When someone asks you, “how are you?” How honest is your response? When you respond “good,” and ask them the same question, do you really care? Even in our Sewanee bubble, isolated from the harsh “outside world,” our words, conversations, actions, and even our own feelings often lack the color and grit of honesty. Tonight, we as the Sewanee community continued our tradition of having a forum for an onslaught of honesty—a means of completely uprooting the polite insincerity we typically accept without question.
Tonight was the performance of the famous Sewanee Monologues. This event is an opportunity for anyone to write a story to tell to the entire university. These stories are written and submitted anonymously and then read by a group of people who sign up to present these stories to us all as best they can. While some people choose to read their own monologues (kudos to all of you, that takes real courage!), anonymity adds an entirely new element to the experience. Hearing a story without a gender, color, class, greek organization, major, or label to pair it with allows the audience to respond to the author’s honesty with similarly honest empathy, feeling, and understanding. These stories cease to be about that girl who gets around, the douchebag in that fraternity, the one twitchy guy in my philosophy class, or the girl who always sits in the front and acts like she could teach the class; rather, the stories are about people no different from you or me. Why is this? Why do we have to listen to a story without the face that matches it in order to really connect with it and listen well? Lots of the monologues tonight addressed this very issue, the brokenness of our seemingly invincible community. However, this article isn’t a monologue itself, merely a mechanism for explaining this incredible event to those who were unfortunate enough to miss it.
Sewanee Monologues are not just for the English and theater majors. They aren’t exclusively for girls or gays or anyone in particular. These are your stories, my stories, our stories. They are happy, sad, awkward, funny, heart-wrenching, and uplifting. They are an opportunity for us all to come together to confront the honesty that we tend to hide. Sewanee Monologues are a carefully crafted 2 hour and 15 minute word-vomit. It is a beautiful thing that embraces each and every person’s truth and encourages everyone listening to really ponder what they hear. I would suggest that each time we all come together to pool our experiences and thoughts, we make our community even better than it was before. In case any of you were wondering where EQB has gone in recent years, it certainly showed up tonight in Guerry Auditorium.
Ecce quam bonum et quam iucundum habitare fratres in unum. Behold how good and how pleasant it is when brothers and sisters dwell together in unity.
A gold star on the forehead to everyone who wrote or read a monologue as well as to all of those people who made the event successful and came out to support an honest Sewanee. YSR!