The Bluewall
September 19, 2000 • 2 p.m.
| Tania Marques and Deborah Fashina lunch and chat, oblivious to the drama on One Life to Live. |
The entire room smells of coffee, pizza, stir fry; there’s the sound of plastic trays scraping on plastic tables and chairs being pushed back. Off to the side, someone named Monica realizes she’s in love. Poor Monica. Love is brutal. Only a few people in the room seem to notice when a man pulls a gun on her.
Given the size of the
big screen TV in the Bluewall, you’d think more people would pay
attention to Monica’s plight. There are street-legal cars smaller
than this TV, which is perched on a platform large enough to accommodate
a dozen tables and fifty avid TV watchers.
And that, admittedly, was the expectation – that the place would be packed with students doing everything not to study, living up to the statistic of five hours of TV per adult per day.
Not so, at least at the Bluewall. Sure, there are clusters of TV watchers, but most people eat and study below the platform, out of listening range, and those who are watching tend to be university employees reluctant to give their names.
“This is my one soap opera fix for the day,” says one. She turns from the closing scene of All My Children. “Some days it’s really busy, could be fifteen people here to watch. Then at two, there’s another group for One Life to Live, and another at three for General Hospital.”
The One Life to Live crew must be slacking off. Fourteen minutes of the show go by and no one notices. One student glances up periodically but doesn’t even flinch when we learn that Sam really is the biological father of young Matthew.
So much for TV brain drain smack dab in the geographical center of the state’s flagship campus. Even the soaps’ devotees come to watch their one show and then leave – no one seems to stay for the afternoon. At the end of each show, there’s a changing of the guard as one group leaves, another takes its places. They eat, watch a little, turn and discuss the show.
“I’m here every day,” one staffer from plant and soil sciences declares. “There’s no other place for staff to go, and this is very relaxing.”
She’s right – there aren’t many places that combine eating and relaxing or studying (the library, for instance, frowns on food consumption). And where else can you watch a certain Nora come out of her coma with perfectly coiffed hair and a coquettish attitude? Who knew a coma could be so good for you? “Thank God for your miracle drug!” Nora tells her handsome doctor.
“Oh, I like the fantasy of it,” the plant and soil sciences staffer says, one of the roughly six regulars for this soap. “We critique it all the time! It’s really funny.”
Students, on the other hand, don’t seem to be part of the regulars. Darrick Stevens, an economics senior, looks sheepish as he turns away from the screen. “I thought that ESPN was on. Of course I end up watching it. I already know all their names,” he admits.
Problematic? Not at all, according to Stevens. “I was giving my brain a rest.”
Similar stories come from the other students. Tania Marques, a freshman in astronomy, and Deborah Fashina, an exchange student from the University of Sussex, eat in front of the television most days, but they tend to chat rather than watch.
“What show is this?” Fashina asks. “I don’t know. Really, we just want to hear what’s going on,” says Marques.
Toward the back, Shalaun Knight, a junior in accounting, glances at the TV sporadically. Since she lives off- campus, this is a convenient place for her. She’s holding Bread Givers by Anzia Yezierska, a novel about an immigrant Jewish family. Homework? “Nope. Just reading,” Knight says. Any drawbacks to the Bluewall and its TV platform? “I don’t have a long couch here,” Knight sighs.
— Karen Skolfield
