by Victoria Gore
Southern Student Representative, 2013-2014
Southeastern Louisiana University, Hammond, LA
The phrase “Keep Portland Weird” is alive and well throughout downtown Portland. In just one city block you can see a variety of people, including business people, panhandlers (some with signs), newspaper peddlers, runners, teenagers in pajamas, and clowns. Yes, clowns.
In 2013, Sigma Tau Delta helped keep Portland interesting by adding our own bit of “weird” into the mix. Of course, I’m talking about my favorite convention event, the infamous Bad Poetry Contest and Dry T-shirt Skit Competition. The Bad Poetry Contest is divided into two categories: good-bad poetry and bad-bad poetry. The competition is fierce… and fiercely funny. If you don’t laugh until you cry, you aren’t laughing hard enough. I find that nothing is better than honestly bad poetry, and so my personal favorite last year was Ms. Jayne Wiese Higgins with her poem “Rage Against the Man,” a relic of her hippie youth from her hand-embroidered journal entitled “Feelings.”
The next best thing to the poetry contest is the Dry T-shirt Skit Competition. There are puns! What good word lover doesn’t like a little wordplay? The winners of the skit are more often than not a little bawdy, and the Alpha Eta Sigma Chapter from Westfield State University certainly lived up to the challenge. Their ingeniously inappropriate pun was “Chicks Like Big Dickens.”
From food to people to ideas, isn’t the best of everything a little weird? When you gather hundreds of bright young minds from around the country, you’re bound to find something a little weird… and a little wonderful.
This year we will be bringing our unique blend of weird and wonderful to historic Savannah, GA, to celebrate Sigma Tau Delta’s 90th anniversary. Join us at the 2014 Sigma Tau Delta International Convention for learning, fellowship and fun. I’ll see you at the Bad Poetry Contest!
Dry T-shirt Skit at the 2012 convention
