Not much for complaints

MCA schedule worth a look

By Sarah Paul

Posted on Oct. 18, 2001, at 12:00 a.m.

Sarah Paul

For The Maine Campus

Rarely do the words “I’m bored,” ever escape my lips, but when they do, I am looking for some hardcore, awe-inspiring (preferably free) entertainment.

Now I know that some people love to unwind watching soap operas or sitcoms on television, but I personally get to the point where I just need to get out of my apartment.

Sure, there are weekend parties and athletic events for me to go to, but I also want to see someone get up on stage and perform for me. I want rock concerts, local bands, plays and dance performances; I want hot music and cool performing arts. Since one of the best parts of writing a column is playing devil’s advocate, I have a bone to pick with some of the entertainment options at the University of Maine.

I keep hearing buzz that other colleges in Maine are hosting some pretty great concerts. G. Love and Special Sauce just played at Colby College, the Counting Crows had a date at Bates College, and boy, was I disappointed when I missed Ben Folds Five’s performance at Bowdoin College two years back.

So, I got excited and I called to see what performances I could look forward to at the Maine Center for the Arts and I came up with.Gordon Lightfoot? If you are a huge fan of his, please don’t take any offense to this. I know that the man definitely has a great deal of talent and I love the song “If You Could Read My Mind.” Instead, I was really hoping for something more along the lines of Staind or maybe even Nelly Furtado.

I’m aware that private institutions such as Colby, Bates and Bowdoin may have more coins in their piggybanks to put towards student entertainment than we do, but is it too much to ask of performers to come as far north as Orono, Maine? It irks me that if I want to go to a concert I have to travel south to Portland. By the time I’ve paid for the tickets to a concert at the Cumberland County Civic Center, I don’t even have enough gas money to get down there. All I have to look forward to is dollar movie night at Spotlight Cinemas and the two free tickets I can get each semester to go to the MCA. Heck, even those aren’t free because I already paid for them as part of my comprehensive fee.

Another thing that disheartens me is when I head to the MCA to pick up my comp tickets only to discover that the Mandy Patinkin or Shawn Colvin concerts aren’t included in the free ticket deal. It makes me want to cry when anything good comes along – I’ve always got to drop anywhere from $18 to $45 to see it.

Originally, my beef was that the MCA catered more to the outside community than to the student body, but then I did some digging around for information. I figured if the students were in charge, there would be no way that we would invite the London City Opera to perform “The Merry Widow.”

After a bit of research, it turns out that both the University of New Hampshire and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst have very similar performance schedules as is offered here at the University of Maine. I discovered that the MCA actually takes the cake in bringing in performers such as the American Indian Dance Theatre, the Ballet Gran Folklorico de Mexico and the New Shanghai Circus.

We are truly lucky to have such a culturally-diverse population here at UMaine, and we should be pleased that we have the ability to cater to the interests of many different people. We also rely on the community for funding and support, and it is great that our own MCA is a place where the community and the university can intermingle.

Not only that, but when I dug in to find fun things to do, I realized that there was a great deal of opportunity at my fingertips.

I can get involved with planning for Bumstock 2002, take in a show by Blind Albert, a local band at the Waterfront Grill in Bangor on Oct. 27 or check out the “Noises Off” production which lands at Hauck Auditorium in December.

I had never really looked hard enough because all I really wanted was to be bombarded by entertainment options. For me (and I am sure that it’s the same for many other students), entertainment is one of those things that we really don’t want to have to work for at all.

The moral of this column is -they who do not beg do not get the entertainment that they want. Adele Adkins, the marketing and friends promotion guru at the MCA told me that she reads every suggestion that is put into the MCA Info folder on FirstClass and our Student Entertainment Committee is always asking for fresh ideas from students, too.

The reality of the situation is that if we want great entertainment here on campus, all we have to do is get involved.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 18th, 2001, 12:00 am. You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS feed.