When Mizpah began in 1987, three years (and five “shows”) before Less Miserable, one of its first established hallmarks was its narration style. For most of these early shows, the narrator was played by Dave Kaufman, whose completely flat and uninterested line readings were a key part of the shows’ tone—he was so unconnected to the goings-on onstage that he became almost a hostile character. Dave was unavailable for Less Miserable, but his replacement Scott McGlasson captured the feel of his delivery perfectly—and got off some of the juciest ad libs of the evening (as in the moment towards the end of the show where the rest of the performers are so lost that they all leave the stage, and Scott asks the audience to “take a moment to reflect upon the recent events.”)
The text of the narration itself was also a Mizpah characteristic. It always seemed just a tad . . . off; its overblown verbiage sounded reasonable at first but then would begin to veer a bit into inanity or cliché. Narrative passages were always written down ahead of time (often they were the only lines which were carried into a performance and read), so whether for good or ill it cannot be said that the lines were not thought out. Most of the group contributed to narration scripting from time to time, but Steve Baarendse was one of the masters of the style, writing lines which seemed okay at first blush but which left listeners scratching their heads ever so slightly.
"; ol_titles[1] = "Taylor Dishroom Culture"; ol_texts[1] = "Every university has one: the dishroom, where winsome students are permitted to spend the key hours of their days scraping cottage cheese off plates for minimum wage. The majority of the Mizpah were among these exalted few at one time or another, so the idea of resetting Les Misérables in a dishroom was not far off base—the feelings of revolt engendered by dishroom duty were some of the strongest politically oriented notions we had back in the sleepy 80’s. Jerry Nelson was the name of the dishroom manager at the time, and so embodied the archetype of Hugo’s driven Javert.
NOF (pronouced just as it’s spelled) was the cryptic legend engraved on the huge dishwasher which Taylor dishroom workers fed endlessly. It is mentioned by name in two of the songs in Less Miserable, with very little evidence to suggest that the audience had the faintest idea what it referred to.
"; ol_titles[2] = "84601?"; ol_texts[2] = "The prison number of Jean Valjean in Les Misérables is, of course, 24601—so why the change? Taylor student numbers, with which every student was eminently familiar, were also five digits, and the first two digits represented the year in which the number was assigned (one wonders how they managed to weather Y2K?) Although all of the Mizpah at the time were 1986 freshmen and 1990 graduates, many of the members had taken summer classes in high school and thus had student numbers beginning with 84. The result was a number which fit in well with the sound of the original songs but which also elicited an instant recognition and laugh from the audience.
"; ol_titles[3] = "Mark Ringenberg"; ol_texts[3] = "Mark was one of the original 12 Mizpah members in 1987. Tall and handsome, he was the son of a revered Taylor professor and the younger brother of taller (though not more or less handsome) men who were also Taylor students and from under whose academic shadow Mark was not often able to stride. Early on in the Mizpah shows and performances, Mark was embodied as one of the Mizpah obligatory scenes—the man himself, not any particular dramatic occurence. Specifically, he began to appear in each Mizpah production dressed in his basketball uniform and palming a basketball while standing still with a grin on his face. The idea was that of a “special talent” which Mark alone could employ; the fact that this talent was immaterial to the task at hand (performing a play) didn’t seem to faze him.
Despite the insult and injury inherent in this concept, Mark was very good-natured about it all. After several live shows and multimedia presentations where he dutifully appeared in full regalia, by the time Less Miserable was being written there was no real place for him in his usual role. Instead, he became the main character, played with great gusto by Wally Campbell. Since Mark’s actual job at the time was in the dishroom, it made sense. At the performance, Mark sat unacknowledged in the audience, grinning as widely as ever.
