manic-pixie-dream-girl

Despite being scattered across the globe, student videographers bridged the gap between dancers in the Columbia University Ballet Ensemble, using digital effects to stitch together a magical forest for the group’s rendition of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” CUBE presented its ballet version of Shakespeare’s play on Dec. 5, featuring befuddled lovers and mischievous fairies dancing across the screen.

At 15 years old, Phanésia Pharel, BC ’21, marched into the lighting booth of her high school’s black box theater and locked the door behind her. By the time she stood up and walked out, she had written her first play. The following year, she was a published playwright.

I woke up on a hospital gurney three days after Christmas. This was 2018: I was younger (a given) and dumber (another given). I had worn a black dress and heavy eye makeup to go out the night before, which was now horrifically smudged, and the state of my face suggested that I’d taken a narrow strip of sandpaper to it. I came to slowly, with a growing awareness of the heaviness of my limbs, in a ward full of people older and sicker than me. Eyes open, I didn’t move for the next hour or so. I wanted to fade back into oblivion. I knew full well what I, in my lightly blood-spattered black dress, looked like to the elderly man with the fractured arm in the bed next to me.

“Kiss me through the hole in this nasty wall,” calls Pyramus, played by Joel Meyers, CC ’21, his head poking out from under the legs of the Wall to his lover Thisbe. The Wall was played by Jane Walsh, CC ’23.

Tumultuous, turbulent, and, altogether, chaotic.

Unbeknownst to you, the man sitting next to you in the Hungarian Pastry Shop the other day was, in fact, writing a character based on you for his MFA creative writing thesis.

Perhaps the most vivid memory I have of my life is the moment I found out about my acceptance to Columbia. I’d bet all the JJ’s mozzarella sticks in the world that this is the case for many students here.

At Columbia, you’d be hard-pressed to find any woman afraid to call herself a feminist.

A group of undocumented Columbia students spoke of their experience at an event at Broadway Presbyterian Church on Tuesday, voicing concern for the future and calling on classmates to advocate for policies to protect undocumented youth.