A Midsummer Night's Dream...in November

A love quadrangle. Fairy royalty. A play within a play. Misprescribed medication. Rude mechanicals. A donkey's head. It all adds up to one of Shakespeare's most famous works and it is coming to the Theatre of the Arts this week.

The UW Drama production of A Midsummer Night's Dream opens to the public Thursday in with six 8PM performances from November 10-12 and 17-19, and two matinees for high school students on the 17th and 18th. There is a special invite-only performance tonight for Arts alumni and VIPs at 7PM.

According to the publicity materials, the production "is set in post WWII and tracks the 'dream' of the baby boomers. From the conformism and consumerism of the 1950's, we travel through the 'woods' to the counter culture of the 1960s and the advent of celebrity culture, and finish in the corporate culture of the 1980's. Using the stunning visual world of hippie culture as a backdrop, much fun and confusion ensues."

The production is directed by Anne-Marie Donovan and designed by Bill Chesney and Jocelyne Sobeski. This is the fourth time the play has been performed at the university.

General admission is $17, with students and seniors (the latter a category that is starting to include baby boomers, by the way) paying $13. More details can be found at Drama and Speech Communication's season information page.

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Dispatches from across the creek

With material from a Conrad Grebel press release and Chris Redmond

Dr. Susan Schultz Huxman (left), formerly of Wichita, Kansas, was inaugurated as the 7th president of Conrad Grebel University College at Floradale Mennonite Church on Sunday, October 16. The inaugural program featured a “Litany of Investiture” involving the Grebel Board of Governors; the President of the University of Waterloo, Feridun Hamdullahpur; the General Secretary of Mennonite Church Canada, Willard Metzger; the Executive Director and Moderator of Mennonite Church Eastern Canada, David Martin and Aldred Neufeldt; Grebel Professor of English and Peace and Conflict Studies, Hildi Froese Tiessen; and Grebel student body president, Lori Reimer. The Inaugural Address was delivered by Ed Diller, partner-in-charge, Taft Law Firm in Cincinnati, former moderator of Mennonite Church USA, and fellow board member with President Huxman at the Mennonite Education Agency. For complete details of the service, including a transcript of President Huxman’s remarks, visit grebel.uwaterloo.ca/inauguration.

As well, a note that should have appeared in this space weeks ago: St. Jerome’s University has published a planning document, “Strategic Vision 2015 and Beyond”, which will, according to president David Perrin, “guide us as we move toward our 150th anniversary in 2015”. The institution is “dedicated to educating the whole person”, it says, and creating “a challenging and intimate academic environment”. Specifics include “our commitment to undergraduate Catholic studies” (indeed, a planned minor in Catholic studies is on its way to the university senate for approval), a “social justice” emphasis on keeping the St. Jerome’s experience accessible to students without financial resources, and improvements to physical facilities, especially residences and the library.

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A note from, and about, the interim editor

I suppose a few words of introduction are in order. As Chris mentioned yesterday, I will be acting as interim editor as he begins work on historical writing projects, which I for one am very much looking forward to reading.

I arrived at the University of Waterloo as a graduate student studying political science in 2000, though my history with this institution goes back a few years before that as I was a regular attendee of shows put on by the Waveform Transmission Collective, a campus club for electronic music enthusiasts, during my days as an undergraduate at Laurier. Why, I remember one particular micro-rave in a tiny office above the Bomber back in 1997 that involved a strobe light and a bag of candy necklaces...perhaps I've said too much. In fact, forget I mentioned it.

I have spent most of my career at this university in the shadows. I was hired full-time in 2001 as Executive Researcher/Assistant at the Federation of Students, working to support Students' Council and the elected executive, and spent a great deal of time poring over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore about the history of student government and the student movement at the University of Waterloo. The only time the wider university community was ever aware of my existence was when I screwed up the annual student elections, and occasionally a referendum. (Exhibit A is to the right)

In 2007, I was seconded to the Department of Communications and Public Affairs as a communications specialist, and began writing speeches for the president and other senior administrators - again, in the shadows. I enjoyed my work with David Johnston and Feridun Hamdullahpur immensely, and somehow managed to produce more than 400 speeches without succumbing to the ravages of Carpal tunnel syndrome (yet).

Now, for the time being, I'm stepping into the long shadow cast by Chris Redmond, who has shepherded the Daily Bulletin through more than 4,500 issues over 18 years and is an incredibly tough act to follow. Judging from the tributes pouring in to the Bulletin's inbox and on Twitter (and yes, Chris is receiving all of them), readers have appreciated Chris’s uncanny ability to build a sense of internal community across an institution that becomes more complex with each passing year. All I can do is pledge to continue to deliver the news in the tradition of connectedness and credibility that has been Chris’s calling card since 1973. I hope to have a little fun along the way as well.

Best of all, now my mistakes will be highly visible. That's a nice change of pace. It is. Really.

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