"; ol_titles[4] = "One Night In Dishroom"; ol_texts[4] = "Mizpah songs were about half-and-half between original “tunes” (usually no more than repetitive, three-chord jingles) and borrowed music, but one hallmark of the early Mizpah style was the refusal to sing with any accompaniment: the loud (very loud) voices of the cast, singing in a unison colored by a sizable percentage of the singers employing different keys, created their own kind of backing track. For the musical extravanganza of Less Miserable, however, the group needed some variation. While the entire Les Misérables section was done with solo voice (with the occasional contribution from Dave Benjamin’s “orchestra”), the group wanted a very different sound for the initial shock of moving to additional musical parodies. So One Night In Dishroom marked the first time that a Mizpah song was simply sung over the original track; rather than attempt to find a purely instrumental version or to use fancy electronics to blot out the vocals on the original, the singers simply sang louder. (In order to approximate the clipped sound of the lead singer (rapper?) in the original One Night In Bangkok, the narrator’s microphone was replaced with an earcup from a set of headphones.)
"; ol_titles[5] = "“In a show with everything but John Bollow...”"; ol_texts[5] = "No question about it: this line was somewhat unkind. During the years that Mizpah was on campus, there were always one or two eager comedian types who wanted an entrée into the group. Of course, Mizpah didn’t view itself as anything more than a shaggy dog story; the very idea that someone would want to become a part of the “troupe” was a wonderful addition to the joke. (Any opportunity for legitimacy of any kind was always eagerly taken, as the very existence of this web site and this commentary should demonstrate.) But the fact was that this attitude resulted in some hurt feelings among a few guys who really desired the kind of companionship and creative freedom (the freedom to act like idiots in public) that Mizpah had. John Bollow, at the time the coordinator of Coffeehouse events, was one of these kind souls who really wanted a chance to belong (and whose offer to host a Coffeehouse was a selfless contribution.)
The reference to him in the song is half tribute, half stab, but it wound up there not because the group wanted to attack him but as a very dark insider joke. There was another gentleman (whose name will not be recorded here) who was far more aggressive in his approaches to the Mizpah. At the time Less Miserable was being written, he showed up for the early workshops uninvited and made it clear that he considered himself part of the action. In a rather awkward moment, he was informed that Mizpah didn’t need his contribution; any sense of shame or guilt this cut might have given the Mizpah members in question was obviated by his very vocal, petulant, and angry stomp-out. As One Night In Dishroom was being written, later that night, the line appeared (referring to this gentleman) and it was an instant hit within the group, leaving them literally rolling around the room. The line was quickly repointed at John Bollow to preserve the peace—and because we knew that John could take a joke.
"; ol_titles[6] = "The Taylor D.C."; ol_texts[6] = "D.C. is the abbreviated nickname for the cafeteria at Taylor, officially called the Dining Commons. Since Taylor was (and remains) a residential university, it does not have the plethora of dining options that larger campuses have—in fact, at the time, there was only one other option, a small grill housed in the Student Union building (then connected to the dorm where all of the Mizpah members lived, Morris Hall.)
"; ol_titles[7] = "“We need more Calgon!”"; ol_texts[7] = "Is a textual note necessary here to explain the reference to the delightfully un-P.C. advertising campaign for Calgon’s water treatment product of the 1970’s? I grow old, I grow old; I am afraid that explanation is indeed needed for a few of you. Suffice it to say that the call for more Calgon and the reply, “Ancient Chinese secret, huh?” were the backbone of the television ads. In case any more evidence is needed for the spookily preternatural connection of Mizpah to pop culture references, I’d like to note that the phrase later became one of the many recurring jokes on MST3K (or Mystery Science Theater 3000 for the uninitiated), that playwright Henry David Hwang said in a 1994 speech to MIT that the commercial (among other Aisan stereotypes in the media) was “a source of great embarrassment to me,” and that an Internet search turned up this very funny entry into a haiku-writing contest by a gentleman named Jim Crossland:
We need more Calgon!!
Ancient chinese secret, huh?
Clean clothes good, not bad.
In the fall of the 1989-90 school year, one of the Visiting Artists series of concerts at Taylor was a group called the Chinese Golden Acrobats. For well over ninety minutes, this (theoretically) internationally reknowned group of athletes stunned Taylor audiences with their displays of stick fights, iron bars bent between two acrobats’ throats, and a chair-and-human pyramid which rose all the way to the auditorium ceiling; each of these feats was punctuated, not with a bow, but by the acrobats holding both arms up and shouting “Hah!”.
