for the Chicago premiere of her play Late: A Cowboy Song, won the MacArthur Fellowship in 2006. Chicago has a vibrant theatre scene, and Piven has been feeding it for almost 40 years.

“More Northwestern students should know that just two blocks away is one of the major cultural institutions of the Chicago area,” Artistic Director Jen Green says. “It’s a classic Chicago black-box experience in your own backyard.”

Currently playing at Piven Theatre Workshop are two short plays by Novel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter. Joyce is directing Two by Pinter and chose Pinter’s “The Lover” and “The Collection” in order to explore the intricacies of human intimacy and sensuality.

“Intimacy is a fearful thing, in that we will do anything we can do to run away from it, even though it’s our basic need,” Joyce says.

Throughout the plays, Joyce and the actors carefully fill Pinter’s signature pauses with the tension and emotion that underlie the silence. “When we find the subtext of the encounter, we see that stakes are high, and one’s idea of oneself is being threatened,” Joyce says. “One is fighting for one’s point of view in a very personal, private way.”

Pinter’s work is known for its minimalism, and Joyce wants to stay true to that. She’s fiercely loyal to the text. “Most actors think they have to bring something to [the text], but I feel the opposite,” she says. “You have to hang in with the playwright — he knows what he wrote. The words tell you everything.”

Joyce brings her theatrical visions to life by being both a generous actor and mentor, according to Jessie Mills, an assistant director for Two by Pinter and former Northwestern graduate student. Mills grew up in Evanston and trained at Piven Theatre Workshop as a teenager. After working at theatres throughout New York, Mills returned to Piven.

“Once you get a taste of what it’s like to be in community theater, you don’t want to let it go,” Mills says. “A lot of people who train here and go elsewhere get disheartened by the individualistic sentiment at other theaters.”

“Piven’s incredible as a training ground,” she says. “It’s a group of students who are slowly becoming artists, working together and collaborating… it allows you to address theater in a different light.”

Piven Theatre Workshop further realizes its theme of community by giving back to the surrounding neighborhood. Besides training about 1,000 students a year (ages 9 and up), the theater has a scholarship program, the Piven Empowerment through Enrichment Program, and classes for adults with disabilities. Piven also partners with various outreach programs in the city to share its passion for creativity.

“It comes from a deep philosophic belief that art unifies and creates,” Joyce says. “It’s not just for the privileged few. Community is a magic source of positive things — we are always aiming for that communal energy.”

The directors, teachers, producers and actors at Piven take on additional responsibilities to serve as teaching artists for students, interns and assistants. Piven doesn’t hire freelance artists — it is a self-sustaining program with teachers and students that continue the mentoring cycle and keep alums coming back. As a nonprofit organization, Piven also offers internships for graphic design, box office and marketing.

Joyce claims that the secret to Piven Theatre Workshop’s success is that they don’t set out to train artists. When artists are in touch with their talent and in the company of other supportive, like-minded artists, their talent grows parallel to the sense of camaraderie. “What the world doesn’t need is another unemployed actor,” Joyce says. “We need a community of artists.”

The perfect example of Piven Theatre Workshop’s ability to grow artists is Joyce’s son, Jeremy Piven. As a child, Joyce says, Jeremy was not so interested in theater — he instead wanted to play football. “He was not tall enough or big enough, thank goodness,” she says. “We always had to negotiate him coming to perform and be in class here.”

So the Pivens allowed Jeremy to play football in the fall, so long as he rehearsed and performed in their famed Young People’s Company in the winter and spring. The other kids asked, “How come Jeremy gets to do other things in the fall?” and Joyce’s answer was always, “Because he’s my son.”

What she didn’t tell them was, “Because he’s very good.” Joyce smiles as she recounts the way he could walk into a room and immediately own it, even as a child – he was a natural. After many years immersed in workshop productions and the supportive atmosphere of his parents’ theater, Piven emerged as a true artist. Football was a dream deferred for all the right reasons.

Joyce Piven. Photo courtesy of Piven Theatre Workshop.

