If judged by his looks, Thom Jones might be considered a bit of a hipster from downtown New York City, in a leather jacket, blue Chucks, dirty-washed jeans, and a hat to top off his outfit. But when Jones, the master of accents, opens his mouth, he transforms.

The lobby of Brown-RISD Hillel, where he teaches TSDA 0930A: “The Actor’s Instrument: Voice” alongside Professor of Theatre, Speech and Dance Lowry Marshall, turns into a city subway as he takes on the voice of a hypothetical Puerto Rican woman who, he says, wears earrings “the size of doorknockers.”

“Ay! But, of corrs!” he says, rolling his “R’s” emphatically, as he puts his hands on his hips. It is like witnessing a metamorphosis, as the clean-shaven, green-eyed Clinical Associate Professor of Theatre, Speech & Dance becomes an incarnation of the stereotypical Latina woman, loud and extravagant.

Jones smiles when he sees the reaction he gets from Ana Bermudez ’12, who is first meeting the “Master of the Accents” from the referral of a mutual friend. Like Jones, she shares the natural ability to imitate an accent with precision.

“Ay mami!” she replies, loudly and clearly, instantly altering her own Colombian accent to become that of a Latina who might easily be found in a telenovela. Her smile widens, as she adds a hand gesture to heighten her new accent.

“Mijita, that sweateh, it look so naice on you,” she continues, complimenting the striped sweater that Jones wears under his jacket and speaking so fast that it’s hard to keep up. The two of them have hit it off instantly, entering a multicultural dimension as they begin switching rapidly from accent to accent.

Hillel’s receptionist glares at the pair—they’re disrupting the peaceful atmosphere. But in between the laughter and accents, neither of them realizes that they are speaking significantly louder.

“It’s nice to meet another nerd like me,” Jones says, laughing and almost breathless. He extends his hand and officially greets Bermudez. “I think we could definitely be friends.”

Jones, a classically trained actor, started teaching speech training when he was a student at Purchase College. Although he had an acting career that included performances in the Phantom of the Opera, he found he kept coming back to teaching.

“I then realized that this is the way this career is going,” he said. “This is the right path, and I like it.”

According to Jones, there are three fundamental aspects that make up an accent: vocal placement (“Which is where you place your voice at—is it in the back, middle or front?”), the rhythm (or rate at which the person speaks—slow, drowsy, choppy, you name it), and musicality, which has to do with pitch.

“For example the general American [accent] is broadly expressive; it has one or two notes,” Jones explains.

Jones has had a broad experience coaching several Hollywood celebrities, including Mel Gibson in his recent movie Edge of Darkness and Nicole Kidman in the movie Rabbit Hole. “I was also a dialect coach for the show Brotherhood, which takes place in Providence,” he says, explaining that the city has a very specific dialect, so he had to work carefully with the actors to get it just right.

Jones says that the difference between accents is a mostly geographical phenomenon. In the southern United States, the climate is hotter, “So your body is more relaxed, and you’re goanna speek lahk this,” Jones drawls, whereas with the chicano accent from LA, “It’s gonna be more urban, man.”

Bermudez continues her lesson, suddenly pulling out her secret weapon: the Indian accent. She picked it up after spending the last two years of high school in the United World College in India and has continued practicing during her time at Brown.

“T’is the way they say the T’s that ti’s hard,” she says, her voice slipping into the perfect rhythm.

Mesmerized, Jones says he would have believed she was actually from India—not only did she execute the vocals perfectly, but she also played the part well. “It was lovely. It was subtle,” Jones says, explaining that her gestures and the way she moved her body made the accent seem natural. “That shows mastery.”

“Voice is so expressive,” he adds. “That’s why you have to have imagination to teach people how to deal with accents. You have to teach them everything—how to breathe, when to pause.”

Captivated, Bermudez  patiently listens to everything he has to say. It is the first time she has witnessed a professional explaining the technique behind a craft she has always considered little more than an entertaining hobby.

“You have a talent,” Jones tells his newest student. “There’s a specific thing that you feel, and the way you listen, you’re connecting.”

He calls this “empathetic listening.” In trying to grasp an accent, both he and Bermudez are trying to get closer to those who possess it naturally, to share a moment.

“We articulate the emotional experience that we are having,” he tells her. “And you and I feel emotions very strongly.”

Laughing, he adds, “I’m sure it’s also a great source of entertainment for your friends.”

“You’re right,” she says with a giggle. “They seem to really like what I can do.”

