Carnival

No matter how cold the Hanover winter, it always seems to warm up just enough during the second week of February to threaten the snow sculptures built for Winter Carnival. This year was no exception. Bare spots and puddles appeared for 'he first time since Christmas. Nonetheless, packs of couples, dogs, and children flocked as usual to the center of the Green to have their pictures taken in front of the dripping campus statue. This year's representation was of a sizable Saint Bernard weighed down by a cask. The Carnival committee offered the usual full slate of entertainment and sporting events, Friday's classes were canceled, music blared from open windows, and most students put the next week's impending mid-term examinations out of their minds. Others professed to find in the Carnival carousing a good excuse for leaving town.

A citizen's cross-country ski race opened the festivities on Thursday. Some 170 competitors, ranging in ages from 9 to 78, started at the golf course en masse and survivors finished 15 kilometers later in front of Robinson Hall. Heelers spent the early morning hours piling snow across sidewalks, driveways, and roads to construct the final kilometers of the course. Spectators lined North Main Street, cheering racers on to the finish. Winners in each division won prizes like ski-racing suits and dinners at the Hanover Inn. Later that evening the women's hockey team lost to the University of Vermont in overtime, the Dartmouth Players - whose avian costumes were spectacular - performed The Birds by Aristophanes, and Billy Preston gave two back-to-back rock concerts in Spaulding Auditorium.

Friday morning the men's and women's downhill and Nordic teams raced at the Skiway and at the golf course. More entertaining, however, were the snowshoe relays on the Green and the canoe downhill, also at the golf course. The snowshoe races proved, as one might expect, just how difficult it is to sprint so shod - DOC types seemed to hold little advantage over neophytes recruited on the spot. Teams of canoe racers tried to steer their craft down a course set on the side of a hill. The only rule was that one member of each three-man crew stay in the boat at all times. During lulls in the action, such as it was, the crowd in attendance - perhaps 200 strong - engaged itself in a spirited mass snowball fight.

Another double concert Friday evening featured a triple-bill of folk singers - Eric Anderson, Tom Rush, and Brewer and Shipley. During the relatively sedate early performance we overheard a student in the row behind us complain, "The problem with the audience is that no one's had much to drink yet." We enjoyed the music anyway. The midnight movie, the weekend's only attempt at pedagogy, was Everything You Always Wanted to KnowAbout Sex.

The Carnival Ice Show, successor in spirit if not temperature to the Outdoor Evenings of early years, packed a wildly enthusiastic crowd into Thompson Arena Saturday morning to watch a corps of Hanover youngsters and undergraduates perform intricate production numbers, under the direction of Secretary of the College Mike McGean '49 and Lois McGean, former national and world skating champions. Sheryl Franks and Michael Botticelli, Boston-area high school students and 1977 Eastern Senior Pair champions, were featured in performances of Olympic caliber. Balloon man Frank DelVecchio basked in the limelight of the opening number.

Another Saturday attraction was the ski jumping competition. Several hundred spectators saw Dartmouth jumpers fly to first, second, and fourth positions. Even though Dartmouth skiers won the top three positions in Saturday's Alpine competition, a strong showing the day before by University of Vermont racers sent the Dartmouth Cup to Burlington for the second year in a row.

The big brass sound of the Barbary Coast jazz band was well received at their third annual Carnival concert Saturday afternoon. A talented combo section and capable soloists were featured in several numbers which highlighted an informal but generally polished performance. Woodswind, formerly the Dartmouth Distractions, made their debut at the combined Glee Club concert, sold out as usual, and still deserving its reputation as the Carnival entertainment event.

The midnight showing of Winter Carnival to a capacity crowd in Webster Hall was the scene, according to The Dartmouth, of a "near riot" when the doors were closed on those still waiting to get in. Although the influx of visitors to the campus was larger than usual, Proctor Robert McEwen reported only an average amount of damage to dorms.

Despite coeducation Winter Carnival is still, for some reason, the big weekend for importing dates - increasingly male as well as female. The Dartmouth quoted one student as saying her experience at a fraternity convinced her the average Dartmouth male still prefers having his date come from out of town. " 'I had been sitting there telling the guys I was a Dartmouth student and I was getting nowhere,' she said. 'But, strangely, once I told this fellow that I was from Colby-Sawyer he immediately noticed how delicately the light reflected off of my legs.'"