At Jeremy’s first play in college, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, he played Mark Antony. When it came time to deliver Antony’s famous speech, instead of entering through the wings, Jeremy kicked in the door at the back of the auditorium, stormed down the aisle and bounded onto the stage.

“My husband and I turned to each other, and we said, I think we have another actor in the family.”

Joyce Piven is always in play. Whether she’s analyzing theater text and bringing it to life, mentoring bright young minds or whispering three words very loudly, Joyce is continuously engaging with the world. And luckily, she wants to engage with us too.

“Because our emphasis artistically is community, we would love it if Northwestern shared that aesthetic,” she says. “All students, theater and non-theater, can come and extend their passion beyond the wonderful training they’re getting at school. Come, exercise in theater and play.”

That said, the senior theatre major is used to looking down (literally) on people, some 15 feet up in the air.

For the past two years, Menendez has been training in circus arts and as her graduation approaches, she is setting up auditions with professional circus shows as well as the National Circus School in Montreal. Although she has done partner acrobatics and some trapeze and cradle works, her specialties in aerial acrobatics are lyra, or aerial hoop, and silk dances.

“I kind of grew up with people asking me: Aren’t you scared?” says Menendez, a former gymnast. “And yeah… sometimes it’s scary, like if I get on a really high rig. But I learned a long time ago in gymnastics that my body knows what it’s doing.”

Menendez trains about five days a week to maintain her flexibility and build the strength necessary for her art. This includes two days with a personal trainer, two days working on acrobatics and one day for even more practice.

“The strength that she has is incredible,” says boyfriend Daniel Mercer, a gymnast and Menendez’s occasional acrobatics partner. “She’s got muscles out of her wazoo.”

As for a fear of heights, Menendez doesn’t seem to have a problem with that. “I haven’t found my limit yet,” she says.

Listen and watch below for a peek into her circus life:

Yalowitz had spent the previous two months on leave from Northwestern canvassing in the swing state of Ohio. Early voting had begun Oct. 1, so by the time Election Day rolled around, “I’d done all I could do,” Yalowitz says.

He was still nervous, of course — a wave of nausea had hit by 6:30 the night before. “When you’re in Ohio on a presidential campaign, you’re in the middle of the storm,” Yalowitz says.

Photo provided by Adam Yalowitz

His “Get Out the Vote” director told him, “If we lose Ohio, we might lose the rest of the country. We can’t afford another four to eight years of Republican leadership, so don’t screw up.”

Yalowitz had left the office that night at 3 a.m., so he had slept about an hour by the time he received his robo-wake-up call. “‘You have to go win Ohio!” Clinton said. “It’s time to open up your campaign offices!’”

An hour later, Medill junior Molly Lister’s alarm went off. After securing tickets to Obama’s election night rally downtown, it seemed obvious that she and her friends would be forgoing their Global History lectures and spending the whole day in downtown Chicago rather than Harris 107.

Lister and her friends were the second group in line at 7 a.m., after two men who had slept there the night before. The two groups quickly merged, snacking on yogurt covered raisins and fruit, playing cards, and taking trips to a nearby Starbucks for the next eight hours.

MTV News and the Associated Press interviewed Lister as people drew Obama signs and American flags on the ground in chalk.

Weinberg junior Hannah Jaracz awoke with no intention of going downtown. A registered Republican, she had crossed party lines for the election. But her mother’s warnings of the inevitable crowd chaos had dissuaded her.

After hearing about other Northwestern students heading down, Jaracz said “what the hell” and crammed onto the packed Intercampus Shuttle with her roommate. On the ride in, she found out Jeff — a Loyola student with whom she had been good-friends-and-nothing-more since the sixth grade — was going to be downtown, too. She figured there wasn’t much of a chance of meeting up with him, though.

***

Photo provided by Garen Chekley

Communication senior Garen Checkley spent the afternoon marching up and down Michigan Avenue with fellow Communication senior Abby Miller. “Join the Obamanomenon!” their banner read.

Grant Park visitors joined in on the celebration, taking endless photos of Checkley, Miller and their creation. Reporters from Al Jazeera to the The Wall Street Journal approached Checkley with questions.

