Big Man on Campus

Every year, one of the sororities at Purdue, Zeta Tau Alpha, puts on a huge philanthropy for breast cancer awareness and education called Big Man on Campus. BMOC is pretty much the fraternity variety show. Each frat house picks one guy to be in it and they come up with a 5 minute act to perform. Since Aunt Jenny was diagnosed with breast cancer this year and Katlin's mom has been in remission for a year, we decided to go this year to see the show. Unfortunately Liz, the BMOC co-director who also happens to be in all our nursing classes, neglected to mention what we were in for!!!

Katlin and I showed up at Elliot Hall at around 6:00ish, hoping to get good seats for what we thought was a 6:30 show. When we came in, we saw that every Greek on campus was crowded into the main entryway and they weren't letting anyone into the auditorium yet. We also noticed that all the girls were pretty dressed up, like in nice tops, nice jeans and heels. Katlin and I didn't get the memo that BMOC was a pseudo-dressy affair, so we showed up in jeans, tennis shoes and our I HEART BOOBS t-shirts. Classy.

Apparently the show started at 7, because they didn't let us in until around 6:30. Poor Katlin and I had no idea where to sit because everyone else was affiliated with a Greek house. Finally we just picked two seats on the edge of a random row (in case we needed to make a getaway) and sat down, hoping that nobody would notice us. This effort turned out to be futile, as evidenced by a point during the show when Katlin muttered "I feel like everyone is looking at us and knows we're not Greek." It definitely felt like it.

Eventually the show started, and the rest of the audience got steadily more obnoxious. I'm pretty sure someone brought a trumpet in that went off at random times. Despite this, the show was actually pretty entertaining. My personal favorite were the three guys that dressed up in leotards and did the "Single Ladies" music video dance, but the ultimate winner was the guy who did a dance to "Kung-Fu Fighting." All in all it was a fun experience, and ZTA ended up raising $108,000 for breast cancer!!! We were so proud of Liz and it was an amazing thing for two girls who have been personally affected by breast cancer. We did take pictures, and as soon as Katlin e-mails them to me I'll post them here. (One of them is relatively scandalous ;)