Wet Fling becomes a fun Fling

After downpours rained out Friday night's scheduled Living Colour concert, "Three Ring Fling: The Greatest Fling on Earth" redeemed itself Saturday with sunshine, crowds in the Quadrangle and a packed Superblock carnival. Instead of going down in history as a Fling that flopped, as many Friday partiers feared, the event ended on a positive note. "I thought that the weekend as a whole was a success and well worth all of the efforts that we put into it," Wharton senior and Spring Fling Co-Chairperson Jeff Anapolsky said. "Saturday was an excellent day -- I've never seen Superblock as packed as Saturday night for such a duration." But many students said they were unhappy about the concert's cancellation. "Yeah, it was raining, and it sucked," College sophomore Judy Atkin said. "And I'd bought a ticket for my boyfriend, too. I'm out $16, and I'm poor as it is." But Atkin and the other 3,000 who bought tickets in advance will not have their soggy $8 tickets refunded. "It's a major disappointment, but there's nothing we can do about it," Fling co-chair and College senior Matt Jacobson said in the Lower Quad in the middle of Saturday afternoon's revelry. "[The fact that there are no refunds] is stated explicitly on the ticket." Anapolsky said that students who bought tickets in advance were aware of the risks involved. "It's more fair to the students to keep ticket prices as low as possible from year to year, rather than to give people refunds the one time the show is rained out," he said. "We leave it open, and people run the risk every year of it being rained out." But Anapolsky said the cancellation of the Hill Field concert, in which Bad Brains and Lords of the Underground were supposed to perform as well, was "an awful shame." "That concert would have been the best thing that Penn would have ever seen," Anapolsky said last night. "It was a very, very sophisticated package that would have put on one hell of a show." Anapolsky cited the possibility of danger to students due to the evening's torrential rain as a major reason for the cancellation of the outdoor concert. "There's expensive sound equipment that cannot get wet," Anapolsky said. "There's the risk of electrocuting the whole crowd, which wouldn't be too good. Then, you'd have a big story -- 'as the students fried at Fling.' " But all in all, many flingers said they enjoyed the carnival, and said the events in the Quad were more popular and more interesting than in years past. "There was more to do in the Quad than anywhere," College sophomore Barbara Soriano said yesterday afternoon. Anapolsky and others did say that they were disappointed with some of the student behavior in the Quad. "Like every year, you have that many people, there is alcohol involved and people are not rational," Fling Co-Chairperson and Wharton senior Leila Graham-Willis said. While Graham-Willis said that the damages would not be assessed until later this week, Anapolsky said that he knew of a raffle prize bear and a Princeton Review banner that were stolen. "I was disappointed that people got too rowdy Saturday afternoon," he said. "People urinated in public in the Quad . . . I didn't expect this of Penn students."