Bill Clinton may be a tough act to follow, but the cast and crew of The Secret Garden seem to be handling the Roone Arledge stage quite well – or at least they’re putting on a good show. Hannah Goldstein reports from the (secret) final dress rehearsal.

You might say the ‘Secret’ is out of the Box: the passing of Columbia Musical Theatre Society’s biannual black box show, has left the Secret Garden as this semester’s main stage production. At their last dress rehearsal before a two-night run, the cast presented a small audience (including Lucy Simon, the composer of the original score, no less) with a somewhat unconventional twist on the old classic. The performance marks the culmination of the Columbia Musical Theater Society’s long proposal and approval process that lead first-time director Mary Jo Holuba, BC ’12, to take on the non-traditional project.

Unlike the story you may remember, the show is more thematic than plot-driven. Holuba emphasized healing as the driving theme by re-envisioning traditionally inert entities as dancing people: ghosts, plants, and exotic memories take on human form and remained a constant force onstage throughout the two-and-a-half hour performance, whether shifting silently in the background or executing wild turns center stage at movements of high tension. The dancing was, for the most part, entrancing, but the presence of the dancers occasionally distracted from what plot action did occur between the speaking characters as they acted out a story about young Mary Lennox, who comes to life after the death of her parents in an unlikely garden at an English estate. Though the set was fairly minimalist and the pit claims a sizeable part of the stage space, the blocking and choreography easily filled the rest of the space, making for an interesting but occasionally overstimulating show, at least in the visual realm. The music, however, was fitting, well-executed, and effective – ironically most noticeably so when the stage was most crowded.

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Oh sure, there may be budget cuts aplenty on the way, but the Medical Center isn’t about to let the economy stop its discoveries. This time, a team led by Columbia University Medical Center researchers has linked a gene called ELP4 to Rolandic epilepsy, the most common form of epilepsy.

Rolandic epilepsy’s best-known symptom is a seizure beginning just after waking up in the morning, though scientists are looking into other problems associated with the disorder, including learning and motor coordination difficulties. Researchers think ELP4, the first gene linked to Rolandic epilepsy, may affect connections between the brain’s neurons during development. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in what the organization of neurons has to do with all types of epilepsy. Identifying ELP4 may go a long way toward producing more effective epilepsy treatments and perhaps discovering the causes of ADHD, speech dyspraxia, and developmental coordination disorder.

At right is Deb Pal, Columbia University research scientist and senior author of the study. Bwog congratulates Pal and his team and reminds you to continue taking 15-minute breaks every few Halo battles.

Emerging from Fortress Lerner just now, Bwog was nearly mowed down by a swarm of young white male skateboarders, like a Critical Mass for the four wheeled set. They went on for minutes upon minutes — what could this be? Where do they come from? Do they have some kind of skateboarder phone tree?

If you know, please enlighten us!

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter #2, we now know this was the Broadway Bomb, “the worlds [sic] most dangerous Longboard Skateboard race.”  Today’s race was from 116th and Riverside to Bowling Green.

Bwog Editor Juli Weiner spent the night in the land of Brobdingnag. Names and details have been omitted to protect the innocent.

Last night, twenty of the largest people Bwog has ever seen stood assembled in suits outside Butler. Passersby stopped to stare at the group, as it is not often persons of this width or height are seen in one place, outside the context of athletics that is. The boys were instructed to yell that they were pledging the “best frat,” PKA. But they weren’t pledging PKA, this was a Test of Their Commitment.

Next, a similarly large person instructed the group that they then must collectively ask five girls for their phone numbers. It was at that moment that twenty of these man-giants looked upon your Bwog editor, who was the closest girl at the moment. We politely declined, and the group headed toward Lerner, toward the womenfolk.

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As you well know, Columbia has a long history of Nobel Laureates, and now the presitgious group can also claim Martin Chalfie, Chair of the Biological Sciences Department, who, along with a professor from UC San Diego and a professor emeritus from BU Medical School, won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry today. 

Their Nobel nod came after they discovered the gene for the protein that makes jellyfish glow — the protein is the tricky looking thing at right. The protein, which has become famous as Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP), has since been used in a myriad of important experiments looking at cellular development in neurons and cancer cells. 

Good luck trying to get into his class — this semester he is only teaching a Genetics class for Biology Ph.D. students.  The Biological Sciences Department also has a more jargon-y explanation of Chalfie’s work.