Cheers from the fans, and the Homecoming king who wants to build a moat.

Students gathered around Norris’ new televisions Saturday night to watch the last minutes of Dance Marathon.
Watching DM unfold from the outside was like living an episode of a TV show where the teenage son rebels against his parents, only to discover all of the sacrifices they make for him. I’m that teenage son. At [...]

Senior Brian Fryd, part of the lighting team, directs clean-up at about 1:30 a.m.

Trisha Apte stood on the second floor of Norris to greet her tired friends as they streamed out.

Listen in on DM’s beneficiaries being presented with their checks:
Evanston Community Foundation:

CARE (plus dancers’ sing-along with “Stacy’s Mom”):

Audio recording by Patrick St. Michel.

DM raised $423,027.68 for its primary beneficiary, CURE.

This is it. All the bar night fundraising, checks from grandma and last-ditch deposits build to this. The big reveal of the final total of money raised for CURE and the Evanston Community Foundation.
Block by block, the finance committee has been unveiling the totals at different benchmarks, each total growing bigger. This is the number [...]

DM dancers learn dance moves to Justin Timberlake’s Lovestoned.
The Louis Room speakers have been blasting Euro-techno for the past five minutes, but Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” ironically enough breaks up the foreign grip on the soundsystem. All the dancers still seem extremely pumped to be doing this.
Over the course of [...]

We talked to two DM veterans about the significance of the final block. Here’s a slideshow of their words, with pictures and sounds from the first 27 hours of DM 2007.

Photos by Dagny Salas, Tom Giratikanon and Patrick St. Michel. Sound recording and editing by Spencer Kornhaber. Slideshow production by Dagny Salas and Spencer Kornhaber.

Listen to this clip of the DM dancer crowd reciting the words to the Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way perfectly.

Dancers party on in the last block of DM.

Emcee Adam Welton riles up the dancers.
With the energy still pulsating, DM took a Southern turn as a string of “crunk” hits played. Lil John’s exaggerated screams of “OKAY?!?!?” and “Yeah!!!!” echoed several times, while Nelly’s simple instructions of “It’s gettin hot in here/so take off all your clothes” got the crowd even more [...]

Members of the Dancer Relations committee distribute the “last block” T-shirts.
DM Dancer Relations members stood in the halls of Norris. With them were large boxes stuffed with bags containing the DM 2007 T-shirt. The design: the outline of a city and a highway, with the words “Life is a Highway” written at the bottom, on [...]

The Sea Monsters, which tied for first place in a three-way, played at DM’s Battle of the Bands.

None of the local bands that strummed and sang in this year’s Battle of the Bands left as a loser. The Agglitz, LiLi and The Sea Monsters accepted a tie for first place amid cheers from an [...]

Dancers shine during Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”
Eight blocks in the books, only two to go. Dancers slowly shuffled off the floor, back into the halls, where they once again converged against walls, legs pointed towards the sky. The usual looks of tiredness painted the participants’ faces. Sarah Kong sat on a table, looking only seconds away [...]

Maggie Carnahan and Katie Bacon

Carbohydrates were on the menu for the dancers’ dinner: pasta, garlic bread and salad. Communications freshman Katie Bacon didn’t complain, though. At least not about the food.
“Thank god there’s only two blocks left,” Bacon said over her dinner. “It’s a little painful right now.”
Bacon and her partner, Weinberg freshman Maggie Carnahan, [...]