This shared cultural reference was the basis of a very, very easy joke, one that filled many Mizpah requirements: 1) It allowed for plenty of slapstick—everyone knows that falling down is funny; 2) It required funny noises; and finally 3) It filled an indeterminate chunk of time before the intermission—as long as people were laughing, the hilarity could continue. (Careful analysis of the extant videotape does not reveal whether this final principle was strictly enforced.)
"; ol_titles[9] = "The “Lickshaw” Driver"; ol_texts[9] = "Ridiculous accents (delivered, a la Benny Hill, with no intention of offending an ethnic group) were a big part of Mizpah humor in general and Steve Baarendse’s humor in particular. Always on the lookout for an excuse to cross his R’s and L’s, Steve leapt upon the need for a shady Bangkok character with a reason to yell out something which could be suitably mangled. The Lickshaw Driver was actually a direct descendent of a Steve character from Mizpah’s prior show from early 1989, Murder By Chutzpah (by Mizpah), in which he played a used-car dealer with the same speech patterns (“Rincorn Continentar? You want Rincorn Continentar?”)—itself a nod to the earliest Mizpah shows of all, in which Thom Verratti always played a dealer of some sort of used conveyance (as with the used-ferry dealer in O! Potomac!)
Note that Steve’s accent use was calculated here. In the Lickshaw Driver’s song, added mostly as an excuse for him to insist “Rights off!”, he sang the middle two verses in full unaccented croon, dropping back into his heaviest accent yet for the intentionally unintelligible final verse. (Also see Steve’s Robert Oppenheimer in the second act for more accented fun.)
"; ol_titles[10] = "Pol Pot and His Attire"; ol_texts[10] = "The sudden appearance of a random political figure, whether from the past or of our own time, was standard Mizpah practice (usually instigated by more socially-minded members like Kevin Sloat or Ken Hugionot.) These characters were often developed only as far as the name and one or two caricatured traits would go; whether by design or through ignorance, most characters were terribly misused (as witness the Narrator’s later explanation.)
The sudden appearance of Ken without a shirt was also standard Mizpah practice. Through no unnatural effort of his own, a childhood of shinnying up trees in the jungles of Indonesia had left Ken with an incredible phenomenon of nature in the form of his chest. From the very first Mizpah show, Aescalapius, finding an excuse to get Ken out of his clothes was one of the first tasks of the writing team. This was not only good salesmanship—it also lent a touch of subversion, as naughtiness of this sort was somewhat frowned upon at Taylor. (And, of course, as with all men’s groups from all of time immemorial, nudity was a large part of general day-to-day life on the Brotherhood (the dorm floor which housed the Mizpah) at any rate.)
"; ol_titles[11] = "We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Articles"; ol_texts[11] = "Along with tunes, lyrics, and plot structure, Mizpah was not above stealing entire jokes from other sources (although, with the huge popularity of Monty Python in the 70’s and 80’s, references to that austere group were forbidden for fear that Mizpah’s comedy might degrade into a computer-science-slash-theater-geek-style free-for-all.) In this case, a line from Joe Piscopo’s character in Johnny Dangerously, which had been cracking up some of the members the week before, was lifted. These kinds of indulgences rarely got a laugh except among the actors on stage, which of course was sufficient reason to include them. (Note that, in order to create some chance of comprehension, the decision was made to have Ken deliver this first line as himself rather than Pol Pot; after this, the character rarely says anything except in a grunt. So, rather than immediately establishing Pol Pot as a real, viable character, Ken’s entrance is used to comment on the soon-to-end Lickshaw Driver character, the dominant focus of the previous scene, and his only character trait—the ridiculous accent. These are the kinds of structures which are to be found throughout Mizpah material, and it’s really very fun to pretend that this incredibly lowbrow humor was, in actuality, a front for highly sophisticated and cutting-edge theatrical innovation.)
"; ol_titles[12] = "Props Or No Props"; ol_texts[12] = "Whether the joke was wonderful or terrible, anything in a Mizpah show which depended on a prop usually wound up slighted when the prop failed to appear on stage. Because the shows were created via multiple improvisational/rehearsal sessions, usually with no finalized scripts or dress rehearsals, only the largest and most obvious props were obtained. In this case, a fairly funny bit in rehearsal—the compounding of the obviously fake ventriloquism by Ringenberg with the old ventriloquist glass-of-water routine—was almost blown by the fact that no one had remembered to bring anything to drink out of. Chances are good that someone’s notebook contained a list with “cups” featured on it, but more pressing things on the day of production caused it to be overlooked.
