On Sunday, March 2, the Festival of the Arts wrapped up its month-long celebration of the arts with a closing ceremony held in the Swan Building.

The festival began on Thursday, Jan. 31, with an opening wine and cheese reception, and then carried on through the month of February with nearly 50 events taking place.

At the start of the closing ceremony, Bruce Dilg, an associate professor of architectural technology at Ferris State, who also played a major role in the festival’s success, commented on the events and gave his appreciation to all those who helped make the Festival of the Arts possible.

The events that took place in the festival’s 32 days ranged from photography and poetry on to music and sculpture with local and national talent being recognized.

The campus and the community combined together to help form the 22 venues in which each event had taken place.

Pepper’s Café and Deli, Artworks, Frame Factor, and The Gate were only a few of the places where events were held. Dilg commented at the closing ceremony that he is already receiving requests for next year’s festival.

Dilg is a member of the Festival Coordinating Committee which is also comprised of Dr. Scott Cohen, William Donahue, Mark Gifford and Ed Mallett. The committee’s goal, according to Dilg, was to build bridges between the community and students at Ferris.

After Dilg’s recollection of the festival’s events, award-winning Michigan artist and artist-inresidence Robert Barnum spoke about the creation of the sculpture.

Barnum, who is also responsible for the mural in FLITE’s extended hours study room, designed the sculpture with the help of his students. Actual fabrication of the sculpture was completed by almost 30 welding and engineering students at Ferris State with the coaching of their welding professor David Murray.

“The reason why this sculpture is here,” said Barnum, “is because of the students who were involved in the process.” He added that this experience has been one of the best in his career.

Barnum unveiled the sculpture, which was already revealing due to its hovering size, and called it the contemplation sculpture.

The sculpture, which is still awaiting a paint job, will become the first extension of the Michigan Art Walk, off the Ferris campus and into the community.

In closing, President Eisler presented the sculpture to Mark Warba, Big Rapids’ mayor. Warba, in return, accepted the sculpture on behalf of Big Rapids and extended his thanks to President Eisler, Barnum, Dilg, Murray, the welding students, Artworks and all of the events’ sponsors.

“I believe that the Festival of the Arts 2008 has been a great success,” explained Warba. “And I also think it achieved its goal of bringing together the talent in our community in a celebration and enjoyment of the arts.”

In addition to the closing ceremony, the Festival of the Arts ended on Sunday with a Jazz and Blues Cabaret Night at the Big Rapids High School, and a Winter Band and Orchestra Concert that featured the West Central Concert Band and West Central Chamber Orchestra in Williams Auditorium.

Ferris State’s 2007 Rube Goldberg team used 229 steps to juice an orange, creating the largest functional machine that set a Guinness Book World Record. In the process of setting the world record, the Bulldogs won the National Championship in front of 1,500 spectators. Ferris State’s team was featured in New York City on “The Today Show” and out in California on “The Jimmy Kimmel Show.”

According to the Argonne National Laboratory, the Rube Goldberg Machine Contest is named after cartoonist Reuben Lucius Goldberg, whose work inspires the contest’s weird machines and crazy mechanics.

His cartoons combined simple machines and common household items to create complex, wacky, and diabolically logical machines that accomplished mundane and trivial tasks. His inventions became so widely known that Webster’s Dictionary added “rube goldberg” to its listing, defining it as, “accomplishing by extremely complex, roundabout means what seemingly could be done simply.”

The contest is judged in three parts. The first part judging includes the general impressions of the machine and team. Here teams can earn 35 points based on their spirit, theme, explanation, team chemistry and submitted description. The second judging criteria are based on time. Teams shoot for zero points here because anything else goes negative. The final criteria is based on how the machine operates. Teams look to earn 65 points based on completing their tasks in two runs, style steps and how the machine flows. The team can however be docked points due to human intervention and objects leaving the machine.

The 2007-08 Ferris Rube Goldberg teams’ theme is based on the 50 states. Using their theme, the team has to assemble a hamburger consisting of one pre-cooked beef patty, two vegetables, two condiments and two halved buns. The team is allowed one electrical cord and one pneumatic hose entering the machine.

“Competition brings out the kid in all of us by tinkering around with little gadgets to make a highly engineered apparatus,” said College of Technology professor Dan Wanink.

