“We were just goofing around one day and decided to name the event after one of our band members, whose name is Paul,” Simpson said.

Sweaty music festivals with youth gone wild have been a staple of American counterculture since 1969, when the Baby Boomers—in all their vainglory and with their brown acid—got together for three days of peace and music at what’s now known as the Woodstock Festival.
But like everything else in this country—D-Day, the Fourth of July—people decided to detract from Woodstock’s initial appeal and make it an annual event. After Woodstock followed a progression of similar music festivals led by aspiring, nostalgic bands in an attempt to revive the reckless spirit of peace, love, and drugs—in succession and without relent.
Now, in 2010, we have Warped Tour, Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, the Sasquatch Festival, the newly revived Ozzfest, Summerfest, and Fest 8, with each festival generating millions of ticket sales. What began as a rejection of Capitalism as if it were a demon disease, as a way of absconding from the tedium of the straight-and-narrow, now serves as the sole crutch for a music industry crumbling under the internet’s omniscience.

Simpson hopes Paulfest will take hold as a seasonal event, adding to its repertoire every major music festival along the way. For example: Paulfest’s take on Lollapalooza would manifest itself in the form of Paullapalooza.

Simpson and his bandmates are hopeful for Paulfest’s success but have yet to find a venue to host their festival, and its date is still undecided. Thus far, Paulfest has garnered over 70 confirmed guests on its Facebook event page.

Each year, the Leesville concert and symphonic bands hold a senior banquet to honor the achievements and contributions made by the band’s senior members during their high school years. Graduating seniors can even choose to give a small speech of gratitude if they so choose.

Most of us in the band have devoted much of our time to the ensemble, in addition to the two blocks we set aside for the two-semester course every year when we plan our academic schedule. But it is nice to return to school at the start of a new semester and resume procedure as if nothing much has changed. The sense of stability one feels from that element consistency, however seemingly scant or unimportant, during those moments in high school when every aspect of the educational process appears dreadful and uncertain, is without parallel. I could have easily taken six other classes with the time I’ve spent in Mr. Albert’s band room. But given the opportunity, I don’t believe I’d have it any other way.

Having been a member of Leesville’s band program for three years now, and having spent the better part of the last five years playing my clarinet with many of the same people, I understand the importance of being in the band. In my experience, the music we play is only secondary to the camaraderie we enjoy during rehearsal and on our spring trips, while preparing for music festivals and breaking the silence between musical movements and quarter rests with mindless chatter. It turns out there is virtue to be found in distraction after all.

The band banquet, which took place Friday, May 28 in the LRHS cafeteria, will serve as an opportunity for the band’s senior members to remember the past and celebrate the future, with a bitter sweetness that is both reluctant and embracing, until it becomes time for them to bid farewell to Leesville and trudge ahead into the rest of their lives.

Before she got started with the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, Leonard worked with Habitat for Humanity and her husband, Miguel Carias, to help build houses for underprivileged families.

It was not until Leonard lost her husband unexpectedly to cancer that Leonard shifted her philanthropic pursuits in a more focused direction.

“My husband was diagnosed with a form of leukemia with a 90% rate of survival. He just happened to be in that 10%,” Leonard said on Sunday at the show’s conclusion. “We’re hoping to close that gap here tonight.”

So while waiting on a miracle, Alley came up with the idea for Kirstie Alley’s Big Life, a new reality show that airs on the A&E network. Taking its cues from Fat Actress (2005), Alley’s first attempt at holding down a show whose sole focus was her stagnant fat, the show follows the fallen Jenny Craig patron through the ebb and flow of a normal day in the Alley household as she contemplates the pros and cons of healthy choices and daily exercise (pro: potential weight loss; con: required effort).

But despite its absurdity, Kirstie Alley’s Big Life is entertaining and funny. The show’s colorful cast consists of one stylist, an assistant—who has her own assistant—a handyman, and Alley’s two teenage children. While watching Big Life, one gets the feeling that life in the Alley household is nothing short of an extended slumber party.

But Big Life differs from Fat Actress in the way in which Alley’s attitude toward weight loss has become more positive, and thus more conducive to results. Alley’s perspective on being fat has matured since her first series.

In Fat Actress we witnessed a bitter Ms. Alley in general decline, with depleting funds, an expired contract, and a desperate desire to be thin and in movies. This is not to say that the image of Alley approaching the end of her tether while swinging and screaming and clawing her way back to perceived beauty in Fat Actress is not funny or without comedic merit. It is also not to say that there was never a point to the countless shallow weight loss pursuits.