In this case, drinking was adequately easy to mime, and Wally was able to save the bit with some exaggerated overacting (he brandishes the imaginary glass with attention-getting waves and then mugs as he pretends to drink and Saltine takes up the song.) Although everyone probably kicked themselves at the time, there was something about making the comedy as hard as possible for the audience to understand which was very appealing to the group—and which makes this scene in its preserved videotape form a group favorite. (Note that the same problem crops up in the penultimate scene as the Lackey pours the company a toast; clearly, cups, a pitcher, and some sort of beverage were on the phantom prop list but never did make it to the house.)
"; ol_titles[13] = "“STOP IT!”"; ol_texts[13] = "As this is primarily a transcript and not a script, there are scores of performance errors represented here—bits which were rehearsed one way and performed another, lines which were improvised once but then forgotten, entire scenes dropped in the heat of the moment—which I have no intention of correcting. But in this case, the temptation to comment is too strong. Wally Campbell’s motivation in creating the Pickle on a Cloud scene was threefold: first, the structure of the play was such that, although other musicals are cannabalized in Ringenberg and Saltine’s escape from the dishroom, an additional song from Les Misérables was to occur in each new setting. Second, the appearance of the three-foot-high inflatable “pickle bandit” was an expected part of a Mizpah production by this time, having been featured in most of the shows since it was given to Sebaceous the Ferryman in O! Potomac! (coinciding with the first use of the line “A gift for you.”) But, thirdly and most importantly, he wanted to parody the disgustingly saccharine Castle on a Cloud. In writing and rehearsal, the clear peak of the laugh was at the end of the final baby-talking stanza:
There’s a lady all in white,
Holds me and sings a lullaby
She’s nice to see and she’s soft to touch—
She says, “Pol Pot—I love you very much...”
At this point, presumably driven to the brink by insufferable cuteness, Pol Pol was supposed to explode. Ken Hugionot, unsure of his cue in performance, blew up early. Wally, ever mindful of the joke (some would say “with the singlemindedness of a comedy idiot savant”), struggled mightily to complete the scene, but in the end fell before Ken’s frighetening intensity.
"; ol_titles[14] = "“Tell them there’s food in the back.”"; ol_texts[14] = "The Taylor Coffeehouse program, like Mizpah itself, was originally the brainchild of Brotherhood men (residents of the 3rd floor of Morris Hall.) In 1986, business major Jeff Jacobsen hit upon the idea of renting out a local Upland dive twice a month and inviting Taylor students—bands, comics, even performance artists (the most amazing being the infamous Audience Discomfort)—to perform there. A small cover charge and light refreshments, less a few bucks to the establishment, comprised the house take. Jeff completely failed to make a plugged nickel, but the concept was so entrancing to Taylor students that the university took the program over the next year and subsidized the snacks.
Mizpah’s connections to Coffeehouse run deep. The first publicly performed show, O! Potomac!, ran for three curtains at the original Berry St. Cafe-based Coffeehouse. Two years later, in its second school-administered season, Wally Campbell acted as Coffeehouse coordinator (resulting in one Mizpah show, the Christmas singalong/mystery Murder by Chutzpah (by Mizpah), and three (3!) “Open Mike Nights” in which Mizpah members figured heavily.) But in this, Coffeehouse’s fourth illustrious year, John Bollow was the acting Coffeehouse coordinator. His vast improvements on the formula (improved upon again by his successors such as Zoe Bond) meant that Less Miserable was in a room that seated well over 250 persons uncomfortably. But, in one important aspect, Coffeehouse still had an unsolvable problem: no one ate the food. Despite hundreds of dollars in the budget, despite a different array of fattening treats offered at each show, even despite the fact that it was all free, the food was never consumed. John’s plaintive call to announce that food was there for the taking, as the record shows, was not heeded—perhaps somewhat hampered by the fact that people were crammed uncomfortably knee-to-knee crosslegged on the floor and couldn’t actually get up.