I put this quote before this paragraph and rephrased the following sentence a little

For years, she has been the comic/actress within her group of friends, her repertoire of accents helping to break the ice or simply to make a house party more fun.

If she can do so much already with just her raw talent, Jones says, then who knows how far she’ll go with formal training in the discipline

I changed from “if she actually sits down, etc…”

Inspired by her new mentor, Bermudez says she is now considering an acting class in the future.

“It’s as if I’ve found my soulmate,” she jokes.

Filed under: Features by Luisa Robledo
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Last week, I discussed the correlation between pockets of good weather and rashes of PDA. What I didn’t mention is that these balmy afternoons and golden dusks also mark another important yearly phenomenon that, as a sex columnist in my final year at Brown, would be irresponsible of me to ignore: Senior Scramble.

What is Senior Scramble exactly? According to Urban Dictionary, Senior Scramble is:

The last-ditch attempt among college seniors to find new hook-up partners or to consummate a long-standing crush before graduation. While the term may refer to the final year of college, it is usually understood to mean the final semester, especially during the last weeks of school. With the impending end of a college environment, the connotations of the term “senior scramble” are of desperate solicitation and confession.

I like this definition. It covers the essentials. However, a friend recently called my attention to the fact that Senior Scramble presents us with a chicken-or-egg dilemma. Which comes first? The conscious quest for last-minute liaisons, or the naturally arising urge to connect with people because time is running out? Do we do the scrambling, or does the scramble do us? I put my money on the latter.

Some restrict Senior Scramble to Senior Week, the true 11^th hour of senior year, but I believe the Scramble begins well before the home stretch of May. We’re months away from the last hurrah, yet I’ve felt my biological Brown clock ticking ever since returning this January. As with menstruation, there are a finite number of eggs to be had at this institution, and a four-year window during which to fertilize them.

Stay with me here—I have been chattering on about Senior Scramble, which may lead you to believe that this phenomenon applies to only ¼ of the undergraduate population. I’m pleased to debunk this fallacy. You too could be part of this sexual free-for-all, freshmen reading this sentence in the Ratty, sophomores skimming the sex column in the SciLi, and juniors perusing Post- at Jo’s.

That’s right; you might already be implicated in this mess. You might not yet be an egg in a Senior Scramble, but you may already be an ingredient in a Senior Omelet in which seniors act as the eggs that hold the omelet together, and the underclassmen represent the fixings that give the omelet its decidedly un-egglike textures and flavors. (I can’t take credit for the theory of Senior Omelet. I’m indebted to a friend with a penchant for social commentary and a knack for metaphor construction.) If you want to extend this metaphor even further, it is up to you how many fixings you want to include in your omelet. All I’m saying is, you’re only a senior once, and polyamory is potentially a condiment on the table.

And seniors! Our days at Brown are numbered. True, we run the risk of disease (e.coli) and fear crushing our delicate protective shells in the process, but we might as well just go for the Scramble or the Omelet, depending on what we’re craving, and not worry about getting egg on our faces, as it were.

So the question remains: can we, could we, should we incorporate aspects of the senior egg dish mentality into our sexual interactions at other, less urgent moments? I’ll let those of you currently in the throes of The Scramble decide for yourselves.

Keep this in mind: omelets (and scrambles) are delicious. And, in order to make one, you do have to break a few eggs.

Bon Appétit.

Filed under: Lifestyle by Post- Magazine
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Brown may be ranked among the nation’s happiest colleges, but the truth is that life here isn’t always fun, games, and a cappella. Just like any other university, Brown has its fair share of troubled students—undergrads beset with either mental or physical illness (or sometimes both), who struggle to deal with their problems while fulfilling their academic responsibilities.

Sometimes these students find themselves in such dire situations—they may be failing classes, or, at worst, may have attempted suicide—that the Office of Student Life advises or requires that they take a one-year leave of absence.

While it goes without saying that extreme cases warrant forced medical leave, it’s unsettling to think that Brown’s administration has the power to send students home against their will.

But Associate Dean Maria Suarez says mandated leaves are “very, very rare” at Brown, and are reserved only for students opposed to leaving campus and who pose an “imminent risk” to themselves or to others.

Belinda Johnson, the director of Psychological Services, affirms that most students who go on medical leave do so voluntarily—though she does add that most students are initially opposed to the idea.

“It sometimes takes students a long time to figure out that that’s what they want to do,” she says. “It’s not often the case that students wake up in the morning and say, ‘I want to take a medical leave.’”

One student, who asked to remain anonymous, had what seems to be the typical experience with medical leave last semester. It was her decision to go on medical leave, though she received strong encouragement from University administrators.

