The worst name for a party? Poopstock
Ben Hyman
Issue date: 10/22/07 Section: Arts & Culture
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"We silk-screened them ourselves," said Sarah Grenzeback '07.5, one of Poopstock's organizers. "The idea is to help support Caitie Whelan ('07.5) and the (Merasi) school in whatever way we can."
This June, Whelan opened the Merasi School in Rajasthan, India, "to provide a community-based education that gives each student the opportunity to ignite and sustain constructive change for the Merasi," according to the group's Web site. The school attempts to counter the caste-based marginalization that threatens the Merasi culture.
To help the Merasi School, where Whelan still serves as director, raise money to reach its current fundraising goal of $15,000, Whelan's housemates and neighbors decided to organize a party that featured live music, a cake contest and a bike show.
"A group of seven or eight of us started talking about it about a month ago," said Hannah Pepper-Cunningham '08. Describing how this idea turned into a reality, Pepper-Cunningham added, "Snowballed would be a very good term."
Poopstock's unconventional name came to Pepper-Cunningham fortuitously, when she noticed that a shirt saying "Jopstock" worn by one of her classmates had folded so that only "opstock" was visible. "I was just daydreaming," Pepper-Cunningham said, "and I was like, wouldn't it be funny if it said Poopstock?"
The cake contest was particularly popular because 'contestants' were asked to produce winning cakes for whatever individual categories they decided to create. The results were uniformly hilarious and ranged from "Most Leafy" - a beautiful chocolate cake topped with mint leaves, raspberries and a single green gummy frog - to Tatiana Sverjensky's '08 "Most Post-Apocalyptic-Dinosaur-Wetlands" - a mashed-up island of cake surrounded by a sea of blue icing, streaked with red frosting and crawling with plastic dinosaurs. All of the cakes, edible and otherwise, were raffled off at the end of the event.