During the past month or so, my enthusiasm for parties has withered from average to practically nonexistent. After four or five consecutive weekends of near-identical parties, I doubt that I would have attended Harwood Halloween if not for all the hype surrounding the annual event. But after multiple guarantees that this would be the best party of the year, I decided to attend.

What had initially appealed to me even more than the Harwood party was the RHS, Office of Student Affairs, and Office of Admissions sponsored substance-free laser tag event in Edmunds Ballroom the same night as Harwood Halloween. Call me a dork, but I’ve always loved laser tag and I’m actually decent at it.

The laser tag event was impressive. A huge inflatable laser tag game area took up the majority of the ballroom, while refreshments, a karaoke area, and a giraffe-head-adorned bouncy castle were dispersed in the remaining space. Costumed students milled around and waited in line for their turn at laser tag. Some sang loudly and badly on the karaoke machine, some released stress and excess energy in the bouncy castle, and the rest of us simply danced and chatted with our friends.

The most common complaint that I heard about the laser tag event was the fact that we did have to wait almost two hours for our turn to play. Because the line was rather unruly, some students simply cut ahead by standing next to people and moving forward. Luckily, the rest of the students were good-natured enough to let it slide. If the RHS decided to repeat this event next year, they could avoid this problem by simply issuing numbers to people as they came in so that cutting would not be an issue. This would also free students up to play in the bouncy castle or to join in the karaoke.

After playing laser tag, I headed over for Harwood, shivering in my flimsy costume. I was then turned away from about four different entrances to the Harwood courtyard and forced to walk all the way to the south of the building in order to enter. A huge crowd of people, dressed up as all types of crazy characters and inanimate objects (and concepts, like "Famine"), danced energetically to the rather soft music.

For some reason, it seemed like the Halloween atmosphere affected the behavior of many of the partiers. My butt received two unwelcome, full-on grabs, and a few drunken students physically threatened one of my male friends. However, it seemed that the vast majority of the students there were having a great time. The costumes added a lot to the event, helping it to stand out from other parties. There seemed to be a lot of students from the other 5-C’s, as well as other universities like Occidental and UC Berkeley. Laura Lopez ’04 commented "It was too packed..they should have restricted it to just the 5 C’s."

After all the publicity surrounding the Harwood party, I expected it to be something truly spectacular. And it was, in the sense that it actually did look and feel slightly different than the other parties of the year because of all the costumes, and because of the elevated level of excitement in the air. I think the crucial factor of a successful party is the enthusiasm of the partiers. For example, a member of my sponsor group insisted that Frosh Aid has thus far been the best party of the year. An easy explanation for this could be that all the freshmen that attend the party are hyped up and eager to experience their first official college party.

The greatest accomplishment of Harwood for this year is not getting shut down. The party actually lasted all the way until 1AM, probably mostly thanks to the lowered music volume.

The aspect of both of these events that made them noteworthy is that they are actually different from the other parties held on campus. Hopefully, they will inspire other party planners to be more novel in putting their events together.