Frosh Week Gallery
Pictures taken September 5 - 11, 2004

Frosh Week, or Orientation Week - that wonderful time when first years get acclimatized to the fabulous world of Wilfrid Laurier University by cheering maniacally, spurred onwards by multicoloured veterans of cheering. Wilfrid Laurier has a reputation for strong orientation weeks, raising millions of dollars for Shinerama and shattering fundraising records on an annual basis. It's big, it's exciting and it's definitely weird.

I harbored vague disturbing memories from my own first year experience but I was about to raise old skeletons by becoming a willing volunteer myself, three years later...

Okay, so me and Marta went out and got these identical digital cameras.
Everyone in the Best Buy thought that we were doing a lame little dating
thing until I started loudly complaining about how expensive cocaine was
and she "dumped me" in front of the saleslady.

Marta loved her camera like a child. I loved my camera like Marta's
mom.

Anyways, the point was that I finally had a camera. I could document
this crazy 'O-week' Shinerama cheering phenomenon which takes place
at Wilfrid Laurier University each and every year. It's kind of intense -
Matt Good called it a cult a year ago and asked when they were gonna
bring out the vats of purple kool-aid during a show.

The cheering phenomenon begins with a large group of heavily
drugged and/or cheery individuals.

Their presence attracts the attention of other nearby cheery and/or
heavily drugged people, who make their way towards the group
and proceed to cheer. Loudly. It's inexplicable.

Bmac, RadioLaurier's webmaster, celebrates the cheering ritual
by breakdancing on rows of carefully placed Loonies...

...and then carefully replaces them again. What a hero! Ladies
take note.

Bmac then runs off into the sunset in super slow-motion.

Jenn Asselin tries to convince me to cheer along with her and
her Shinerama buddies...

...but I refused! However, I did find myself wearing an O-Week
shirt the very next morning. It was an ugly brown one, just like
these guys are wearing.

See? You can tell how I feel about the brown shirt. It made me want
to kill myself with an intergalactic ray gun.

We took a glamour shot of Kat and Jenn before heading out to molest
the frosh kids.

I am seriously selling this picture to Zellers for their summer spread.

This one too.

Anyways, the mission was to go out with these guys and give
free shit to the kids who were moving in. Bonus points for
embarrassing parents.

Jenn and Laura's mission was to prance around and try to sell
barbeque, from what I could tell. Jenn was feeling sassy.

This girl was actually able to pull off cheery without being lame. I liked her.
In the background is the A-Team (A stands for Activities, apparently).
They are the elite soldiers, the Navy Seals, of O-Week from what I can
tell. Noted preoccupation with colour orange, which is not very army-like
at all.

Aaaagh! Nicky is on the A-Team! She is seen here trying to club
me with whatever orange thing she's holding there. A bowling
pin or something.

BBQ! Sweet mother of Christ!

Doesn't this sorta seem like what an initiation line would look like?
Like with paddles and shit?

We convinced a couple suckers to take pictures with us. We forced
RadioLaurier buttons on them all and sent them on their way, bewildered
and pinioned.

Ashley had the important job of blow-drying the lettering on all the
shirts, which take about 12 hours to dry on their own.

Walled up in our voyeur's radio booth, we watched as the cheering
convened mere feet away from us. We were asked to turn down our
music because it was affecting the cheering. That's Jen Mitchell on
the right there, by the way: my former arch-enemy. Unfortunate and
detrimental.

Tudor cleared the cheering out in a hurry. He is the Master of the
Concourse.

Later that night, I was tricked into attending the O-Week Opening
Ceremonies. This is the birthplace of cheering, the deepest
bowels of culmination. It is an evil place. I asked Ashley to take
my life with the interstellar death ray blaster.

Commander Kat, the one responsible for the trickery.

Stef and Amy were also at this demonic orgy, so of course I took
one of those self-shot pictures with them. It sorta looks like I'm
on a roller coaster, and in a way, I was. Certainly the same amount
of excited screaming.

Allison tried to boost my health with her magical Squirrel Extra
Smooth token, but I was still sweating like a very white slave.
It's damn hot in the Athletic complex.

Wow!

