Saturday night at The State Theatre, the Multicultural Greek Letter Council hosted the Greek Freak Step Show where participants stepped up, competing for the title of Greek Freak Champion ... and $1,000.

   Few knew that Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century philosopher and political thinker, wrote an opera; and certainly Friday night's performance at Risley of his single dip into the genre was framed as a sort of well-kept secret from the annals of highbrow history. The Cunning Man, archaic and baroque as it may seem today, was hardly highbrow at the time.

When Furthur arrives on campus Sunday for a concert in Barton Hall, the Grateful Dead’s loyal following of “Deadheads” is expected to arrive as well. Cornell Police are concerned that large numbers of Deadheads may arrive without tickets and try to break into campus buildings for warmth and conduct other illegal activities. The police plan to increase patrols and take other security measures around campus in response to the expected crowds this weekend, CUPD Chief Kathy Zoner said.

Canadian rapper Drake will headline this year’s Slope Day, according to Dan Tracy ’10, chair of the Slope Day Programming Board.

Sideshows possess an illicit allure, at once reassuring us of our own relative normalcy while also offering a glimpse of those border-states where our categories of the human and the natural break down. Although our urge to leer at others’ frailty and aberrations can often ironically transform ourselves into freaks, the circus can also be a carnival-esque celebration of unexpected diversity.

This column is not about sex. But it is about vaginas. So I guess it’s about sex insofar as sometimes vaginas are involved in sex. I know I already spent time pontificating on my love for the vagina’s northern cousins, but this won’t be that kind of column either. This is a column about pussy monsters.

Maybe you’ve heard of a little production called The Vagina Monologues, a play in which pussy monsters are glorified in all sorts of terrible ways. You got ladies talking about touching and loving their pussy monsters. You got ladies talking about what their pussy monsters would wear or say. Most importantly, you got ladies talking about how pussy monsters around the world are being badly hurt — shit that has got to stop.

Love’s Labors Lost is one of Shakespeare’s wordiest and most intractable plays. Ostensibly a comedy — if we trust the original folio’s title page — it yet fails to end with any marriages. The play is more of a learned satire, pillorying debates from the Elizabethan period about issues of rhetoric, law, and questions of sovereignty. And yet again, as intellectual as all that sounds, Love’s Labors Lost has more penis jokes than one can shake a stick at. The play is essentially about words and about word play — about how there is no about when words come unhinged from what they seek to signify.

Fuzzy purple lights wrapped the State Theatre in a cloud of warmth, as 30-foot tie-dye tapestries set the backdrop for the world’s most renowned Grateful Dead tribute band, the Dark Star Orchestra (DSO). Touring nationwide for over a decade, the Chicago-based DSO recreates original, song-for-song concerts from the Dead’s 30-year history. Last Tuesday night, the audience was treated to DSO show #1,611 — a rare original set list.

Think back to seventh grade when you and your friends attended bar-mitzvahs every weekend. You all felt like you should be dancing, but couldn’t be the first one to start it. So instead, you and everyone else just kind of stood there bopping your head awkwardly.

Now imagine that one of those bar-mitzvahs was in Noyes, with a bunch of Cornellians in attendance and a really awesome Israeli band playing. That is what the Hadag Nachash concert felt like last Thursday night.

Last October, when the Cornell University Programming Board brought Steven Colbert to Cornell, his entrance was anything but subtle. First he roused thousands of students at 9 a.m. to buy tickets online. Then he sold 3,000 tickets in 15 minutes, selling out his scheduled performance in record time. To top it off, he performed an additional show to quell the desire of eager Cornell audience members. Attracting a crowd of about 10,000 over 2007’s First Year Family Weekend, CUPB, to say the least, started the year with a bang.