On Friday night—the eve before All Hallow’s Eve, I did something I thought I would never do: I chaperoned a Halloween Dance. Well, chaperoned is a strong word—it was more along the lines of taking people’s coats and throwing them in bags for coat check and using the magical cotton candy machine to make people cotton candy. While I went into the dance with the entirely wrong attitude (“this is gonna be lame” I’d grumbled, sinking into my chair and pulling my hood over my eyes), I ended up discovering something entirely surprising–dances are kind of… fun.

Sure, they’re lame. Sure, it was just a bunch of Freshman gyrating to pop music,

but, halfway through a Pitbull song, I had some sort of epiphany: if I had to be there, I might as well enjoy myself. So, I threw some coats in the back and, along with Josie Weidner (’16), went and danced the night away. This, I realized, is something that applies to being a writer as well. There have always been prompts that I didn’t like, that felt completely ridiculous, or times when I thought I absolutely can’t write this play or poetry is so stupid, what’s the point—but, like chaperoning a Halloween Dance, sometimes it’s good to push yourself. To get out of your comfort zone and write that weird conceptual poem or do the cha cha slide. And it was if you just “go with the flow” (in the words of Josie Weidner ’16, someone I only kind of know), you might just **gasp** enjoy yourself.

Noa Mendoza, class of 2016