Gatsby Gala to bring Roaring ’20s to the Hill

After an hour of diligent online shopping and Googling, Tara Prescott, Canyon Point’s faculty-in-residence, finally found the perfect golf club to complete her Gatsby-inspired costume for this evening’s Gala.

Taking place in Covel Grand Horizon Room, the Gatsby Gala is the fourth event in a weeklong Gatsby-themed program. With the vision of 1920s grandeur, the On Campus Housing Council and Canyon Point will throw a semi-formal costume dance complete with food, music and prizes.

Prescott said she discovered a common love for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic “The Great Gatsby” with Canyon Point Resident Assistant and current Undergraduate Students Association Council candidate Sunny Singh, a second-year economics and history student.

Prescott said the 24-hour Reading Marathon, an old event from her days as an undergraduate English student at UCLA, and the upcoming release of the new film motivated her and Singh to start Gatsby Week in Canyon Point.

By exposing students to different media and experiences that go along with Gatsby, Prescott said she hopes students will appreciate the novel on new levels.

“When you’re really excited about something, you absorb it in as many ways as possible,” Prescott said. “I think one of the ways to get students interested in literature is to introduce them to the fandom surrounding those things, and that’s what we’re doing with Gatsby Week.”

At the same time the Canyon Point staff was brainstorming the weeklong event, OCHC programmer Zoe Sheppard, a second-year communications studies student, was planning an end-of-the-year spring quarter dance. When Singh and Sheppard discovered their programs overlapped, they opted to co-program the dance. Sheppard said she expects the iconic topic will attract a lot of interest.

“I think the word ‘Gatsby’ has come to mean something that we associate with the 1920s. It’s come to mean grandeur and glitz and the American Dream,” Sheppard said.

Kate Misogas, a second-year program assistant and psychobiology student, said she is very interested in the aesthetics of the 1920s and tried to model the decor after a party scene from the new film. Misogas said she hopes the night will adopt a sense of formality and fun, which will be achieved with the use of metallic tinsel curtains, fake pearls and light projections on the walls. She said she wants the event to be like a prom.

“I feel like we do the prom thing in high school, and when you get to college you still have parties with sororities and fraternities and clubs, but it’s nice to have an all-Hill formal kind of thing too,” Misogas said.

For those with absolutely no Gatsby-themed clothing, OCHC intends to give away four of the iconic Gatsby book cover shirts through a raffle. Misogas said that for the last shirt, students can partake in a scavenger hunt meant to parallel Gatsby’s quest for wealth.

“For the first half of the night, we’re going to have students look around for a green object, and if you find it, you win a shirt,” Misogas said. “It’s like you’re looking for the green light Gatsby was looking for.”

Following the scavenger hunt, two world arts and cultures students from the Canyon Point staff, Joel Ontiveros and Lindsay Kullmann, will provide swing dance lessons. Specifically, the students will focus on the Charleston, an iconic dance from the time period.

“It’s very similar to the whole flapper thing where you’re waving your hands around and flailing your legs. … It’s another form of expression and freedom the women were doing,” Misogas said.

Prescott said using these other more interactive tactics is one of her favorite ways to teach students about literature. When teaching, she said she often treats students to Irish tea and biscuits, or some other fitting refreshment, so students can gain an experience and sympathize with characters. For her, the dance is just another way of doing this.

“It’s great to experience something similar to what the characters might have experienced at the time. It puts you in a mood of imagining and daydreaming your way into the story,” Prescott said. “I think that for a night, especially the night of the dance, it’s nice to daydream about what that time would have been like.”