Glee club versus Harvard sweetest matchup of weekend

Harvard is coming to town this weekend. And I don't mean the football team. Or the field hockey team, nor men's or women's soccer. Those teams may all be gathering to attack the Bengals of Central New Jersey, but you won't see anywhere near the excitement at Princeton Stadium, Lourie-Love Field or 1952 Stadium as you will in Richardson Auditorium.

Harvard's glee club is invading Richardson on Friday night to feast on "Grade F Tiger meat," according to the Crimson promotional poster from last year's football concert in Cambridge.

Normally I wouldn't suggest to anyone to go to an event that starts with singing in German or some other such language that requires me to read the translation to try to figure out why everyone just sang louder. I like it, but I can understand why a lot of people wouldn't. What a lot of people (and I) do like is violence — just ask my JP advisers.

The brawl that Princeton's glee club had last year with Yale's was epic, and I wouldn't be surprised if this year's concert with Harvard is as exciting.

So the idea is that the glee clubs of the Big Three follow the football teams around when they play each other and have pep rallies that are masqueraded as concerts. Once the glee clubs have their fun with songs of the Deutschland, they begin their bltizkrieg — or at least Yale and Princeton did.

The teams sing a medley of football songs in front of a surprisingly involved audience that laughs at the opposing school. That's the first plus. They also have skits that are confusing to outsiders but nonetheless entertaining because they insult people who go to Yale.

I have been to a lot of sporting events at Princeton, but no team gets into it like the glee club.

Last year, after a few seconds of composed singing of their football songs, Yale's yodelers were interrupted by several Princetonians running across the stage with insulting signs for the audience to laugh at — and it obliged. The Yalies could do nothing but sing on to a hostile crowd. While they kept trying to sing the virtues of the followers of Eli Yale on the gridiron, the Princeton glee club tried to pully signs on a string over the stage. Despite their best efforts to dangle insults directly over the heads of Yale's glee club, Princeton's singers distracted the audience even more through their shoddy engineering. Everyone was transfixed with the four pieces of poster board that were hanging just off the edge of the balcony because the pullies didn't work.

That was fun enough for the alumni in the audience, but Yale didn't take it too lightly.

The Elis went dirty with signs insulting Princeton over the admissions office hacking into their website. That incited the riot.

Princeton had called all the former glee clubbers in the audience to sing the medley onstage, but Yale was not intimidated by its inferior numbers.

The Yalies went after the stuffed Tiger on the piano. Then they tried to steal a Princeton banner from a glee club alumnus. He wouldn't let it go, and the two singers — in the middle of a song — played tug-o-war on the stage until they both hit the ground. The poor student conductor was trying to hold things together as the stage turned into a battle royale with fights breaking out in the front and those singers not fighting giggling in the back. There were people dragged on and off stage and attempted threats throughout the medley.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

There may not actually have been any blood spilled onto the stage, but there were some bruises, which I haven't seen in any fight over school pride at Princeton. It's the kind of thing you hear about in stories from Ivy League schools in the 1870s. Nowadays, it's rare for even a team that's supposed to be in a ritualized combat with its rival to show any kind of enmity. It's just always "going to be a good college [insert sport here] game, because we're big rivals." The glee club is the only Princeton organization I have ever seen actually in a fight with people from a rival school. I'll grant that those Penn idiots tried to set some of our debaters on fire with (inflammable) motor oil a couple years ago, but I didn't see that, and it was drunken stupidity.

At the end of the concert, there were Princetonians from every living generation in the audience giving three cheers to Old Nassau and relishing a victory over Yalies.

This year, the football medley has been rearranged by junior Drew Fornarola for the first time since former glee club director Walter Nollner h'62 made the original glee-club arrangement in the early 1960s. The songs were written by Kenneth Clark, Class of 1905.

Fornarola is most famous for his writing of the music and lyrics of "Orange Bubble" for the Triangle Club. The glee club will be performing his new arrangement of that song, too. It is cleverly insults the other Ivy League schools, so I am a big fan.

When Harvard comes to town on Friday, I'd like to see some bruises and some Crimson on the floor.