Let’s call her Lauren. Last fall, during her very first days as a freshman on College Hill, she found herself overwhelmed by depression and severe anxiety—problems that she’d been dealing with long before her arrival at Brown.

“At the beginning of the year, I was having basically nightly anxiety attacks, so I’d end up just running around campus at two in the morning, not having any idea what was going on,” she recalls. “It got to a point where I couldn’t do my work—I was pretty non-functional.”

By the second week of school, Lauren had already met with a dean in the Office of Student Life, after being referred there by a concerned professor. The dean, as well as therapists in Psychological Services, urged Lauren to leave campus, but she initially refused.

“They did attempt to send me home, about a month in,” she says. “I had to literally convince the deans to let me stay.”

In order to stay on top of her workload, Lauren requested extensions from professors, but her depression and constant anxiety attacks made it impossible for her to do well in her classes. Throughout the semester, even as late as November, deans and therapists in Psychological Services encouraged her to return home. “What they said is they don’t see a reason for prolonging any suffering,” she says.

Near the end of the fall semester, finding that her depression made it almost impossible to focus on her responsibilities as a student, Lauren finally chose to take some time away from Brown.

“You can’t really stay in school and fail all your classes,” she says. “It just doesn’t make sense.”

While most students who go on medical leave recognize that they need to get away from school to sort out their issues, many are turned off by the prospect of leaving Brown—not for just one, but for two full semesters.

Technically, there is no official two-semester rule in place. But since students on medical leave must apply for readmission either in November or May, it is difficult for them to take a medical leave shorter than a full school year.

The rationale behind this policy, says Dean Suarez, is to ensure that students returning from medical leave are fully ready to come back. Two semesters gives students enough time to be sure they’ve recovered and that they’ve experienced a “sustained period of recovery,” she says.

Likewise, Johnson says students are much more likely to experience a successful return to Brown after two semesters away, rather than one. “We don’t want our students to come back and take another leave,” she says.

Students eligible for medical leave are well aware of the reasoning behind this policy, but it doesn’t help to allay their fears.

“I have a definite and very large problem with the two-semester leave policy,” Lauren says. “A year is an excessively long time, I think—certainly not everyone’s problems can be solved in a semester, but who’s to say it can take two or more?”

As Lauren and other students who have gone on medical leave can attest, it’s not just the idea of going home that frightens them—it’s going home for a full year, with nothing to do and almost no one to see.

“It doesn’t feel great when none of your friends are there, and you don’t have anything at the moment planned,” Johnson says. “For some students, that seems very scary.”

According to Johnson, the vast majority of medical leave cases involve depression, but conditions such as eating disorders also qualify students for time away from Brown. With this in mind, a few important questions begin to crop up.

Does it really make sense to send depressed and troubled students home, when their friends and those they’re close to are away at college? What if these students have problems with their parents? Is it reasonable to condemn them to another year in their company? Can we really be sure that the best solution for every troubled student is an unproductive year at home? And isn’t there something to be said for sorting out these issues here at Brown? The answers to these questions aren’t simple—and they vary widely on a student-to-student basis.

Johnson says medical leave is only necessary when a student’s medical condition becomes so severe that he or she is unable to “effectively focus on their studies.”

But reflecting, for instance, on the high incidence of suicide in the past few months at Cornell University, one can’t help but wonder: to what extent is the University’s decision to ship off students influenced by liability issues?

According to Dean Suarez, the answer is none. “Our concern is the students’ wellbeing and welfare,” she says. And there’s no evidence to the contrary.

Students returning from medical leave, meanwhile, often come back to Brown having reconciled with the University’s decision to send them away. More often than not, they realize that they made the right decision—and that they’ve really benefited from their time off.

“My experience has been that, overwhelmingly, the students who have taken a medical leave find it was very helpful and just what they needed,” Suarez says.

One student who was forced to take leave from Brown because of an eating disorder says that when she was sent home, she wasn’t able to appreciate how big a favor the University was doing her.

“I was pissed at the time—I was furious,” she recalls. “It feels like you’re being singled out, and your world is falling apart.”

But after spending some time at home and dealing with a month-long bout of depression, she began to feel better, more like her old self. And she began to realize how much she needed time away from Brown to heal.

“Within a few weeks, I realized how important it was for me to be placed on medical leave,” she says. “For me, medical leave was the right thing, even though I wasn’t able to admit it at the time.”

