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Spirit Quest
When the face paint comes out, I hide in the music storage attic
. . . By Chrissie DeMaso

Friday afternoon walking down Thayer Street I saw something I thought I would never see at Brown. In fact, four years ago I chose Brown at least partially because I thought I would never see this very thing. And what is it, you ask? School spirit. Specifically school spirit strong enough to make people paint their faces.

Regression therapy
I don’t honestly know when my dislike of extreme (by extreme I mean anything much beyond clapping and generally hoping that your team wins) school spirit began. I could blame it on my early exposure to my family’s devotion to the University of Michigan. But I think my aversion to that spirit was due mainly to a desire to be different and a basic dislike of football. I also seem to remember a childhood fondness for the Duke basketball team.

No, the real hatred of school spirit started in high school. Despite playing multiple sports at my suburban public high school, I never participated in typical “fan” behavior. Maybe it was because I didn’t like a lot of the people I went to school with, maybe it was because I still just hated football; whatever it was, I avoided school spirit like Icelandic chamber orchestra concerts. We may have been one half of the country’s oldest Thanksgiving Day high school football rivalry, but I wasn’t buying the hype. I think mostly it just felt forced and insincere. I participated in spirit days for teams on which I played—but donning a tie or wearing my warm-ups and pigtails seemed pretty innocuous. And I was always sure to stop short of putting any sort of paint on my face. For four years I avoided the dread red ‘W’ on my cheek with the tired excuse of having sensitive skin.

When I discovered that being part of the “concert band” also involved mandatory participation in the marching band, I nearly lost it. While I have since come to deeply respect real marching bands, ours was pitiful. Marching band involved sitting in the stands, in the cold, at football games and playing so poorly that people often failed to come in, cutting the punch-line from Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” It also involved a town parade for which we trained 3 days a year and were lucky if we could at least walk without running into each other, let alone play the piece well. So to make up for missed football games I spent much of the fall season sorting sheet music. It wasn’t such a bad compromise: I never had to embarrass myself or support my school publicly and instead I got to hang out in the secret attic of the school. Skipping football games only became a feat when our football team went to and won the Massachusetts championship football game and the band director tried to crack down on attendance. But thanks to much determination, I avoided even that game.

My final rejection of school spirit came when I refused to attend the big pep rally my senior year. This pep rally involved a much heralded “senior women dance.” I did not skip wearing a “squaw” made of red felt and covered in marker scrawls to save my dignity or because I found it demeaning, but rather because I simply could not stomach supporting school sports that way. I couldn’t even manage to sit through the pep rally without dancing. So I secretly smiled as the secretary read my excuse note and told me how horrible it was that I had to miss the big fun event for a dentist appointment.

The here and now
Having survived high school relatively unscathed, I decided I would be safest at a college that had negligible school spirit. Brown seemed just right. Alumni loved the school and had “spirit,” but no one was going to chase me with lipstick trying to put a big red ‘B’ on my face, there would be no pep rallies, and no one would think I was weird for loving sports but not the spirit. It was just what I needed. Throughout my four years at Brown I actually managed to forget my school spirit phobia. I went to watch the soccer team play when I felt like it, I saw Drumline and made ex-drumline-member friends and actually wished I had been in a marching band. I even bought a school sweatshirt.

Apparently once the pressure to be spirited was off, I became more comfortable with school spirit. Some may criticize Brown students for being fair-weather fans, but it is the fact that we are allowed to be fair-weather fans that makes school spirit so much more genuine here. People support when they feel the urge, and when they do, they support well. You can’t honestly tell me everyone at Duke or University of Michigan wants to paint themselves and scream at all those games. It’s the relaxed atmosphere that lets me deal with school spirit here. You’ll still never see me with my face painted or engaging in school cheers/songs, but I know you’ll understand that my spirit is still there. And for those of you who do paint your faces, two tips: be careful with the pattern you choose, as the Brown colors can look a bit like blackface, and you probably don’t want to write the entire phrase “Brown Bears” running across your face.

Despite the above, Chrissie DeMaso B’03 is still proud that she played on a state championship soccer team in high school.

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