Ramblin' Roadshows

by Alexis Jhamb

Tired voices were chanting “Dartmouth unite! Take back the night!” as I walked to Thayer Dining Hall with a prospective student. As we rounded the corner and headed down Mass Row, Olivia, a potential member of the Class of 2004, cringed at the sight. A large mob, composed mostly of women, was marching en masse in our direction, looking rather angry and bitter.

“This doesn’t happen all the time. It’s Sexual Assault Awareness Week,” I told Olivia, hoping that she wouldn’t decide to attend the University of Pennsylvania in the fall instead of Dartmouth.

“Those crazy fools. They’re so noisy,” was her initial response. After dinner, Olivia and I decided to take an informal tour of the classroom buildings across the Green, but we couldn’t escape the Sexual Assault Awareness Week festivities. Forming a circle in the center of the Green were darkly clad students holding a “candlelight vigil.” I ushered Olivia across to Dartmouth Hall, muttering about “empowerment” as we power-walked away from the stoic students holding their candles. I already had enough to explain to the now-apprehensive Olivia, with the D-Plan and LSA programs. Apparently I also had to justify the odd and frightening rituals in which Dartmouth engages to draw attention to sexual assault.

Olivia picked the wrong week to visit the College. She may, consequently, be attending the University of Pennsylvania this fall. Sexual assault is surely a serious concern of students at Dartmouth and elsewhere. But the march and the vigil weren’t about combating sexual assault; not a single rapist saw the candles on the Green and turned himself in. The demonstrations were about taking a public pose, so that a bunch of student activists could announce their opposition to sexual assault—as if the campus were full of sexual assault advocates conspiring to legalize and perpetrate sexual abuse on all Dartmouth’s students.

The events were thus not only useless and ineffective, but also hysterically paranoid and frightening to those unfamiliar with Dartmouth, like Olivia.

Campus activists rarely prompt meaningful dialogue (they usually just shout down people who disagree), but they’re awfully fond of cheap stunts and empty gestures. A case in point was “Sister Spit’s Ramblin’ Roadshow,” an event sponsored by the College’s Women’s Studies Department, the Office of Residential Life, and some student groups. Sister Spit, an acting troupe, is an all-lesbian, “free-wheeling gaggle of loudmouthed girls,” who travel the country to hold performances of spoken-word poetry. They’ve been doing it since 1997.

In an email message to the entire staff of The Dartmouth Review, Hillary Miller ’02, one of the event’s organizers, explained that Sister Spit’s show was partly a response to the Review’s criticism of other activities held by the Women’s Resource Center. “I encourage you all to go,” she wrote.

“While I did not write a formal response to your last issue, please consider a portion of the energy that I expended coordinating this event to be a form of response,” explained Miller. “Sister Spit will provide you with an education that is not easily found in the Upper Valley area, and certainly not on this campus.”

So I attended the show on Monday, May 1 at the Tabard. Sure enough, the hosts, Sini Anderson and Michelle Tea, opened the presentation by pulling out a copy of The Dartmouth Review’s April 10 issue. Evidently, the Sister Spit folks are good friends with Inga Muscio, the author of Cunt: A Declaration of Independence who delivered a lecture at the College last term. Sister Spit took exception to the Review’s coverage of that event.

Anderson revealed that when she first read the article, she “got that panicky feeling” similar to claustrophobia. She declared the Review article “offensive.” So, being offended, the two decided to ridicule the article’s author, Andrew Grossman, with infantile jabs like “Gross Man—how appropriate.” Mr. Grossman, they said, is evidently “not much of a rocker.” Some response.

Finally, after some more inane prattle, the poetry reading began. The first act, “A Professor from the Planet Zoloft,” as you can imagine, was more silly than engaging. As the actual poets performed, the scene became a bit more bearable. One poet, introduced as having been on tour with Sister Spit since she turned 18, spun the cliché line, “Yeah, I know your ex-girlfriend; I date her.”

What of the “education” Miller promised? When co-host Michelle Tea performed, her work described a character’s first time—and consequent “bad trip”—on Ecstasy, a hallucinogenic and illegal designer drug. After her act, Tea proclaimed that “Ecstasy is great,” and offered as evidence an account of her own drug use.

Tea and Anderson enjoyed an Ecstasy trip at a recent Marilyn Manson concert, they reported, while mocking teenagers having their first hallucinogenic experiences in the mosh pit.

In one of her poems, Anderson expressed horror at a heroin-addicted mother-to-be on the streets of San Francisco. So the message on drug use was somewhat mixed.

The Roadshow was surely an educational experience, though probably not the sort that Dartmouth College, or its offices and academic departments, should be sponsoring. In their April 15 statement, the College’s Board of Trustees affirmed the need to “work to eliminate abuse of alcohol and other drugs.” Evidently, they weren’t as serious about that aim as they were about banning frats.

Academic funding was used to bring the Sister Spit tour to Dartmouth and give the performers and their dog, Pandora, lodging at the Hanover Inn.

Sister Spit’s animated behavior made some performances memorable, even good entertainment, but it wasn’t much of an “education.” Their tattoos (covering almost all available space on their visible flesh) and multiple nose rings (in a single nose) made me more than reluctant to affiliate myself with their group.

Their message, if it can be called a message, was equally repellent.

I’m just glad that I couldn’t bring a prospective student to Sister Spit’s Ramblin’ Roadshow.