Lauren, who just returned home a few months ago, is still coping with her depression and anxiety. She doesn’t do much besides go to therapy, drink a lot of coffee and watch a lot of movies. “I ended up befriending all the workers at Starbucks,” she says. “They all know me.”

Johnson says that such behavior is normal for students who go on medical leave—and that, in time, the majority of them find ways to make the most of their time away from Brown. Eventually, once they start to feel like their old selves again, they end up doing something that’s interesting to them—like getting an internship or a job, or finding some volunteer work.

For the time being, Lauren doesn’t have much to look forward to at home, besides more days spent watching movies and at Starbucks, and, as of this week, a new job. But if other students who have taken medical leave before her can serve as an example, it’s likely that she’ll return to College Hill in one year, a much happier person, and a more capable student.

Filed under: Features by Matt Klebanoff
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Frank: Dear F*ckers,

Apparently no one has any questions this week, so unfortunately for you, Joe and I, who in the meantime have become more and more like Norman Mailer, each in our own ways (I, for instance, have become astonishingly petty), are going to write to you, in the tradition of our forefather, “as if [we] were talking in [our] living room, or in yours…[our] opinions will be half-formed, if not totally inarticulate, but at least they can be awkwardly close to the questions [we are] really thinking about” (Advertisements for Myself, 287). Yep—just like Old No’man [sic] used to do, as punishment to all of you reading this right now, for giving up on the column. The Hardy Brothers is a participatory democracy, people. That’s the whole concept. Get with it. Didn’t you see anything in Lulu that confused you? Don’t you have any thoughts about the Dionysian oral sex party sponsored by the CAC in List I proposed last week? Am I the only one who wants to go to that instead of some senior ice skating night with complimentary Brown flavored water or whatever the f*ck it is? People, we give you so much! Use your imaginations, at least. Ask questions.

Alright. Well, since you’ve left us to our own devices, this week I’ve decided to write about how sex with a new partner is not like sex your first time. This statement is obvious, but is worth expounding upon. I feel the subject matter is also seasonally appropriate since spring is traditionally a time of new life and sexual blossoming, which means…NEW PARTNERS and GENDER CONFUSION (okay, now everyone read Spring Awakening—ready, set, go!). If we put the latter on hold for this column, I’m totally serious; if everyone doesn’t start having sex with each other soon like something out of a Bosch painting, I’m gonna kill myself from boredom or start writing for Perez Hilton.

So, New Partners in Three Parts, in honor of Wallace Shawn: 1. When you have sex with a new partner, you want to perform well. The same goes for your First Time. The difference between the two is that by the time you understand the concept of a new partner, you also understand the concept of what it means to perform well. 2. What does it mean, then, when you don’t perform well (Hegel asked this question a lot)? Well, it kind of doesn’t mean anything. It’s just disappointing, but only slightly so. If you f*ck up your First Time, you want to weep, cut off your penis, weep some more, and throw yourself off a bridge to prevent the partner you’ve just failed with from seeing any of this. It will also prevent them from recovering your body and re-attaching your penis (embarrassing), or not re-attaching your penis (more embarrassing), and the person you lost your virginity to will also tell everyone that you were a good lay even though you were terrible because that’s how we talk about the dead in this great country. 3. In conclusion, sex doesn’t matter as much after your First Time because you never feel like you do in 2. again.

4. Therefore…well, you can draw your own conclusions. I’m gonna go drink a beer and think about space travel. Till next week…Love, Frank.

***

Joe:  I f*cking hate it when Frank does his space travel thing. It’s like watching a stoned reading of The Elegant Universe, only more pretentious. So please, Brunonians, stop f*cking us and yield some questions already. If your own sex lives are so boring such that you have no quandaries, no concerns, and no conundrums with which to confront us, here are some examples of some crazy ass f*cking (described or partaken in by your publicly elected officials) that you should know about:

1) Johnny Be Good: John Edwards, The Daily Beast tells us, threw his pregnant girlfriend against the headboard of their hotel bed and went down on her while she videoed the whole thing during his fall of ‘07 presidential run. He may be a fraud and a shitty public speaker (anyone see that fiasco in Salomon 101 last spring?), but you have to applaud his bravado. Make more sex tapes, people.

2) No Wiggling Required: Last month, New Hampshire State Rep. Nancy Elliot offered her take on anal sex during a hearing on gay marriage: “We’re talking about taking the penis of one man and putting it in the rectum of another man and wriggling it around in excrement…And you have to think, I’m not sure, would I allow that to be done to me?”