***

Soon after she had made it to her spot within the Grant Park crowd, Jaracz received a text message from Jeff, despite the faulty cell-phone reception. “J-15,” it read.

With her roommate’s clarification, Hannah looked up: they were currently in J-17, and with only a glance behind her she made eye contact with Jeff. “We were both downtown with millions of people and we were only 10 or so rows apart,” Hannah says. “It seemed like fate.”

Jeff took what was then a bold leap, confidently putting his arm around the girl he’d known for so long. Hannah’s anxiety did not fade for a minute during their two and a half hour time together, yet she still inherently felt “as if everything in the world was coming together.”

***

Lister watched pressed against the metal railing in the front row of Grant Park’s ticketed section. “I had bruises the next day,” she says. But sacrificing her body, a full night’s sleep, and the opportunity to go to the bathroom was worth it to Lister. Her parents called saying they’d seen her among what she called a “sea of faces” on CNN.

The countdown to the final results is a bit of blur, but once they called Virginia and Ohio, “I think we all looked at each other without saying anything, and we all just knew.”

Communication junior Allison Finn and her friends watched the five jumbo screen televisions and cheered riotously every time the CNN analyst declared a state “blue.” The collective energy of the crowd hit a tipping point though, when simulations imagining John McCain winning Democratic strongholds such as California showed he still would not have enough electoral college votes to muster a win.

Photo provided by Adam Yalowitz

Looking around the crowds, seeing “all ages, all races, all ethnicities … it was a true cross-section of the population,” Finn recognized that “it’s okay to be an idealist again.”

The TV in front of McCormick freshman Natalie Kennelley was substantially smaller. Kennelley was crammed in a room with 200 of her classmates at an international school in San Miguel County, New Mexico. She was stateside after growing up abroad, in places where anti-American graffiti adorned the alleyways and sides of buildings.

She spent most of her life in predominantly Muslim countries and was frequently self-conscious of the “American” stigma. She would conceal anything blatantly American and even pretend to be from Canada. But she linked arms with students from more than 80 nations, recognizing that the election was “not just about me and my country … everyone in the world was a shareholder.”

The screen in front of SESP senior Allie Bream was on a laptop in a van in Oman. Bream and her fellow study-abroad students were scheduled to go on an early morning hike in the Omani mountains, 10 hours ahead of Chicago time.

One student in the car had access to a wireless card, and was checking online results as they drove to their destination.

“It’s done. Obama won,” he said, in an unsettling and calm voice.

***

“Raw excitement, passion and relief,” Lister says of the moment CNN flashed “Obama Wins” in large capital letters. For the next 10 minutes, Lister joined in collective chants of “Obama” and “Yes we can”, waving a tiny American flag in unison.

In the back of the crowd, Checkley shared in the celebration with a member of Obama’s Chicago church standing beside him. “People were screaming and crying and hugging random strangers,” Checkley says. “It was super loud for about a minute and then, silence, dead silence. People hadn’t gotten over the shock phase.”

***

“We did it,” Kennelley overheard her best-friend whisper back in New Mexico, as tears openly flowed amid joyful roars. A stark contrast was drawn between the “internationals,” who outwardly celebrated, vocally cheering what was to them was the possibility of a reformed global atmosphere, and the American students who sat huddled, holding each other.

In Oman, Allie Bream’s van made a similar unexpected stop. Pulling off the road, the students got out in front of a tiny Omani restaurant, empty save for two men sitting at one of the few tables. The students were led by their program coordinators and the restaurant owners upstairs, into a modest apartment. They filed into a carpeted but bare room with a small TV in the corner.

Sitting cross-legged on the floor, the students watched Obama give his acceptance speech on Al-Jazeera in English. Bream’s eyes welled. The program directors began congratulating them, passing out candy.

“This is a big day for you,” they told them.

***

“Holy fuck, we won!” Yalowitz thought, one of four volunteers left in his Toledo office.