"; ol_titles[15] = "“There’s ten-to-one girls out there!”"; ol_texts[15] = "Here, revealed for the first time, is what actually happened during the intermission:
Flushed with the adrenaline of live idiocy, the various Mizpah members grouped in the main auditorium above the Stuart Room and tried to assess the debacle so far. Among accusations and recriminations of missed lines and bits, the most dumbfounding revelation to the members was summed up in someone’s (Wally’s?) incredulous comment: “There’s ten-to-one GIRLS out there!” Mizpah, for any who are in doubt, was not originally intended as a popularity-garnering endeavor. On the contrary, most would have thought that it was a gathering together of the least desirable male elements of campus, who in working out their own feelings of inferiority felt compelled to push some kind of anti-audience “entertainment” onto unwilling participants—a sort of analogue to the British punk movement going on in the mid-80’s, which also inspired British comedy of the period such as The Young Ones. Of course, as older and wiser heads would have realized, what annoyed their older classmates when they were freshmen had, by their senior year, found an audience comprised of similarly disaffected types—and, yes, even a few women. The record does show that women made up a large percentage of the audience that night; is it not for this commentator to speculate why. (For more possible clues, see the Mizpah Senior Show segment elsewhere on this site.)
"; ol_titles[16] = "Palestinian Names"; ol_texts[16] = "Edginess takes on different forms based on the edge-defining shape, and plenty of what is sophmoric and silly about a script such as this one is better understood in the context of Taylor students’ limiting factors in 1990. The use of clearly Palestinian names for the Israeli “Jews” seems offensive now, and did then as well, but it wasn’t intended to offend—at least not in the obvious way. Instead it was a poke at the fact that the vast majority of the Taylor audience was likely to miss the incongruity. The whole “this is funny because stupid people won’t get it” comedy defense seems a little hypocritical in retrospect, considering the large percentage of anachronistic material and random use of names, ideas, and references.
"; ol_titles[17] = "“The JEW begins shaking his arms...”"; ol_texts[17] = "There’s a very funny aspect to the Jew’s dance here which is not conveyed by the script: namely, Kevin Sloat’s utter and complete lack of rhythm. (There’s a taste of that in the opening “Dishroom Song,” where Kevin’s shouted line was delivered so arrhythmically that it threw off the rest of the song—and this to a group-stomped beat!) Despite many attempts by every other member of the group to demonstrate Topol’s/Zero Mostel’s arm-shaking dance to “If I Were A Rich Man,” Kevin remained unable to do this and sing at the same time. The result, captured imperfectly on video, is a study in over-deliberated movement.
"; ol_titles[18] = "BONUS: Unused lyrics"; ol_texts[18] = "Additional, unsung lyrics to “If I Was A Deeshman”
TBA
"; ol_titles[19] = "“Torah, torah...”"; ol_texts[19] = "As far as records show, the “torah, torah” line emerged for the first time in the heat of performance, replacing any number of unrecreatable lines offered in rehearsal. This is a reasonably good example of the manner in which Wally Campbell’s mind works. It’s a fairly complex pun, and one that flew by nine-tenths of the audience at the time. In any estimation, it is certainly no weaker than the surrounding material.
"; ol_titles[20] = "Chase Music"; ol_texts[20] = "During the entire show, the Orchestra, played by Dave Benjamin, was putting up a thankless performance. Pressed into service shortly before the show started, Dave was asked to arrive in full evening dress tuxedo and was ensconced in an uncomfortable position at stage right. He was then told to improvise an entire range of instruments, at his own discretion, without the benefit of knowing any of the musical material ahead of time. He was thus reduced to picking up the showtunes a measure behind the singers and coping with the shifting keys and inexplicable breakdowns. Essentially, it now must be admitted, his participation had only been thought through as far as the initial sight gag of him entering and “tuning up.”
So the idea that Dave would rise above the situation at all, in any way, is nothing short of miraculous. In this case, his building “chase music” was absolutely central to the scene at hand, and needed to both provide justification for The Jew’s increasing agitation and also give a backdrop for the entrance of Pol Pot. Dave’s choice of a sub-Slavic-, Middle-Eastern-, Jewish-sounding theme, slowly building in intensity and speed, was his crowning acheivement of the evening and a high point for the show in general. Although nothing can serve as retribution for the painful hour Dave endured, it is hoped that this textual footnote, buried almost irretrievably on a website that no one will ever visit, can at least function as a much-belated thank you.
