Zombie March

My friend Jewels has posted numerous times on her LiveJournal about various zombie walks she's been on. According to her, the two best days to do a zombie walk are Halloween and Easter (since it was the day that Jesus rose from the dead and became a zombie).

I thought it was a pretty good idea, so I went out with an OSACS credit card and bought $50 worth of make up from Party City (crap, I know, but it works).

So, we met in the lobby of Westmo at 5:00 and waited for people to show up. And we waited and waited and waited until about 6:00 when we had 9 people. At this point, we got to work.

We discovered that the best zombie make-up was simple. Use a sponge to apply a patchy white base. Then use a sponge to apply sparse green, perhaps bruises. After all is done, apply fake blood by either dripping it on the face (over a trash can so that it doesn't get on the floor or your clothes) or by putting it on your fingertips and making scratch marks.

Ben decided that he had to dress in drag before he could be a zombie.

And Everett was already Jesus

After everyone was made up, we decided to commence the march at around 6:30

When we got onto campus walk, we were greeted by a surprise counterattack:

ROBOTS!

We found it difficult to contain our laughter. After the robot assault, we regained our composure, and continued our march to the Nest where we filled our tummies.

--Mike Isaacson GALL President

Eyeball Soup

At our puppet master's meeting before the GALL school year got officially underway, the GALL elders were discussing various things that the club could do so that we might not run out of ideas like we did last year. One of the ideas presented was to put googly eyes in various locations. It was a good idea, but we decided that the clean-up (since GALL maintains responsibility for clean-up when necessary) would be too tedious to actually undertake such an endeavor. However, Dani would not give up on that idea.

A few weeks ago, she came to me with a new idea. We should paint ping-pong balls like eyeballs and put them in the fountain. She was really adament about eyeballs being somewhere on campus. It was a pretty good idea, so we did it.

Trinkle, our normal meeting place, was taken over by some catering hooplah, so we moved to the lobby of Combs. When the bodies assembled, we got to work.

The process was fairly simple: Paint the eyeball, making sure that there was paint on both sides (if not, the painted side will weigh the ball to face down), and spray them with acrylic sealer.

The theory was grand. The practice was tedious. Severely lacking in eyeball music, we were not as productive as we might have hoped to be with 503 eyeballs to paint. We resolved to save the rest for next week.

When we packed everything up and deposited it in the basement of Westmoreland, we resolved that our new meeting place should be Westmo's creepy basement.

The next meeting, in the basement, with eyeball music and more people, we managed to get a substantial amount done. However, we still had another hundred or so to do by the end of the second week. So, with Halloween looming around the corner (on Friday), we called for an emergency meeting the next day.

On Wednesday, Liz and I finished the remainder of the eyeballs and dropped them in the fountain.

So on that cold October night, we threw the eyeballs into the fountain. It was merry.

Unfortunately, the acrylic sealer didn't work as well as planned and most of the paint had faded by the next day. Oh well, you live and learn.

--Mike Isaacson GALL President

The Beaded Curtain

This has been, by far, the longest running GALL project ever. Hopefully, it will remain to be.

The idea was a coalescence of Chris being dead set on a junk art project, and me thinking that beaded curtains are pretty cool. At one of the primordial GALL planning meetings (before we started actually doing things at meetings instead of just planning them), we thought it would be a good idea to build a beaded curtain out of bottle caps.

Little did we know, it would take us months to complete it with the showing that we had at the time (about 3-4 people would show up for any given meeting). Nonetheless, we worked...

And worked

And worked

By the time the spring semester ended, we still hadn't finished it.

I regretfully packed what we had of the beaded curtain - three-and-a-half strands of bottle caps - into a box, and put it in storage with the Office of Student Activities and Community Service over the summer.

Following Club Carnival in the fall, we had 35 members at our first official GALL meeting. By the time we got to working on the curtain again, the numbers were still in the twenties.

The little minions had ats and managed to finish the thing in three weeks despite a Gordian Knot caused by poor storage practices (my bad, guys).

So, when we finally had the thing constructed with each strand in a separate bag, I got with facilities, and one early Wednesday morning, erected the thing in front of the Eagle's Nest.

For good measure, I left our marking on the sidewalk.

And some puns

--Mike Isaacson GALL President

Pillow Fight II

Joe Mollo is a genius! This year, in an attempt to draw more people to our pillow fight, we decided to advertise. And since GALL isn't the biggest fan of paper flyers, we chose clothespins instead.

Some people were intrigued by the innovative publicity. Some, such as a girl in my Arabic class, greeted the clothes drying accessories with a, "What the fuck is this?"

Looks like a clothes pin to me

I got to Ball Circle at around 3:45, and clouds were looming overhead. By 3:55, it was drizzling. But I saw hope in the distance. Blue skies were coming, and by 4:00, we were battling with cases of goose down.

It was a good fight and rain free.

Full of tactical stand offs.