As you can see, the RadioLaurier contingent survived the night
although most of us complained bitterly to Kat. Well, I did. Hahaha
God I hate cheering.

I went to 93 Columbia after my escape. Now apparently O-Week
volunteers were supposed to sign some kind of contract that forbade
them from drinking or carousing, but I didn't remember signing
anything...

Which is good. Because I would've broken it anyways.

My God, how many people fit in this garage?

Alicia's on the internet! Oh no!

The next night was very important. RadioLaurier, wearing identical
shirts which read "Turn us on and pleasure yourself," set out to
invade the Frosh Quad party and give them free stuff out of neon
coloured buckets.

But first I found April. She's in the middle and on the left is her
friend who's name I cannot remember because I am terrible with
names. Look how smug I am though, I probably still knew her name
at that point.

Ryan demonstrates the awe and power which ERT (Emergency
Response Team - sorta like a student ambulance) commands at
Wilfrid Laurier.

And Nicky, who is still okay even though she's in A-Team (she
likes good music).

The management has spoken. Prevail from Swollen Members swung
on the light trusses once, and now it is forbidden!

Inside the Turret, Stef was shaking down Frosh kids for Shinerama
dollars.

The headlining band of the night was Alexisonfire, but my camera
battery died before they came on stage. This is The Reason, I think.
They used to be called Sewing With Nancie, which was a much more
interesting name I think. More ambiguous, at least.

Jared and Kat display some of the fine merchandise that we
were plying the young folk with.

The info cards were designed to give electric shocks, as Saunders
demonstrates. Some kind of evil Pavlovian conditioning plot to get
more listeners, I think.

Stefa's on the red team! Go red raptors!

This is Phil, the man responsible for coordinating all the music acts
at Wilfrid Laurier. Kinda scary, but he booked Swollen Members and
still ended up keeping his job, which is impressive.

This is Joy and Leia. They want you to turn them on and pleasure
yourself, like the shirts say. Look at those smoldering late-night
sex chat stares.

These are first year girls.

Oh no! The Reason has turned into brightly glowing specters of
discombobulated light! The room is ablaze!

My camera apparently has the magical ability to add pyrotechnics
to punk shows. The Reason is flashier than KISS!

Dallas Green from Alexisonfire is a pimp.

Unsurprisingly, Cooper was at the show. He runs the company
Flamesburn, which hosts this website for fairly cheap dollars.

This is Sikken. One night, we were drunk and decided that she is
going to be my agent when I finally write a book. It was possibly
even this night! History in the making, for sure.

This mysterious girl named Leia had insisted on jumping into
virtually every picture I took that night, even after I leveled
a fair amount of verbal abuse on her and called her a stripper.
I think she retaliated by telling every first year that I took a
picture of that I was a child molester or rapist or something like that.
I sorta do look like a rapist in this picture, if you look carefully.

As I was leaving, shaken by images of gyrating first years all over
the place (Bacchus gave out thousands of condoms that night, I
heard) this random girl showed up. She danced and posed for a
good five minutes while someone tried to figure out my camera
and I tried not to laugh hysterically. It was excellent.

When I got home I was attacked by this rabid raccoon! It was in
this instant, hearing the loud chittering raccoony sound of an angry
bandit, that I finally understood cheering and O-Week.

The raccoon told me that O-Week is a government plot designed to turn upper-class, white, educated Canadians into a zombie task force. "Cheering is a hypnotic ritual designed to increase response to the zombifying procedure!" he chittered wildly. I considered his point. It made sense, you know; all the money dropped into the Shinerama coffers, never to be seen again...

It was at that moment that my head began to spin wildly. ALERT! ALERT! a warning seemed to flash, red rhythm pulsating behind my eyes. Myself, sitting in the middle of the gym, looking around disdainfully at the walls of white shirts surrounding me. Myself, younger, wearing a white shirt, looking down in admiration at the rainbow of volunteerism in the middle of the gym. Myself, happily dropping money into the Shinerama bowls and bins, pleased to be making a difference in the fight against Cystic Fibrosis. A rush of euphoria and my head righted itself. The red subsided. I was stable again. I was back under control.

I hit the raccoon in the head with a plastic water bottle and went to bed. O-Week was over as far as I was concerned.