Photo provided by Adam Yalowitz

After hearing the news in Ohio, he piled into a volunteer’s car and headed toward a party at Union Hall. Passing the barbershop where volunteer Betty Amison had been coordinating her neighborhood efforts, Yalowitz asked to pull over.

Walking around the back, Yalowitz found “a group of little old black ladies just going nuts, dancing, jumping up and down,” he says. The women yelled “Adam’s here!” joining in a group embrace. “The bond that I have with this 65-year-old, five-foot-two black woman in inner-city Toledo will probably stay for the rest of my life,” Yalowitz says.

***

Finn and her Northwestern friends, alongside countless thousands of strangers, frolicked down Michigan Avenue, singing, dancing, crying, screaming. Waves of triumphant strangers prevented any car from getting through. People were “just … running. I’ve never felt so unified with a crowd.”

Photo provided by Hannah Jaracz

As Obama’s speech came to a close, the Grant Park crowds spilled into the streets. Hannah and Jeff’s walk back to the El was sealed with a kiss on the cheek. “We call [Obama] the matchmaker,” Jaracz says.

***

One year later, Jaracz and her boyfriend are still together. Checkley’s banner hangs on the ceiling of his bedroom, spanning two walls and reminding him of a story he’ll “be able to tell the grandkids about.” Finn channeled her newfound idealism by interning at a non-profit women’s human rights organization in New York City. Yalowitz shook off his “Obama Hangover” and returned to Northwestern with at least 10 couches across the United States he can sleep on. Lister’s friend from the eight-hour line became a facilitator for the Global Engagement Summit, an organization where she hopes to recreate that same phenomenon of collective action.

“I don’t think I had ever felt so involved before,” Lister says. “We grow up in a very fractured world,” she adds. “In that moment everyone was rooting for the same thing. I just want[ed] to be an American.”

Brian Odom in Pompeii. Photo courtesy of Odom.

$875,000 — that’s a lot of money. What’s that going to allow you to do that you couldn’t do before?

This is fantastic. $875,000 doesn’t go as far as you might think it would go. The award is for five years, so this will support two graduate students and allow me to buy a laser, that’s it. It really is hard to raise money to do research — students and equipment are expensive. But it’s not easy to come by $875K, so this is huge. It will free us up to pursue creative ideas that we might otherwise have trouble getting funded.

You also won a $600,000 Career Grant from the National Science Foundation. Sounds like a good year for you. What kind of projects will these grants fund?

Yes, it has been a very good year. We have several projects, and every agency signs up to support one project, so they’re slightly different. They’re all within the context of trapping molecular ions, but then we’ll do different things with the trapped ions.

Two other Northwestern professors won Packard Fellowships in the past two years, but they’re both in geosciences. Is it time for some interdepartmental warfare?

(laughs) Actually, the physics department has done very well historically. This is our fourth Packard award, which is pretty good, since our department is relatively small.

How will the grant change your involvement at Northwestern?

It means that I can do better research than I could do otherwise, which is a big part of the job as a professor. You teach classroom courses, but a lot of our effort goes to research, which is teaching graduate students by the apprenticeship system. That part of the job is very important for the university and for the department, and things will be much better now with this grant. We won’t be scrambling for funds, we won’t be worried that we’re going to run out and we have to play it safe to get funding. We can really be creative and see where it takes us.

Your research is about cooling molecules to sub-Kelvin levels. What is the ultimate goal?

Packard has decided to fund us to do very high precision spectroscopy on molecules. Did I use the word spectroscopy? I probably didn’t explain what that was.

I tried to pretend that I knew.

Spectroscopy is measuring quantum energy levels. We can do that with atoms, measure to 17 decimal places. We can’t do anything near that well in molecules. The best molecular spectroscopy is to 12 decimal places, something like that. We have techniques to cool atoms down and to hold them in traps, a container without walls. The atoms are held in this trap not because they bounce around and hit something and come back, but because we use electromagnetic fields, so it’s a much gentler container. But we don’t have any techniques to hold molecules in traps. That technology is just being developed.

What would you do with that?