C’mon Nance! You should know that you’re not supposed to do it there unless you’ve already taken a doodoo! Same goes for you guys and gals. But, seriously, try it. Make up for our minimal anal (still only ¼ of a time), and write us about it.

3)  Jail Bait Tickle Fight: First, don’t do anything like Kevin Garn, the Republican State Rep. in Utah that skinny dipped in a hot-tub with a 15-year-old in 2002, then paid her $150,000 to stay quiet. Stay away from Hope High School, the Wheeler School, and large tubs of hot water, and you should be covered on this front. Also, while we’re at it, don’t get into a tickle fight with your friends if it makes them uncomfortable. New York Rep. Eric Massa is learning that lesson the hard way, offering his resignation at the same time that news broke that he was groping male staffers in the office.

So Ladies and Gentleman, don’t veil your bigotry (or anal sex) in “excrement.” Don’t (almost) commit statutory rape, or touch people in ways that make them feel uncomfortable. But, do have sex on videotape with enthusiasm, remember last week?!

Most of all, take heed: this is what we look like when you don’t love us with your words—disheveled, disorganized, hot and bothered, verbose and aching with lust. Please love us again, we miss you. Write to us about your sex. Write to us, period. The dawn of spring has renewed our virile vigor and refueled our tanks of testosterone. Providence is so beautiful in March, and we all want someone to share it with us. Our treat.

—-xoxo The Hardy Brothers

Filed under: Lifestyle by The Hardy Brothers
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Admittedly, handing out a four-star rating in your first published film review is like wearing a tuxedo to the first day of class. The enthusiasm is commendable, but it may be overdoing it a bit. Fortunately, that’s not the case here: France’s (unsuccessful) submission for this year’s “Best Foreign Language Film” earns the rating—and probably more so than any other film you saw in 2009. But, you interject, what about Avatar and its groundbreaking 3-D visuals? Or The Hurt Locker and its expertly-crafted, almost-ceaseless bomb-disarming tension? A Prophet is better and more entertaining than both and proves, along with Sweden’s Let the Right One In, Germany’s The Lives of Others, and Spain-Mexico’s Pan’s Labyrinth, that the division maintained between the “Best Picture” and “Best Foreign Language Film” Oscars is not only bizarre, but entirely absurd.

A Prophet, (French title: Un Prophete), is the story of Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rhaim), a young man of unspecified North African descent serving a six-year prison term in France for assaulting a police officer. Avoiding the common prison movie tropes, A Prophet does not construct its plot around a desire to escape or a will to survive until eventual release. Malik is a character who may think about the future, but he acts decisively in the present; it just so happens that his present is a brutally political prison-yard teeming with Muslim thugs, corrupt guards, and a group of hegemonic Corsican Mafiosos led by a modern-day Machiavelli named Luciani. Though Malik at first attempts to keep himself removed from all the intrigue, he is drawn into the Godfather-esque world of protection and promotion, favors and punishments, when the Luciani asks him to kill a new Arabic-speaking prisoner who may spill some sensitive information in court. He tells Malik he could choose not to do it, except that his awareness of the planned hit means that he himself would have to be killed. This is the startling—and incredibly fascinating—underworld in which A Prophet carefully unfolds.

While perhaps the story is the most interesting part of A Prophet, there is no denying that Malik is a compelling central character. Unexpectedly, however, though the events taking place in the prison (spoiler: and beyond) are mediated through his character, he remains somewhat unknowable. We never learn very much about his background, his family, or his criminal history. Sometimes, such as when he is self-studying Corsican in his cell, one gets the sense that, ostracized by Muslims and non-Muslims alike, he is just looking for acceptance. On the other hand, when he is seen using his ability to understand the obscure Mediterranean language to his own material advantage, it is obvious that his motives are not so guiltless. Though the viewer comes to learn more about the ever-complicated Malik through his relationships and interactions with other prisoners, it must be said that even as the credits roll, he remains tantalizingly elusive.

So, is there anything negative about A Prophet? Each viewer may have his or her own minor criticisms, but it would be difficult to find any major fault with the film. Admittedly, I did overhear one viewer criticize it for being too long. Obviously, at 150 minutes, A Prophet is by no means short and will easily eat up most of your evening or afternoon. That said, it does not take its running time for granted, achieving a pace that keeps it tense and interesting until the very end. Also, it should be said that the same viewer, during the very first scene of the movie, when Malik is shown in custody, leaned over to me and asked loudly: “Wait, why is he in jail?”

Unless you’re that guy, you will enjoy spending two and a half hours at the Avon with this new French masterpiece.

Filed under: Lifestyle by Kelly McKowen
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