"; ol_titles[21] = "Surprise! You’re Dead!"; ol_texts[21] = "If this hasn’t already become painfully, transparently obvious . . . “rehearsal” for a Mizpah show was nothing more than a coffee-and-goofiness-fueled improv session, at which (almost) nothing was written down. And “performance’ of a Mizpah show was nothing more than the final rehearsal session, this time fueled by the recklessness of appearing before a live audience. Troy Felton hadn’t been shot through the head in rehearsal, and in any case was not the flop-down-on-the-floor-and-die-screamingly type anyway. Thom Verratti, his erstwhile roommate, was in full character as the toadying Lackey. And Ken Hugionot as Pol Pot was executing people on the spur of the moment, as it were. Thom wound up trying to push Troy over and force him to mime his own death, and then again when Ken shot him again later in the sequence. Troy’s bemused refusal to play along is a good example of a typical Mizpah response, and a repudiation of one of the cardinal rules of Del Close’s original improv theater games—never deny the reality of something offered by another performer. Mizpah was definitely about improvisation, but it wasn’t about good, theatrically viable improvisation. (For more on that thesis, see the Unititled show and related materials.)
"; ol_titles[22] = "Accident(s)"; ol_texts[22] = "This idea of trapping the bad guys (Pol Pot and his Lackey) in ropes held by them was a good one, and it went off beautifully in performance (fortunately someone had remembered to bring the ropes from the prop list!) But it did result in one spectacular unplanned accident: while the performers ran in two pairs, one clockwise and one counterclockwise, winding up the baddies, Steve Baarendse was clotheslined by the rope traveling in the opposite direction and took a full-body dive to the floor. He leapt up and kept right on going like the trouper he was, but the sight of his 6’ 4” frame in mid-fall was the most arresting part of the scene in performance. Another fun unforeseen result: Ken Hugionot and Thom Verratti, left seated onstage by the other performers at the end of the scene, were actually unable to distentangle themselves or, in fact, move at all. Ken, in character as Pol Pot, eventually bounced himself forward and was able to exit stage right—dragging Thom along, still attached to him back-to-back.
"; ol_titles[23] = "The Mizpah Voice"; ol_texts[23] = "The esteemed British troupe, Monty Python, had a series of in-drag caricatures, often used for housewives, which they called “Pepperpots”—their name for the piercing, unfeminine, falsetto shrieking they emitted by way of voices. Mizpah members, from time immemorial, also had a signature voice, used for everything from punchlines to characterizations to directives in non-show situations (many commands directed at freshmen, for example, were delivered in this voice.) It can be described as high, with an indeterminate foreign accent, and sounding as if is being directed away from the speaker, as a ventriloquist would. (It was sometimes emitted by Mizpah members who were concealed behind drapery.) The use of the Voice as a real-life alternative to normal speech is demonstrated here: no character within Less Miserable has those vocal characteristics, but an unforseen event—the failure of the “light crew” (Jeff Kiger) to turn on the “spotlight” (an overhead projector with a crude circular cutout) at the right time—prompts the entire cast, spontaneously, to begin emitting the Voice, with the odd directive-in-the-form-of-a-statement phrasing also characteristic of Mizpah (“Lights go off...!”)
"; ol_titles[24] = "BONUS: Unused lyrics"; ol_texts[24] = "“E = M C Squared” was conceived as a full-on, full-scale parody of the over-the-top Sound of Music extravaganza, with its endless variations and reprises and costumes and sets. As such, parodies of all the interweaving musical parts of the original were planned; in addition to the counterpoint shown in the script, which in performance varied slightly from its original—
E equals
M C squared,
E equals
M C squared!
—a third set of singers was supposed to belt out the following cadenza, first as a separate bridge, and then simultaneously with the chorus:
When you know the formula,
You can make a pow'rful bomb!
These extra parts were left out, to the chagrin of the parodist, because of a lack of personnel to carry them off.