Kirstie Alley’s Big Life seems to offer its viewers a message of hope. After years of self-loathing and personal sabotage, Alley is learning to accept the things she cannot change while doing her best to change the things she can.

When I saw the Blue Men perform at the Astor Place Theatre in New York this past weekend, I experienced much more than I expected I would find.

The show features three men with heads painted a melancholy shade of blue, with an expression of permanent astonishment tacked onto their faces for an added quality of otherworldly eeriness.

The performance itself unfolds like domestic childhood boredom run amok as the three Blue Men toss paint around the stage and through the air, as they crawl across rows of seats to flirt with their audience, as they bang on PVC pipes as if they were drums, and as they release toilet paper from rolls suspended from the ceiling like alien incarnations of Rumpelstiltskin spinning glorious golden ribbon from straw.

As unruly as the Blue Men get, there remains an ostensible sweetness about them. All they really want is to foster performer-audience connection. The Blue Men refuse to sit idly by and fall victim to communication in its most supremely superficial sense. Despite their amusingly preternatural appearance, the Blue Men want to be loved like everybody else.

In addition to the financial incentive to regulate marijuana, the legality of the drug would reduce criminal activity, clearing the court-system for the serious criminal offenses worthy of legal penalty.

California has always maintained a fairly liberal outlook on marijuana’s recreational use, the West Coast serving as the slouchy stoner’s Tabernacle. But the proposal of an act to regulate the fancy plant’s consumption the way alcohol is regulated across the country marks the start of what seems like a larger first step in the direction of total countercultural infusion into straight-laced, mainstream culture.

The experimental and recreational use of marijuana has gained near universal acceptance as a kind of social rite-of-passage, a relatively benign pastime, something almost everybody has done, does often, or will someday do. The Showtime sitcom Weeds provides an interesting look at this axiom. The show details the plight of a widowed mother who peddles marijuana, not on the side but as a full-time job, to her neighbors in the sunny LA suburb of Agrestic to support her two kids. On some level, the perpetually blazed Weeds’ suburb feels like a microcosmic representation of an America calling out in unison for its daily trance.

Awareness of the facts about drugs is more accurate and astute now than it was long ago, in the days of Reefer Madness, when misconception ran rampant. “Federal agents had told me that vipers are always dangerous, that an overdose of marijuana generates savage and sadistic traits likely to reach a climax in axe and icepick murders,” reporter Meyer Berger wrote in The New Yorker in 1938. Although there continue to be people who recoil in distress over anything with druggy connotations, the legalization cause is inspiring what many feel is a necessary and realistic discussion.

Depending on the outcome of the November mid-term election, California may be the first state to legalize and regulate marijuana for all of its uses. If this should happen, one can only presume that the rest of the country is not far behind.

In the early 2000s, email eradicated the mailman and the art of writing letters (snail mail), and became the primary method of text-based communication. With the wind went the days of waiting by the mailbox for the mailman’s arrival like Vladimir and Estragon waiting for Godot.

But with the growing prevalence of this innovative technology came new rules. Email assumed all the tasks and most of the etiquette of letter-writing, but remained less formal.

Now that texting has, for the most part, overwhelmed calling as the preferred method of distance-interaction, many avid texters like myself have established their own rules regarding the pastime. And while most of these rules are never really expressed—are discussed in hushed tones because such a thing as re-texting someone who has not yet responded to the initial text in question is understood as an act of desperation for seemingly no other reason than because it just is—many of them have gained wide acceptance.

Texting was originally meant to serve as nothing more than a quick and concise way of communicating something to a friend, something that does not warrant a phone call, something that can be said and left alone, without fanfare or frustrating goodbyes. It was meant to function as email on a smaller scale. Somewhere along the way, the art of good texting, in some circles, managed to ascend unto a new plateau of importance.

But an all too reliant relationship with text messaging breeds social awkwardness. An activity as casual as texting should never replace voice-to-voice communication, especially when the most commonly used lingo consists of acronyms and emoticons. It is imperative that the anxiety and formality associated with texting be broken.

So the next time you find yourself obsessing over whether or not it is too soon to text the cute guy you met at a party only a few hours prior, or whether your negligent friends have all conspired to ignore your messages after not responding for longer than two hours, take a deep breath and remember that it is not the end of the world. Remember that rules are sometimes best when broken, and that no matter what, forthrightness always prevails. So go ahead, be extra-friendly, send another text, or maybe even call. And if you’re daring enough to leave a voice message, do not forget to ramble, if for no reason other than the fact that you can.

