This past weekend our department held our annual Sociological Research Institute. Kind of an odd name, I know, but basically it’s an internal conference and banquet. The banquet is usually lots of fun and is the highlight of the weekend. If it were up to me, in fact, the whole event would be renamed the Sociological Research Festival.
Anyway, last year a few of us grad students got together for a brief performance as The Talcott Parsons Project (if you don’t “get it”: one + two) and this year we returned with a complete setlist:
I think just a quick glance at that list will give you a pretty good idea about the mood we were going for. Overall, I think it was a smashing success. Of course, we had a quiet crowd of mild-mannered sociologists, but by the opera section of Bohemian Rhapsody we had them singing along anyway, and we even had a few people dancing by the time Footloose rolled around. (I think the liquor being served deserves some credit too, though.) Other highlights included special guest vocals and guitar playing by our department chair, and prolific blogger, Chris Uggen. Of course, there were few technical glitches, but how was I supposed to know that running my guitar across the front of my amp to generate raging feedback during our monstrous Top Gun intro could actually knock the guitar nut loose and throw the whole thing out of tune?
Now as everyone knows, you can’t be a real band without t-shirts, so we’ve even got our very own band t-shirts. You know you want one.