"; ol_titles[25] = "“Have one of my Tums...’"; ol_texts[25] = "Mizpah had a huge weakness for puns, personified in Steve Baarendse. The group knew how irredeemably awful, terrible, and just plain lousy this one was, but it slayed us during the writing and so was left in—along with the elaborate pause in the song for Oppenheimer to actually bring out a roll of Tums and pass one on to Ringenberg. The complete apathy of the audience to this business is now a particular favorite when the video record is viewed, as it is upon each tenth-year anniversary of the original production (and never at any other time, on pain of death.)
"; ol_titles[26] = "Pol Pot and Steve"; ol_texts[26] = "Like any good piece of art, Mizpah shows had significant, symbolic recurring themes, usually really cheap ones. It amused the group to think that Ken Hugionot as Pol Pot would shoot three major characters during the show, all played by Steve Baarendse, especially since Steve was so good at diving to the floor and playing dead. In this case, Steve (who was the main champion for the original music of Les Misérables, and worked to get a snippet from the musical in wherever possible—preferably unaltered) also was eager to sing the “I might have known the bitch could bite!” passage. But where Steve was comfortable getting a little naughty in the context of a school performance, he was nervous about the final part of the verse with its talk about virgins and urgings and so forth. Thus, he was counting on Ken to shoot him somewhere mid-song.
Instead, Ken, again firmly in character, stood proudly by as Oppenheimer ranted his way through the entire song, leaving Steve somewhat embarrassed and robbing the audience of a final repetition of a key thematic element, one which surely would have cast the entire production in a completely new light had it been allowed to play out. Alas, such was not to be.
"; ol_titles[27] = "The Moment of Dissolution"; ol_texts[27] = "This is another fundamental point in all extant Mizpah shows: the moment where it all falls apart. Here, the point of bringing out “We Got Trouble” again is solely to provide justification for Pol Pot’s homey “Fool me once...” line (which for some inexplicable reason got a huge reaction.) That worked fine. But no one could remember what came next—in fact, if there was a more sophisticated link to the next section, it is lost to posterity today, a victim of failing memories. So the stage was left completely empty in a theatrical equivalent of radio’s “dead air.” Fortunately, as has been noted before, Scott McGlasson as the narrator, confused as anyone in the audience by the breakdown, was quick to provide a dry (and hysterically funny) assisting line. (Note that when Wally Campbell as Ringenberg reappeared with Saltine for the next line, he was clutching a dog-eared scribbled “script”—more like a set list of notes for lines and bits—which was referred to for the mercifully abbreviated remainder of the show.)
"; ol_titles[28] = "Jokes That Aren’t Funny Any More"; ol_texts[28] = "Here, the actors actually formed a plane, in grade-school fashion—lined up, with arms as wings, and climbing and dipping together—for a series of bad hijacking jokes. It hardly has to be emphasized now that this was a significantly more innocent time. The plane sequence’s point was to act as a sort of vaudeville, knowingly-bad-joke bridge to get the cast back to Indiana; there’s no way to tell whether the hijacking material would have still been thought of as a good idea over a decade later, but one supposes the cast could have found an alternate path back to the school for the final scene, if necessary.
"; ol_titles[29] = "Taylor Buildings"; ol_texts[29] = "The buildings referred to are all Taylor University campus dorms and academic facilities circa 1990. Reade Center = the Humanities building. Olson = Olson Hall, the largest women‘s dorm. D.C. = Dining Commons, the main dining facility.
As for the Prayer Chapel, it was often the butt of cheap jokes on campus. At the time, it was a small church-sanctuary-like room on the ground floor of Sickler Hall (the Communication Arts building), accessible only from the outside, through doors that were unlocked 24 hours a day. The theory was that students in need of a quiet retreat for reflection and prayer should have a space accessible to them at all times. Needless to say, the Prayer Chapel was known as a primo (if a bit obvious and crowded to tourist-type proportions) spot for couples to make out—thus the reference. (The Prayer Chapel wasn’t always just a joke. More seriously, its floor was littered with countless notebooks, in which students had written anonymously for years.)