The Ferris teams’ machine starts off with a George Washington quarter crossing the Delaware River and ending with a burger being assembled. Throughout the process, states were represented by something dealing with their state. A couple examples are: Michigan represented by a Model T car, Alaska represented by a king crab, Minnesota represented by ice fishing and Maine represented by a lobster.

“I like how realistic it is using students from all disciplines working together to achieve one final task,” said team member Tom Sybrandy.

On Apr. 5, the Bulldogs head down to West Lafayette, Ind. to Purdue University to compete for the 2008 Nationals.

“Purdue knows we are the competition. We’ve beaten [Division One] schools like Arizona, Texas A&M, Michigan State, Michigan and Penn State,” said team advisor Thomas Hollen.

Stopping into Artworks Gallery in downtown Big Rapids after hours on Tuesday, Feb. 19, I was welcomed to an artist reception complete with a meetand- greet and wine and cheese.

Though he was probably the most average looking man in the room, the featured artist, Benjamin Busch, has been an actor and a director in Hollywood, a photographer with shows in New York City and a United States Marine completing two deployments in Iraq.

Somehow, he just happened to end up living in Reed City, Mich. with his wife, a teacher at Ferris, and daughter. His location made it a little more convenient to get him to participate in this year’s Festival of the Arts.

The first thing that hit me in “The Art in War” exhibit was how the people are portrayed both rough and hopeful at the same time.

The eyes of the children in his photos tell the story of the Iraqi conflict better than CNN, no matter how you feel about war. Looking at Busch’s artwork, you cannot prevent finding yourself face to face with other real people with the same hopes and fears about freedom, no matter what country they are from.

“I have always been drawn to people,” Busch said in an interview on the radio show Weekend America over a year ago, “and especially to children.”

Graduating from college in 1993 with a degree in gallery art, Busch understands the need for an art exhibit that flows.

During the reception for his exhibit, Busch explained how the photographs were set up so that one picture had a similarity to the next in order to lead spectators through the gallery. The lines in one photo would progress to the shapes in the next. A photo of a collage on one wall would lead to the photo of a soldier’s collection of girly pictures on the next.

The subject of children was certainly one theme in the sample of Busch’s two collections from each of his tours in Iraq.

According to the story relayed in the Festival of the Arts program, Busch sometimes had to deceive local authorities to sneak many photos like these.

In order to take pictures of children or architecture, told them that he had to get a photo of the pipes in order fix the plumbing or something similar.

It was difficult trying to arrange a last minute interview with Busch. He was packing on Friday afternoon so he could rush off and catch a flight to New York City to do some voice acting on Saturday.

Between acting jobs, Busch has been trying to get his collections of photographs into book form and he recently wrote, produced, and directed the movie “Sympathetic Details.”

Busch was a lecturer at two events on the Ferris Campus during the Festival of the Arts.

How many movies can you watch before considering yourself a movie buff? Is everyone considered one?

I say no because there is a time when you have friends watching a movie and you have already seen it.

There is a time when you go to the movie theaters every weekend because you want to see a movie so bad that you can’t even wait for it to come out on DVD to rent or buy it.

There is a time when you go buy movies for the heck of it because you thought it was good enough in the theaters for you to buy.

There is even a time when you buy movies you haven’t even seen because the previews seemed interesting enough to you.

Those would make someone a movie junkie in my mind, and I happen to be one of them because I have completed all of those tasks in my life multiple times.

Almost any movie my friends have seen or watched, I have either seen already or go with them to see it in the theater.

I have had a couple of occasions where my friends have seen something I haven’t seen, but it is very rare.

Everyone I know has seen many, many movies because movies are a part of our lives. We can’t escape that; it’s entertainment.

But some, like me, just happen to see many more films than others because we consider it great entertainment. It keeps us occupied for two hours and movies make you think, make you want, and even make you hope for things in your life. They keep you interested.

There aren’t a minimum or maximum number of movies you can watch to consider yourself a movie buff, but when you happen to know a lot of actresses, actors, and celebrities just by face and you have friends telling you you’ve seen too many movies, then you figured out that yes, maybe you have watched too many, therefore you are a movie buff.

It is never a bad thing to be considered one; it is just a part of your life. You are keeping yourself entertained and I don’t think that’s bad.

Entertainment comes in many forms like its books, movies, television shows, or video games. We all need to “get a life” when considered a book worm, movie buff, TV junkie, or game guru, but that’s all right, at least we are able to learn things from them and help anyone who is inexperienced in understanding our “field of expertise.”

