This Friday the 13th, Northwestern students might not worry much about walking around ladders on avoiding black cats, but they will deal with everyday superstitions that are part of life at NU.
“Our coaches are extremely superstitious,” said Weinberg sophomore Megan Hinck, who is on NU’s women’s softball team. “Last weekend we played in Michigan and lost both games.” When the team returned to Michigan this weekend the coaches didn’t want to stay in the same hotel because of bad karma.
Hinck said she and her teammates also have their own rituals to bring good luck.
But athletes aren’t the only ones who want good fortune. Whether it’s a lucky pencil or an unusual routine, many NU students are willing to do whatever it takes to perform well and fend off bad luck.
“In Waa-Mu, there was a sketch where someone had to say ‘Macbeth,’ but the person was afraid he was going to cause bad luck so he started saying ‘Mockbeth’ instead,” Communication junior Sean Carroll said.
Carroll said banning the name “Macbeth” in a theater is well-known. However, Communication sophomore Jessica Cluess, who said she was in last week’s production of “The Elephant Man,” didn’t know about it and was once barred from a theater until she had “performed the ritual.”
“I think you turn around following your left shoulder three times, then spit on the ground, then curse,” she said. “I could have it a little mixed up.”
Cluess also said a former cast member had a routine of touching five specific walls and mirrors in the theater before she would go into make-up.
Communication senior Allison Hirschlag said she used to do a ritual chant about Czechoslovakia before her clown improvisation troupe performed.
McCormick sophomore Alison Hertog, who was in the Northwestern University Marching Band, said the band’s director accidentally created a ritual this year to help NU’s football team.
“Before the (Ohio State) game, he was getting upset because we needed to do better, and he was getting pretty worked up,” she said. “He took off his suit coat and threw it on the ground, and then we beat OSU, so every game after that, we made him throw his coat.”
The football team itself has ways of attracting good luck. However, finding out what they are isn’t so easy.
“I was always told that once you tell a superstition, it’s no longer lucky,” Weinberg sophomore and cornerback Ryan Black said. “I’ll say I have lucky rubber bands but that’s about it.”
Communication sophomore and quarterback Chris Malleo was more willing to share his secrets.
“My friend thinks he has to come to our room at the hotel before a game and lay on my bed, because he did it once and we won,” he said. “I always eat my meal the same and wear the same T-shirt under my uniform. Some people have to listen to certain music, some people have to get taped a special way, others have socks. A lot of people pray.”
But do all these rituals and superstitions actually work?
Communication sophomore Kara Downey was in a show last quarter where several cast members had to perform a “voodoo-bayou-type ritual.”
“Our director told us to motivate ourselves by pretending we were performing the ritual to summon Zach Braff to campus, and a few weeks later, guess who came?” she said.
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