“Heathens All!” The Vassar College Thanksgiving Play

Betsy Rossberg Historical Theater Correspondent

Ah, Thanksgiving, that holiday of meat, gravy, cranberries, and re-runs of The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy. Doesn’t it just make you want to break out into song? Songs about reparations for the Native Americans for all the turkey the fat white Less-Native Americans ate at that feast of thanks and giving many years ago? That’s what we thought. And so The Miscellany News has teamed up with the Vassarion staff of 1620 and the History Department to create an a cappella musical about the Story of Thanksgiving.

Our musical begins with the Pilgrims still in Europe. Matthew’s Minstrels will perform live the Europop club music that will accompany this scene. The Pilgrims, clad in leather pants, tube tops, glitter, and hats with buckles on them rub up against each other in a barn somewhere in central England. All of a sudden the music stops. The BIG BAD KING, played by Powerhouse Summer Theater alum Justin Guarini, has pulled the plug on the “boombox.” The Pilgrims rebel. Their leader, William Bradford, played by Jesse Bradford, throws down his pleather glove, stands up on an overturned keg, and shouts “Give us techno or give us liberty!” Upon discovering that the monarchy would not, in fact, give them either, the Pilgrims hopped on their mopeds, rode to the nearest ship, stocked the ship with enough tequila to last them several months (but which would, in fact, last but a week), and sailed off to the Promised Land.

Upon arriving in said Promised Land and finding it be neither a land of milk and honey nor one of free love and free condoms (yet) as Bradford had promised, but, as it turns out, a rock, the Pilgrims pouted and sang a melancholy song by the band Death Cab For Cutie. Plymouth Rock will be played by the bootleg piece of Plymouth Rock that currently resides in New England Building. Additional rocks from the Geology Department will be used to supplement the fragment. The Night Owls will perform the shitty emo music.

We then cut to the Pilgrims’ first encounter with the Natives. The Pilgrims, acclimating to their new homeland, have constructed a discotheque out of plywood and mud. The Natives, hearing their grotesque music (courtesy of Measure 4 Measure), wander in to see what in Hell’s name is going on. (Note: Hell did not yet exist at this point in history. It was not until the winter of 2001 at an Alpha Sigma Epsilon social at Cornell University that Hell came into being.) The Native Americans, clad alternately like a cop, a sailor, a construction worker, a biker and an offensively stereotypical “Indian Chief,” feel the heat of the music and start a synchronized dance routine. Everyone gets into the groove and, needless to say, the next morning no one really remembers what happened and several people have been impregnated. The White Man (and Woman) was pissed at the Natives because after that night they never called again.

Upset because they thought they all had “a really good time last night,” the Pilgrims go over to the Natives’ house and confronted them. Chief Chaim Goldberg (played by Molly Finkelstein ’08) explains that “We’ve just been really busy lately, what with the Harvest coming up and a research paper on the growth of global economics of dairy products in the time of the 12th century Mongolian empire. Besides, we thought you were supposed to call...” To make up for being a frigid bitch, the Natives ask the Pilgrims to come over for dinner that night.

And so, over a candle-lit dinner of turkey, pie, cranberry sauce (made from a can, that lazy asshole), shots of rum and tequila, and the rockin’ sounds of the Axies singing “Debra,” the Native Americans and the Pilgrims join together in solidarity, for a little while at least, to celebrate the start of the country that would be become AMERICA!