Every weekend my high school chemistry teacher would dismiss us with the same directive, “Have a good weekend. Be safe, be sober, be celibate.” I can’t help but think of his advice once again as Dillo Day sits before us on the horizon, at once joyous and ominous.
Freshmen this year I’m sure have no idea what the day is like, despite everything they’re told by upperclassmen swelling with anticipation for their favorite day of the year. They’ll tell you it’s a concert, a day to get trashed, a party of legendary debauchery and senselessness. These descriptions don’t go quite far enough. I’m not sure if I can even do it justice. It’s a pre-finals day of catharsis for ever-stressed nerds. A concert, yes, but more a facade that nevertheless turns out to be super enjoyable. It involves a numbing ingestion of alcohol that drowns our sorrows for one measly day, and boy are we thankful for it. It’s a day that no one is ever quite ready for.
Last year I spent the whole day sober to make pancakes and hand out pizza. If you scoffed at that last paragraph, you may want to give the sober route a try to see what I’m talking about. I watched roaming squads of carefree drunks wandering Evanston, trawling the streets for parties or kegs and eggs or wake and bake or some other way to propel themselves onto the next level. The field in front of the concert stage was incredible. The surreality of realizing thousands of people around you are out of their mind nearly trumps observing what the people are actually doing. Dancing by themselves while no music is playing, teetering dangerously on the rocks without a care in the world. Sneaking free pizza in direct view of the enormous line gathered behind it. Swarms of people unaware of their surroundings, frogs trying to figure the sky, so to speak, not quite listening to the music but not quite ignoring it. Fighting, selfishness, depravity – it all comes out on Dillo Day. And it’s all gloriously honest.
We rise early, we fall late, everything in between an exaltation of everything we normally lack. For a school like us, full of go-getters and overachievers, we need a break from the norm like this to stay sane. Dillo Day is stress relief, but more than that, it’s an outpouring of our successes, our failures, everything we’ve done all year to get to this point. It’s a time to forget what ails you and join everyone else on the Lakefill shouting in unison that we will persevere. I understand now what a nightmare it is for the administration to deal with a big silly party when every other weekend of the year is relatively benign and appreciate their support of the event in the face of a non-NU community that seemingly reviles it. It’s a pretty crazy day, all things considered.
This column is pretty loose because, if you couldn’t tell so far this quarter, I’m not very good at this. I guess my point is mainly for the freshmen who have yet to experience this drunkfest. To quote the advice my chemistry teacher gave us towards the end of the year, the weekend before prom night: “Have a good weekend. Be safe.”
Tom Hayden is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected]. Illustration by Kaitlin Svabek.
