Rapture Ruptures

Rapture, the SAC dance held two weeks ago, has become the first dance in four years to loose money. Just over four hundred tickets were sold, almost a hundred less than the number required to break even. Luckily, Senior Social Convenor Morgan Shim was able to negotiate DJ 2 Smooth down from his original undisclosed fee, convincing him to merely take all of the money raised through the sale of tickets and concessions. This left the SAC to pay for all of other costs of running the dance, most notably the cost of hiring two off duty police officers. The total loses figure to be close to somewhere between three and four hundred dollars.

Even SAC executives were quick to call the dance a failure. My own impression of the dance was not a good one. While the cafeteria was certainly darker and more smoke filled then normal, it was still obviously the cafeteria and not some kind of bad assed dance club. DJ 2 Smooth seemed to compensate for the general poorness of the music he had to offer by pumping massive amounts of base out of a set a giant speakers that caused the plastic wall between the cafe and the lecture hall to vibrate. The intelligent light show consisted of two small banks of coloured lights which were flashed about at random, and one of those rotating light balls you can buy at Radio Shack. There were rarely more than two hundred people in the cafe at any one time, most of whom hung around the edges of the room, sitting on folded cafeteria tables or leaning against unplugged candy machines.

At many points there seemed to be more people outside the cafeteria then in it. Packs of grade ten girls wandered through the halls, attempting to mooch cigarettes off the coat check staff. It seemed as though the majority of students in attendance were grade nines and tens, though many older students were attracted by the break off. Clusters of people loitered outside the school, looking vaguely threatening and smoking pot. A good portion the people attending were not students at our school, though our school suffered in this regard, since several better schools were having dances on the same night. While our SAC executive paid to enter their own dance, Communications Officer Mehdi attended another school's dance for free, using the eight tickets given to him by that school student council executive.

Rapture makes me question the value of even having school ances. Is it really necessary for the student council to spend thousands of dollars on an event that most students don't care about? In the case of Rapture, the SAC ultimately ended up subsiding an evening of "fun" for a few hundred students at a cost of almost a dollar per head. Why are dances so expensive to run? DJ 2 Smooth and company walked away with over two thousand dollars for one evenings work. Is this the cheapest DJ our school could find? It's not like people expect a lot from a school dance, so why waste a lot money trying to make the dance seem better then it is? You could have the Beaver Foods women DJ a dance, and four hundred people would still show up.