Word: mocks
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...Central Kitchen era. In those days, the story goes, you might catch a glimpse some night of students bearing a steaming kettle of this poison on a pole to wherever the Hasty Pudding Club was assembled for the evening. Everybody would then fill themselves to the accompaniment of mock trials staged by club members. Fortunately, both the College cusine and the Hasty Pudding have matured, although at times both still seem rather half-baked...
...tradition dates back to the first Pudding production of December 13, 1844 in Hollis 11. That first production was a direct steal from a stage play which had run in Boston at the old Tremont Theatre. Lemuel Hayward '45, together with a few of his colleagues, agreed that the mock trials had run their course. (The most popular of them had been called Dido vs. Aeneas: for Breach of Trust). And so Bombastes Furioso, the first in a long line of Pudding preparations was born. The play included one female character named Distaffina. "Madam" Augustus F. Hinchman '45 took...
...years the Pudding continued to "borrow" from the legitimate stage. The results were mostly theatrical bastards. Although a few hearty souls urged a return to the mock trial genre, the progressives prevailed and within five years after the first performance of Bombastes, all traces of the trials had disappeared. The early plays were rehashed again and again. Between 1844 and 1860 there were at least six performances of Bombastes, four of something called Slasher and Crasher and two of My Wife's Come...
...dividends long ago and in grand fashion. When the 100th show Here's the Pitch, billed as a "Gay '90s extravaganza," opened in 1947, Newsweek and Life each devoted a full page to the event. "The club began when undergraduates gathered in each other's room to put on mock trials," Life reported. "By 1844 they had developed real theatricals...
Actually Kyldex I was an exercise in mock cybernetics, complete with audience participation, that fell flat on its mirrors. The underlying premise was noble: involve the audience, especially the young. The overlying problem was that on opening night almost everything failed to work. Through a system of electronic signals attached to each seat, the audience was supposed to be able to vote on whether to halt a given segment of Kyldex I, speed it up, slow it down, have it explained or repeated. Unfortunately, the polltakers could agree only rarely on the vote. So much for artistic socialism...