Say Anything | Ain’t nothin’ but a Fling thang

As you know, if you’re one of the 8,500 students with a ticket to the Fling concert this year, seating at the show is now assigned by section.

But where did this change come from? (You may be asking.)

After Fling is over, the Social Planning and Events Committee powers-that-be meet with security, University administrators and officials from Franklin Field. They devour leftover fried Oreos and Facebook-stalk pictures from the Quad. Kidding! They debrief: what went well, what needs work, was this or was this not the flingiest Fling ever flung?

At last year’s meeting, they discovered that all 7,400 students at the concert crammed into only three sections worth of space — almost double the safe capacity.

SPEC Concerts co-director and College junior Shana Rusonis explained that there were a higher number of security incidents last year than in years past — “security incidents” essentially being “people who are drunk enough that it poses a threat to their own well being and the people around them.”

“A majority of the alcohol-related incidents were people under the age of 18 who had no affiliation with Penn,” Rusonis went on. “They were suburban high-school students coming to the event. They needed to be medically amnestied and their parents didn’t know they were at the concert.”

“It was too dangerous,” SPEC Concerts co-director and College junior Jordan Sale said. “It was only a matter of time before someone was sick and we couldn’t reach them because there were too many people in the way.”

Thank those teens for this year’s age restrictions, which state that any non-Penn student of jailbait age can’t show up without a Penn student in tow. The crush of the crowd was the reason for implementing sections. Too many drunk people, too much of a liability.

As with all change — for the better, for the worse, for the utterly inconsequential — students expressed unhappiness.

In addition to frustration, confusion was widespread: “What’s the point?” “Are they trying to sell tickets faster?” “What’s a Ratatat?”

Are answers to these questions on SPEC’s website? Yes! Did that ease the bewilderment of the student body? Well, no, because you have to go on the internet, then type in the “www-dot” thing, and then… ugh, this is so hard! Can’t SPEC just bring the answers directly to us, perhaps via Harry Potter owl?

“We anticipated that Penn students wouldn’t pay attention to anything,” Rusonis said. Even with Facebook, Twitter, DP coverage, flyering and University-wide emails, “There is no way to reach 100 percent of the student body.”

Sale said she knew that “this is going to be difficult to enforce and announce. The student body will not respond well to it.”

But, why? What’s the big deal? It’s organization, not rocket science. Seeing as some of us will graduate and really become rocket scientists, this should not seem daunting.

And so what if you didn’t get into the same section as your friend? This reminds me of the summer I spent as a camp counselor for fourth graders. The most infuriating thing about an eight-year-old girl is her unwillingness to be separated from her friends.

Try to put them on different teams for kickball. The adamant reply: “NO!” “But Julia, kickball is less than an hour long. You can see Lisa when it’s over.” Julia has no interest in logic. She pouts and shouts: “Nooo-wuh!”

Dearest fellow Quakers, we are not fourth graders. This concert is two hours long. If your best friend is sitting in another section, you’ll be okay. If you were next to said friend while the drunken hordes closed in and one of you slipped off the bleachers, bashing your head against the cement, you would be… not okay. Okay?

Go have fun; it’s not so hard. All right already, the show goes on.

Jessica Goldstein is a College senior from Berkeley Heights, N.J. Her email address is goldstein@theDP.com. Say Anything appears every other Wednesday.

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