“We were worried.”

“We were worried.”

“We were worried about our vaginas.”

And frankly I was a little worried too as soon as I saw lavender and magenta strewn ladies glittering and marching down the aisle towards the stage after sitting through one of Pink’s contributions to the slaughter of music, but don’t let me get sidetracked.

The Vagina Monologues, which took place last Friday, Feb. 29, at 7:30 p.m., filled Williams Auditorium with voices speaking for the power of women, and demanding respect for them.

The monologues introduced the audience to many different scenarios a woman might find herself in, and they covered many different aspects of being female.

While being mostly about sexuality, I was impressed that they mixed in ideas like the miracle of birth to represent non-sexual aspects of being a woman also.

I’m not big into mass support groups or sickeningly sweet after-school-special types, but once I realized what the monologues were really about, it was much easier to digest and find them a little more enjoyable.

For starters, the monologues were formed out of the internationally recognized “V-Day,” and are dedicated to raising awareness and affirmative action on abuse against women and girls around the world.

They speak and raise funds for charities against all different levels of female abuse including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation, and sexual slavery.

This vagina revolution has spread to over 90 countries throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and all of North America according to vday. org.

It has also made appearances on Top Charities Lists, has raised over $40 million in the last nine years, and is completely non-profit.

So as I was sitting in my wonderful turquoise auditorium seat feeling a little uncomfortable and a little bored, it finally hit me what these monologues, each specific act, were all about.

Of course, like previously mentioned, they are speaking out for a cause, but they were more specifically speaking about the beauty of women in general. It wasn’t about vaginas at all, like the name would so blatantly suggest.

They used the concept of “vagina,” a word commonly shied away from in ordinary language, to symbolize the most intimate and unique beauties of every individual woman.

This may sound like a strange idea, but it seemed to work. They used it to embody women’s desires, hopes, wishes, and strengths in general, and in doing so, they made the audience think about what their desires and about the things that make them happy also.

So besides hearing the word “vagina” so many times that it began to sound like a very strange word (I’ve also done that with the word “fork” before) and being anatomically incorrect at times, I believe that overall it is a great cause to contribute to and a good thing for people, female and male, to experience, even if they don’t necessarily love it.

I just have one question, when will the Penis Monologues be introduced?

Friday night found me in the Williams Auditorium for this year’s performance of the “Vagina Monologues.” The show consisted of a series of monologues read by a variety of Ferris students and faculty on subjects that ranged from self-discovery to genital mutilation and rape.

It opened with all the actresses filing in from the back of the audience dancing to the music playing over the P.A. system, and taking their places on the stage. “V-Day Café” was the theme, so the stage was decked out with tables and chairs in front of two couches.

The actresses all took their turns telling their ‘vagina’ story to the audience and in between, the narrator would introduce the next act.

We were presented with some “happy vagina facts” such as “the clitoris is the only organ on the body, male or female, that is designed simply for pleasure. There are more nerve endings in this one spot than on the entire penis.” All the women cheered. I frowned.

A few points in the show I felt a little left out; I don’t think that I got all of the jokes since I’m male. Nevertheless, there were many parts of the show that I laughed so hard that I cried.

There was a darker side to the monologues, however. One woman talked about being repeatedly raped and violated by solders during the war in Kosovo. This was a terrifying story that nearly brought tears to my eyes.

A little while later we heard a “not-so-happy vagina fact” about female genital mutilation, or removal of the clitoris. This often is done in very crude and unsanitary ways and can easily lead to infection, infertility, and many other complications.

I enjoyed the show as a whole, but having a background in theatre, I was let down to see the actresses all holding scripts and reading from them. The actresses were all very talented, but having the scripts in front of them seemed to take away from the performances.

Many of them would have to pause to find their place in the script, or fumble while turning pages in the script; a few times some of the actresses broke character in doing so.

I would highly recommend that anyone looking for something fun and interesting should go to this show if possible. Bring your friends. I just wouldn’t recommend this for a first date.

The show brought to light the fact that it is okay to talk about and explore your sexuality, not to repress it because of things that happened in the past.

Many of the women that participated in the show told what their vagina would wear and what it would say. To be fair, I’ll answer these questions for my penis. It would wear one strategically placed sock. What would my penis say? “I want some pizza!”