Posted by Julia Leef
So, for people who may not know, just briefly, what is Lively Lucy's?
Noah Samors '15, President of Lively Lucy's: Lively Lucy's puts on events every Thursday in Falstaff's. The events range from our monthly open mic night to student band showcases. We have a Battle of the Bands coming up on the last Friday of March and the winner of that plays Earth Day. We've had fancy dress jazz dinner night; Swanky Swank Night is what we named it. We've had just a wide variety of events. We've had every kind of event we can come up with in this space and just utilize the space for what we can do.
Kyle Salzman '15, Lively Lucy's club member: Most of them involve music, like 90 percent. The full name of the club is Lively Lucy's Coffeehouse and we try and keep that in mind while planning events but [we host] mostly concerts every week. We bring in a lot of outside bands, usually between two and five a semester and have a lot of student bands play.
Samors: So we do programming, we also run our own sound as Falstaff's Operating Committee. We got a new soundboard so Lively Lucy's gets to utilize that.
Salzman: Everybody really gets to.
Samors: Everybody gets to utilize it, but for the time being it's mostly been Lively Lucy's. We run our own sound, we design posters, we have an online presence, we have a blog. We do everything when it comes to planning these events. Planning, running, general organization, photography also. We have a Facebook page as well, 'Lively Lucy's Official.' So that's more or less what we do.
Can students apply to you if they want to showcase their band or do any kind of event?
Samors: Yeah, we've had numerous students, clubs and just individual students, come up to me and say 'Hey, I wanna do this, or I want to do that.' Or, like, 'I'm in this band, when can we play?' And we do our best to find a slot for them. Usually the student band showcases or the Battle of the Bands are the best way for new bands to get out there, but we try to do a pretty good case of showcasing the student talent.
Salzman: Our Open Mic Night also is a great way for people to show their stuff. Anybody is allowed to perform pretty much anything. It's the first Thursday of every month and we usually get a really good show in. We've had ones that I remember that have gone until two or three in the morning-
Samors: Starting at eight.
Salzman: --of just students performing. So that's a great way, especially for musicians, to sort of show their stuff and get noticed.
Are there any upcoming events this semester, such as the Battle of the Bands?
Samors: Next week is Beets for Beats with Real Food Challenge, Outing Club, and [the Student] Garden. And it's a fundraiser for the Garden. We're having Bluegrass with Contra dancing and dinner starting at 6:30 p.m. and going until people are too tired to keep dancing. And then we have the Battle of the Bands which is on the last Friday of the month, and again, the winner of that gets to play Earth Day.
Those are the most immediate ones and then April 3 is our Open Mic Night, the last one of the semester as well. And we're in the works of planning a few other events including a Evolfo Doofehtshow which we're hoping is going to work out. It's going to be big if it happens, it's just logistics. So those are some highlights in the next couple weeks.
If students are looking to get more involved in the committee, how could they do so and what sort of things would they be involved in?
Samors: We have weekly meetings at eight o'clock on Wednesday [in] Bolton 280. That's a great way to start getting involved. We meet and we talk about what we need to do for the upcoming events. The best ways to get involved are poster design: just any graphic design work is great. If any students want to learn how to run a soundboard and learn how to run live sound and set up and take down, it's just [a] great space to do that in because it's not the best acoustically so it's a fun challenge to try and make the band[s] sound as good as possible in that space.
Also, students who are interested in programming and scheduling bands, if students have band ideas, coming to the meetings would be a great way to get that-I've gotten a lot of emails about it and sometimes they're a little hard to keep track of, so face to face is always really good.
How large is your club membership?
Salzman: There's probably a dozen people who are fairly regular members of the club who come to some or most of the meetings. We have a, well, Noah's the president--
Samors: And we have a vice president which is Cheyenne Kerekes, and then we have a treasurer, Johnny Murphy.
Salzman: And the rest of us don't really have positions, we just all sort of [equally] contribute ideas during our meetings and help out with the running of events. So there's not really any sort of barrier to entry for new members of the club. It's sort of, just, you got a cool idea or if you just want to be a part of it, show up to a meeting. Anybody can contribute ideas and we just sort of reach a consensus on a per meeting basis.
Are there any questions that you guys get asked a lot that students seem to not know as much about or any misconceptions that they might have?
Samors: Well a lot of it is, whenever I say to anyone, and I like to do a lot of in-person advertising, and I say, 'Come up to Falstaff's at eight o'clock on Thursday night,' and they're like 'Oh, but I went up there when I was a freshman when I was really drunk.' Same thing, all the time, so that's our biggest hurdle as Lively Lucy's, getting people to realize that Lively Lucy's is different. Thursday nights are different from what they expect and that's usually one of the biggest questions is 'What do we do?'
Salzman: I think that Lively Lucy's events in general have a certain sort of atmosphere. They're pretty relaxed and most of the time-I mean, I'm biased-but they're good events, and the people who go enjoy themselves for the most part. And I think that's the biggest misconception for people who have never been to a Lively Lucy's event, who just don't understand how changeable the space is. When it's not steamy and packed to the brim, it's a completely different space. I think people are not aware enough that a vast amount of possibility exists in that.
Samors: Also, another thing that Lively Lucy's is involved in; we're on the Earth Day planning committee, so we pick an off-campus band and then, this is a recent thing we're still seeing if it works, but last year we hosted a Battle of the Bands and the winner opens for Earth Day. So we're doing that again this year and hopefully we're going to keep on doing that.
Are there any other changes that you're thinking about incorporating into Lively Lucy's?
Samors: The good thing about Lively Lucy's is that it's a flexible space. We had our most recent Open Mic Night in Spa because of the renovations that are going on in Falstaff's. So we can work around the space as the club. One thing that I'm hoping to instigate is, with more student involvement, maybe some more official positions. Like, WSPN and SEC both have graphic designers, for example. We don't. We put on shows every week, and it'd be a really cool challenge for a graphic designer, I think, to come up with a new poster design once a week or even if it's split between two or three graphic designers.
Student involvement, underclassmen involvement, we're mostly made up of juniors and seniors right now, and we have two underclassmen who are very committed, but it's only two of them. Eventually we're going to graduate, unfortunately, so getting underclassmen who really want to do this and, I'm not trying to bad mouth SEC or WSPN, but Lively Lucy's puts on events every single week, and SEC is made up of twenty-something people who all have good ideas, who all want to be heard, but it doesn't seem like that's necessarily the best place for them to be heard. So we would like people to come to us more because we know that they've had ideas of bands that we can afford to bring on campus but I just feel like people aren't aware of what we do and who we are.
Upcoming Lively Lucy's events include:
? March 27: Lively Lucy's, Outing Club, Real Food Challenge and The Garden present Beets for Beats with dinner from 6:30 to 8 p.m. and dancing until 11 p.m.
? March 28: Lively Lucy's Battle of the Bands. Doors open at 8 p.m.
? April 3: Lively Lucy's Open Mic Night. Doors open at 8 p.m.
More information can be found on Lively Lucy's Facebook.