This week’s campus celebrity, Janie Laursen, is one of the founding members of the new big band on campus, Dirty Mocs. Short for dirty moccasins, Dirty Mocs consists of Janie on kazoo and Jesse Fried on melodica. Janie first heard Jesse’s melodica skills drunkenly in her freshman dorm. When Janie received a kazoo in her Choral Society care package last fall, they jammed to Adele, and the rest, they say, is history. (Janie has since invested in a higher quality $5 kazoo). The band will be releasing a Christmas album that will be released within the next few weeks and will be available on CDs hand-decorated by Janie and Jesse.
Janie has always been very musical and started singing in choir in middle school. Despite having the terrifying experience of being forced on stage to play the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz last minute without knowing any of the lines, she has continued to follow her passion for music through high school and at Amherst. Janie is an active member of Women’s Chorus and is also one of the few women to participate in Glee Club functions.
The fall of her junior year, Janie went abroad to Stockholm, Sweden in a program she and four other juniors started. She studied gender studies and learned to speak Swedish with her host parents and their adorable blonde children.
Janie will graduate this spring with a degree in English literature and is currently working on her thesis on The Secret Garden. Some of her life goals for after college are:
-Write a play in which the characters have various degrees of a Minnesotan accent (Janie’s home land)
-Do a GPS recording in a Minnesotan accent
-Be a forest
-Be a unicorn tamer
-Get a job as a magic show audience plant
If none of those pan out, however, Janie sees herself going into publishing or the library sciences.
P.S. I’m getting a press copy of the Dirty Mocs Christmas album. There will be a review. Watch this space.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Amherst chapter.