STUDENTS AID HOSPITAL FAIR

It took the North Country Fair, Variety Night, and the Interfraternity Play Contest to draw out students under the banner of extra-curricular activity both from the standpoint of spectator and participator. To the students must go a great deal of credit toward making the annual hospitalbenefit-fair which actually does not—cannot—offer too much from the standpoint of entertainment, the success it was this year. Undergraduates not actually participating by operating booths, attended by the hundreds, danced, played Beano and ring toss, ate, and went home. In the same fashion the student body turned out for the annual undergraduate-talent Variety Night to hear not only the Band and Glee Club, and the three college dance orchestras, Barbary Coast, Green Collegians, and more recently established, the University Club; but to witness a really talented variety of vaudeville of gay-nineties continuity all taking place before a street scene on an asbestos backdrop. The program included everything from "Casey at the Bat" and "Casey's Revenge" to a Hoochi-Coochi dance, and the only things missing were the characteristic hisses and boos of a nineties audience. Indeed, what is sometimes called the most critical audience in the world laughed hard, clapped indulgently, and went home feeling it had a pretty good show underneath its belt. But if it felt as this writer did, as he walked home, it was vaguely disturbed about something—possibly it didn't know just what. :

There is a certain type humor—often the typical male banquet joke—which should be dubbed good fun, clean, all right; but this type is transcended by a type Variety Night was guilty of to a considerable degree—which actually should not have the privilege of being called humor at all. Things are not as they should be when the cracks assume such a character that many students turn worriedly around in their seats to note how the female members of the faculty and administration are reacting. As an apt Dartmouth O'Brien Boldt editorial put it: "Variety Night's smut was really disgusting to part of its audience And most of the rest of the audience was conscious of this. The effect was to spoil the show for everybody. Variety Night like any other student output consumed by the general College community should attend to set itself standards that are acceptable to the community."

In somewhat the same vein are certain aspects of the rebuilding and renaming of the Nugget theatre. With the Nugget has gone for years traditions of apple-core and peanut throwing and a disorder of stomach-curdling student gags and remarks during performances. The undergraduate majority feels that the management is justified in its attempt to get away from this with its new theatre and new name, thus dissolving some of the disagreeable associations of the past. Without injuring Dartmouth spirit or atmosphere, or exerting a kill-joy attempt to throttle the excesses of the firstshow jubilation, the management has a right to consider that the theatre belongs to the faculty and townspeople as well as to the students.

The Interfraternity Play Contest which turned out to be one of the extra-curricular highlights of the year due to the number of fraternities participating (17), general interest and enthusiasm, and large nightly attendances during the playoffs, were in themselves ample indication to many that fraternities at Dartmouth are responding vigorously to the revitalization program. Credit must go to whom it is due—generally, to Davis Jackson, fraternity adviser, and his guidance in the revitalization program, and specifically, as far as the success of the Play Contest in itself was concerned, to Theodore I. Packard, new assistant in play production. Acclaimed the best production by the judges of the finals, Dean eidlinger, Dean Bill, and Professor Cobleigh Delta Tau Delta walked away with the cup for the best production with a clever adaption of scenes from A Midsummer Night's Dream, while Beta Theta Pi rang in for an honorable mention, a cup for the best original play (a satire written by two of its members entitled Meddlesome's Spring Song), and a cup for the best actor in the contest.