We have seen famous bloggers, such as Perez Hilton, gain tremendous notoriety for essentially debasing the celebrity image, and ordinary people-made-famous via YouTube discourse, which might include anything from sex to politics to religion. The Great American Memoir has replaced the novel as the primary literary aspiration of the 21^st century. We are well into the Age of Indiscretion. But just because we can say anything, does that mean we must say everything?

Many of us could use a lesson in the art of discretion. There are certain times during which it behooves one to just keep quiet. However, with the prevalence of so many media outlets—and an endless amount of airtime that producers and executives are desperate to fill with chatter—keeping quiet is sometimes hard to do.

Howard Stern, radio commentator and provocateur, could use a lesson in the virtue of verbal constraint. After the Oscars last week, Stern criticized Precious actress Gabourey Sidibe’s weight. “There’s the most enormous, fat black chick I’ve ever seen. She is enormous. Everyone’s pretending she’s a part of show business and she’s never going to be in another movie,” he said.

While the First Amendment guarantees us the right to free speech, it is sometimes necessary to limit our public expression of opinion for the sake of common courtesy. It is important for us to remember that we are all united in the human experience. We should take that knowledge and use it as a way to become noble instead of vicious.

India Evans is a junior who falls gracefully into this category of teenagers. When she is not in school or with her friends or doing homework, Evans spends the hours that remain in the day making jewelry to sell on Etsy, a website which allows independent designers to sell their items online.

Evans began making jewelry in fourth grade. “I got into it because of my mom,” she explained. “I made mostly macramé before ever moving on to real jewelry.”

Soon after outgrowing macramé, Evans moved onto more complex pieces like bracelets and necklaces. “My mom made costumes and had supplies, so it all just started from there,” Evans said.

Evans characterizes most of her jewelry as Salvage Jewelry. “It’s when you take vintage pieces like chandelier crystals from flea markets and thrift stores and put them back together with newer things like beads from the bead store,” said Evans. “It’s very young and urban.”

Whenever she is in need of inspiration, Evans will turn to a collection of scrapbooks she keeps filled with cut-outs from magazines. “When I look through magazines, I’ll tear out pictures and keep them in binders,” said Evans. “It helps with the creative process.”

In November 2009, Evans participated in the Handmade Market for the first time, in which independent designers and artists showcase their creations for the public. “I rented a table with my mom and sold to people as they walked by,” she said.

Evans sees herself making and selling jewelry in the future. It is her favorite hobby.

India Evans’s jewelry is available online through Etsy and through her new blog.

For centuries people have tried to bottle the essence of youth. Women over forty continue to keep the cosmetics counter at Nieman Marcus in business with countless orders for La Mer and Retin-A, while middle aged men purchase expensive sports cars with the hope that anybody who might see them will divert any attention away from the silver hair or the large belly protuberant enough to seat six. But despite furious efforts to turn back the forever ticking hands of time, youth remains a slippery force of nature that only comes around once.

With youth, everybody gets only one shot of deliciousness before the hangman shows up and wrinkles set in, before life slithers away. Each of us has only a tiny window of opportunity to make it all worthwhile, to make good use of this coveted treat that we have been temporarily endowed with before it gradually and irrevocably fades forever.

Some of us will wake up in our middle age as the bitter remnants of a really great party, while some of us will wonder why we were never invited to the party which was always just around the corner but seemingly out of reach. However, most of us—at least those of us who wish to wake up in our forties in a nice house or Park Avenue duplex—will spend a large part of our teenage years in high school, worried about college and the future, suffering through AP courses, and doing just about anything to boost our transcripts. We will spend so many of our most precious years wondering if we will be successful, wondering if it will all work out, planning for the future while skimping on the present.

But this intense, even religious, devotion to success in high school is not without reason. Getting into college is harder and more competitive now than it was thirty years ago. And with the less-than-savory condition of our economy, we are experiencing an urgency that was not such an issue ten years ago. Even the SAT—which was originally meant to function as an aid for underprivileged kids who could not afford a tutor, an examination of a student’s present knowledge, a test you were not meant to study for—has lost its way. 

“Intellectual curiosity has changed since the last few generations because education has become just a process,” said Mr. Albert, band teacher. “People have become so fact-driven that there is not enough room for creativity.”

The desire to be the absolute best candidate for colleges, and ultimately potential employers, pushes kids into adulthood too fast and too soon, before they can ever enjoy adolescence the way Generation X or the Baby Boomers were able to. As students, we tend to view life in terms of GPA points and how many days until the next test that will determine our grade, and possibly even the course of our lives. High school is just a big schlep toward the real world, a place many of us have heard a lot about since elementary school.

But there is a world beyond applying to college. It is a shame that many students rarely get the chance to consider its possibilities before the pressure of success forces them to live in it.