There are two goals that I submitted in the Packard proposal. One is to see if fundamental constants change with time. That should sound strange.

I was hoping for elaboration.

We would be looking at the ratio of the electron mass to the proton mass. So you would think that constant should stay constant, it shouldn’t change in time. But a lot of speculative theories in physics, which try to unify the forces, theories of everything, predict that constants aren’t really constant. They’re more or less constant, but they change a little bit in time, or they might have been different in the early universe. It might or might not be the case, but it’s the job of physicists to go and look to see. So if we can do spectroscopy on molecules, then we can start probing for this effect to an interesting level, seeing if the electron to proton mass might be changing ever so slightly every year.

What would be the implications of that?

If you measure an effect, then there’s new physics there. One of the speculative theories of everything might gain some ground, as compared to the others.

Does it have more practical applications?

If we measure the constants changing in time, that bit of science will probably never see a technological application, because it’s so small. But when you work really hard to do an experiment like that, you have to invent new technology. And that new technology often has pay-offs that were unforeseen, spin-off projects that are technologically useful.

When I Googled you, the first thing that came up was a blog post you wrote about your relationship with God. Since the scientific community is so overwhelmingly atheist, do you ever feel like the odd one out?

At Northwestern, it hasn’t made me feel like an odd one out because we haven’t talked about it. At Chicago, [where I did my post-doctorate], when it did come up with my colleagues there, it was warmly received. It was a difference of opinion. But generally, things are changing in science. Fifty years ago, if you weren’t an atheist and you were a physicist, people thought something was wrong with you. Now we scientists in the current era are a little more humble about what we know and what we don’t know. So people like me, that have thoughts on God and maybe some spiritual experience, don’t turn other scientists off very often anymore.

Do your beliefs inform your research and vice versa?

Yes, there is interplay. My training as a scientist makes me have a certain interpretation of how the world got started. I’m not an intelligent design proponent, although a lot of people who believe in God are. So if I wasn’t a scientist, who knows, I could be a creationist, but as a scientist I believe in evolution.

The other side is a little harder to articulate cleanly. But there have been times when I’ve done research in one way rather than another because of conversations I’ve had with God on the subject. My interaction with God affects all of my life, including how I do my work, and every once in a while I behave differently because of something that happened in that interaction.

By mid-October of 1918, three students died from this pandemic (675,000 Americans died from the influenza). Under those circumstances, the student body seemed relatively untroubled: The Northwestern Weekly published only three articles about the Spanish influenza during the entire 1918-1919 school year, according to University Archives. Granted, war in Europe and the recent establishment of ROTC shadowed campus coverage of the Spanish influenza. Today, however, there seems to be a new swine flu advisory released every day, despite the less severe consequences.

After the administration lifted the quarantine in early November 1918, The Northwestern Weekly published only one more article on the return of the influenza even amidst the height of flu season. The second outbreak a few months later, in December 1918, resulted in a less severe quarantine which required all students living in dorms to report to preceptresses, modern-day CAs, before 7:15 a.m. each morning to ensure that no one with any symptoms attended class. In case of symptoms of the flu, students were confined to their rooms and placed the little red signs on their doors.

Instead of the Purell spray contraptions inundating the cafeterias, libraries and dorms this fall, the health commissioner of Chicago in 1918 compiled a lengthy list of advice that appeared in several city newspapers in an attempt to stifle the spread of the flu. The list included even unconventional little tidbits, by modern standards: “Don’t overeat, […] don’t become constipated, […] don’t get your feet wet [and] don’t forget that chill is always a dangerous symptom.” This list seems belittling, but look around campus today and you will find students walking around with masks, bathrooms signs reminding us to wash our hands, and teachers warning us not to come to class if we are feeling under the weather. Advice was as easily dispensed back then as it is today.

With the height of flu season quickly approaching, hopefully Northwestern’s Purell contraptions will work and students take preventative measures to avoid getting sick. And if the administration must take extreme measures and place severe limitations on students activities, let us hope that they dust off the somewhat draconian warning given long ago: “Disobedience of these orders will be punished by measures which will insure obedience.”