Rhode Island School of Design

So, Jonathan and I got a day off. I spent the day with my mom and visiting my home town of Columbia, MO. Jonathan went home to Lancaster, PA, to see his wife and to see Bill Cosby live in concert. Because he is still live, Bill Cosby, but won't be forever.

On Sunday, we converged in Providence, Road Island, to perform the orientation night entertainment at RISD, which is supposedly the best design school in the world, although you wouldn't know it from the remarkably boring school hat they gave me.

So, Phil, the director of Residents' Life at RISD, picked us up from the Providence airport and gave us a short tour of the city on the way to the college, complete with colorful insights like the story of their Russian sub, which they converted to a museum, where U571 was filmed, and which sank one particularly rainy night; the most haunted street in the world, which was built on a graveyard after all the graves had been moved; Brown University, and Market Square, where they used to sell real live slaves. Phil also took us to a famous local hot dog eatery, Spike's. We declined the house's 6-dog eating challenge that, if successfully completed, puts your picture on the wall of fame for infinity or whatever. 6 of these dogs is a tall order. Or maybe I mean long order.

Now, RISD is special for more than its top-notch reputation as a design school. The mascot is a giant penis named Scrotie. Scrotie came into being a decade or so after the school's notoriously horrible intramural hockey team, humorously named "the Nads". We even received t-shirts from the school with the proud slogan "GO NADS!" Members of the team are not even required to know how to skate, and the school loses almost every game by embarrassing numbers. RISD does have one other intramural sports team, a basketball team named "the Balls", which supposedly loses most of its games by about 70 points. Art students are not known for their athletic prowess. From a student on the school's lawn, I also bought a student made RISD t-shirt which features Scrotie in a moment of excellence (see pictures).

Naturally, the show was amazing, which was fortunate, because a couple of special friends of mine came down from Burlington, Vermont, to see it, and it would have been a major shame if we had bombed.

We got some pretty awesome pictures of this show thanks to Amanda Chang, a student at RISD. Thanks, Amanda!