And stills implying that Chris was wearing a wig (he wasn't).

In all, it was a successful fight, and ended with a mass pummeling of yours truly.

--Mike Isaacson, GALL President

Poetry Brawl: Eric "Hit-Man" Halsey v. Maggie "Alliterator" Bausch

Our first Poetry Brawl this semester went off without a hitch. The event started off with smack talk similes. Verbal burns were thrown in the vein of, "Your poetry is more watered-down than Natty Ice."

Ouch.

Then began the poetry. It was a good ten rounds of head to head verbal madness. Here are some pictures:

Eric reading

Maggie reading

Maggie with a crazy face

After ten brutal rounds and one round of William Shatner song readings, the judges convened to determine the winner.

And the belt went to The Alliterator!

The nest poetry brawl will be on October 23rd. It will be a grudge match between Ben "Word Breaker" Brishcar and Mike "Iron Quill" Isaacson.

Indoor Air Raid II

This year started off with a bang. At the first G.A.L.L. meeting, Vice President Ben counted 35 people. I don't think we had that many people combined last year, much less at the same time.

This year, we came prepared. G.A.L.L. held a secret meeting of last year's members to prepare for the first public meeting. So I came equipped with six cardboard boxes, 4 packs of construction paper, and the bag of Sharpie Minis that our club holds so very dear.

Remember last year when it took us four meetings to complete 96 airplanes to fill two boxes? Yeah, well these kids are awesome and got through 480 in under an hour. That's more efficient than the spider web project which clocked in at just about an hour.

That Thursday, I met Ben and a few others to help carry boxes of planes to the second floor of Trinkle.

They had already filled their arms, so I was only left with one box. I suppose that shouldn't really make me sad.

The rest was pretty similar to the first indoor air raid, except we were spared the angry PRISM salesfolk, and got the added bonus of people hurriedly rushing by to avoid a shower of multicolored paper.

According to a confidante on the ground, people either had looks of amusement or confusion. So, I suppose it was confusement...or amusion...

Either way, the airplane toss lasted for about 10 minutes, and the mass of airplanes grew.

And grew.

And grew.

I would have been late for my next class, had the professor not been watching the whole thing with a smile on his face.

After all the boxes were empty, we took them down to the first floor (6 people plus boxes divided by elevator equals very cozy) and managed to clean the whole mess up in less than a minute.

I think everyone can agree that this one was a success.

--Mike Isaacson, GALL President

The Duck Hunt

On the same night that we came up with the spider's web, Heather suggested that we put rubber duckies in the fountain. Happy Heather? You got your due credit.

Anyway, I ordered a case of 288 rubber ducks on Wednesday in preparation for Tuesday's ducking.

On Thursday, I found a message left on my cell phone asking me to call back Kites, Tails and Toys.

Apparently, the yellow rubber duckies, which I can only assume are the most popular variety, were on back order and wouldn't get to me until May.

Well, fuck that.

So, we replaced the yellow rubber ducks with pink, blue and yellow plastic ducks.

They got to me the next day. Amazing how much bubble rap comes in a box of ducks.

So, we set out for the duck drop with a box of 132 ducks (they had to cut back to meet the price of the case of 288) and a package of sidewalk chalk.

One by one, we tossed the ducks into the fountain.



We soon realized that these ducks were not very adept swimmers. Despite the fact that the company alleged that the ducks were weighted, most of them floated on their sides. Corporate bastards.

We then began to chalk the fountain. Beforehand, I was asked what I thought it should say. I suggested the standard slogan, "What is GALL?" coupled with the meeting time and place.

Shockingly, I was met with scoffs of disapproval. We settled on various duck references and puns.



Becky wrote "Keeping free art afloat."



Chris wrote "In case of air raid: duck" referencing our previous social experiment.

I wrote "What is GALL?" and the meeting time and place...

After a couple of minutes observing our handy work as we are wont to do (for like a half hour), we noticed two things:

1) Plastic ducks tend to form social cliques
2) There are always a few emo ducks that try to escape



The first observation, I found to be quiant: plastic ducks interact much in the same way that high schoolers and foreign nations do.

The second observation I was more or less fine with. However, Chris was upset by the idea that ducks might tend toward the side of the fountain. So during our half hour of idle observation, Chris assumed the position of a duck herder (duckherd?), mother duck.

When, we returned the next day, we were greeted by orange and maroon balloons sharing fountain space. I completely forgot that the anniversary of the Virginia Tech shooting was the 16th.



Of course, there would be something in the fountain, because in our post-9/11 world, we Americans like to relive tragedies for as many years as possible. I suppose it's like College Basketball teams striving for consecutive NCAA championship trophies.

I felt that the situation was a visual metaphor for theatre in its representation of comedy and tragedy.

Because it was tragic that the ducks were floating on their sides.



Balloons always struck me as festive...

By night, only two ducks remained in the fountain.

--Mike Isaacson GALL President