Students channel holiday spirit
The Daily Pennsylvanian
October 31, 2000
Much like the strangers your parents always warned you about, the Kelly Writers House tried to lure passersby off Locust Walk Saturday night with luminaires and jack-o-lanterns lighting the way to the second annual Halloween Reading and Concert.
Inside, the 30 students and community members who dared to venture through the front door were treated to an eclectic mix of song, verse and prose.
"Maybe I'm odd, maybe I'm mean, maybe I'm just a bitch," College senior Kandice Zeman began as the main character in her original piece "Wicked Virgins and Scary Women."
The 15-minute-long one-woman show explored the anger of a woman who seeks revenge through killing, and it was intended to evoke society's fear of the unknown. Zeman never revealed the source of her character's anger.
"There was a time when I was perfectly happy to be my little virgin self," said Zeman's character, who was dressed in all-white. "But now the only thing that I do is find killers and kill them."
Continuing with the theme of mystery, "Masquerade" from The Phantom of the Opera was performed by Nursing freshman Kimberly Renner and Engineering freshman Sonya Wood, complete with the requisite masks. They were accompanied on piano by College freshman Ann-Hua A Yu, who also read the speech "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" by the famous colonial evangelist Jonathan Edwards.
The audience, containing one member costumed as the main character from the movie Scream, was then whisked south of the border to Mexico with Ray Bradbury's short story, "The Highway."
Read by College freshman Christopher Nuesch, this tale of suspense ends with the main character, whose life is the highway, being told that the "atom war -- the end of the world -- has begun."
The character replies with the clincher: "What do they mean the world?"
Apprehension then gripped the dim room as College sophomore Dan Fishback fell to his knees and prayed "Jeees-uuus, Jeees-uuus, save me," acting out a scene from Polly Jean Harvey's Taut.
"I chose it tonight because I always listen to it on Halloween," Fishback explained after his performance. "It always scares me."
The night was rounded out by a performance from College sophomore Pamela Zinn, a Daily Pennsylvanian staff member, who read a section from Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment; piano music by College freshman Kellen Yamanaka; and a reading by Van Pelt library staff member Ellen Slack of her original piece, "The Boundaries of Skin."
The night concluded with four members of Penn Singers performing a rendition of Gilbert and Sullivan's "When the Night Wind Howls."
"A lot of the material was not Halloween specific," community member Sarah Trachtenberg said. "But the MC [Penn staff member Jerry Rudasill] was great."