Third Morris, of course, is the third floor of Sammy Morris Hall, which has been known as “The Brotherhood” since at least the late 60’s. In 1990, the original Morris Hall (attached to what was then the Student Union) was still standing; the current Morris is a completely new building but Third Morris and the Brotherhood continue to carry on their traditions and create new ones.
"; ol_titles[30] = "“Oh, did I say wine?”"; ol_texts[30] = "It must be hard for 99% of college attendees, former attendees, and dropouts to understand, but Taylor was and is a dry campus—alcohol wasn’t permitted, even for the over-21 crowd. Of course, plenty of students worked around that limitation, but Mipzah members were particularly square in that regard. Whereas their peers at other schools often didn’t remember how they spent the weekends, Taylor students had to really go out of their way for entertainment; this certainly contributed to Mizpah’s ability to exist.
Sparkling grape juice was a ubiquitous substitute for wine among the would-be romantics at Taylor, and was often the basis of a dinner-at-my-dorm-room first date—at least, so it seemed. This line got a far bigger laugh of recognition than it deserved, especially since it was recycled from Thom Verratti’s previous performance at one of the prior year’s frequent Open Mike Night coffeehouses, where he played piano and sang the Beatles’ “Norweigian Wood,” with suitably altered lyrics: “I sat on the rug / Biding my time / Drinking her . . . milk.”
"; ol_titles[31] = "“Drink with me...”"; ol_texts[31] = "“Drink With Me,” sung with (almost) no alteration from the Les Misérables score, actually wound up being an unintentionally touching moment for the group members, in what they were sure was going to be their last production (although they would exist as a performing group long enough to satirize that idea in the Untitled show, three years after graduation, where they sang the (accurate!) lyric “This is our fifth ‘last show ever’!”) The group was very fortunate that their uninvited cameraman Dale Sloat (father of Kevin), who unwittingly perpetuated Less Miserable unto posterity, had zoomed in for a closeup as the song began, and panned across the faces of the group as they sang, and even more fortunate that the slow pan happened to catch the Lackey in his solo line, then continuing across the group as they shrugged. (Without Dale’s support of the Mizpah’s idiotic existence, incidentally, this transcript would have been impossible to create—so, thanks, Dale.)
"; ol_titles[32] = "Death and Mizpah"; ol_texts[32] = "A Mizpah show, more often than not, ends the same way: everybody dies. This was true from the earliest shows (Aescalapius, O! Potomac!); in Murder By Chutzpah (by Mizpah), there were no screaming simulated deaths, but the truncated show ended with the death of the Mizpah itself as the members quarrelled and broke up the group; by the time of the multimedia extravaganza Mizpah Presents: 253 Frames, the death theme had developed to the point that there are no fewer than 16 deaths among the 6 cast members during the course of the show.
"; ol_titles[33] = "Hades, God of the Stuart Room"; ol_texts[33] = "As noted above, Mizpah shows often wound up with everyone dead. But in the college-era live shows, the final death scene was always attended by the same musical number: “The Not Song.” Led by Joe Miller as Hades, the spirits of the recently deceased actors were summoned to their feet, where they floated around moaning eerily and answered Hades’s queries with variations on the word “not.” In this case, in honor of what the actors thought would be their last show as Taylor students (which actually turned out to be their segment of the Senior Show, several weeks later), each was allowed to float up to the microphone to pose his own ad libbed question to be answered by the group.
By the time of the show, Joe Miller had already begun to go straight (a trend which we can only assume has continued, as he is currently a successful corporate lawyer in Indianapolis, Indiana.) Seated in the crowd with his barely approving fiancée, Joe was prepared to resist when called out by the group (which in turn was prepared to have Thom Verratti act as a substitute Hades.) But as the transcript says, Joe was ultimately persuaded to come forward by the audience—and was indeed clad in a suspiciously appropriate red turtleneck. Rising to the occasion, Joe was able to supplement the traditional opening line (“I am Hades, God of the Underworld”) quite nicely. The result is truly for the ages, since (to date) Mizpah’s “The Not Song” has never been performed again.
"; ol_titles[34] = "Lickshaw Driver"; ol_texts[34] = "Fan picture printed in the 1990 Taylor yearbook (the Ilium) of Steve Baarendse as the Lickshaw Driver performing the “Lickshaw Driver’s Song”: