Several organizations Relay for Life

On April 1, despite a storm coming through Keene the night before, dropping several inches of snow, Relay for Life hosted nearly 300 people in the Spaulding Gymnasium, where light strips and streamers led teams in the right direction for the long walk.

Colton McCracken / Equinox Staff

Relay for Life is an event held all around the world to raise money and awareness for cancer. According to their website, it was started by Dr. Gordon Klatt in 1985 in Tacoma, Washington. Klatt was the only person to walk the first year, but he went the full 24 hours. The first event raised $27,000 for the American Cancer Society. Every year since then, it has been a group fundraiser, where team members take turns walking around a track to signify how cancer never sleeps, and at least for one night, neither will the people walking and fighting it. Events range from six to 24 hours, but the event held at KSC was from 12 p.m. to 12 a.m.

KSC senior Elizabeth Truesdell, who is on her second year as the event chair for Relay for Life, said she didn’t think the snow would affect attendance, considering most participants were students. Truesdell said, “The theme this year was game boards. We have a bunch of life-sized games we’re playing, so life-sized Tic Tac Toe, life-sized Hungry Hungry Hippos, we have a Mr. and Ms. Relay competition [and] really just games to get everyone involved.”

Not only were there games, but the gym also had a speaker system that played music to get everyone excited and keep them walking toward their goal. There were also banners and streamers for participants to take pictures with. A monopoly-style jail was off to the back half of the gym and was a popular photo destination for walkers.

Colton McCracken / Equinox Staff

KSC senior Brittany Junkins said this is her third year walking with Relay for Life. She is a part of Delta Xi Phi and said, “The American Cancer Society is my sorority’s philanthropy. So every year, this is our big event we raise a lot of money for and we walk the full 12 hours.”

Sarah Olson, a senior with the KSC dance team, has walked with the team all of her four years here. She said she was excited because this year, the dance team would be performing during Relay. She was really passionate about Relay’s cause and while she was excited that her and her team were getting to perform, she also stressed the importance of why everyone took the time to come out and were spending their day walking around a gym. She said, “We walk for our family members and friends who have battled cancer and we’re here to support our college and our community.”

Hair donations for Beautiful Lengths

On April 1, twenty KSC students and Keene community members donated hair to make wigs for people who are fighting cancer to have access to free wigs. Beautiful Lengths was at the same as Relay for Life.

Molly Mulrennan, a KSC sophomore, was at the event and said she was really excited to donate her hair. Mulrennan said, “It’s something I do all the time, well not all the time, but I grow out my hair for the reason of donating it.”

Tim Smith / Photo Editor

She said she has probably donated her hair seven or eight times before.

Aimee Krafft is a sophomore and helped to coordinate the event.

She said she was really excited about how the event turned out.

Originally, the Beautiful Lengths event was planned on the same day as Relay for Life because Kraftt was not sure if they would have enough people interested to do their own event, but as the day progressed, Krafft said she was pleasantly surprised by how many people attended.

Krafft said, “Originally we had 13 people sign up, but we had a few more come at the door, so we had twenty in all.”

Jennifer Brown-Bassle, the store manager of Supercuts, said she and the other stylists at Supercuts love to come to KSC to do the event every year as their way of giving back to the community.

Beautiful Lengths is a program, started by Pantene, that has donated over 42,000 real-hair wigs to the national American Cancer Society Wig Bank.

The event took place in several parts. First, all the participants went down into the gymnasium for the “first cuts.”

Many Relay for Life participants surrounded them as friends and other people running the event cut off eight to 10 inches of hair off of every donor’s head. “The hair is cut off and we give the person who’s donating a good quality style. Then, the donations get sent out to Beautiful Lengths, where they make wigs for people in need,” said Brown-Bassle.

She said there are a few things that a person needs to have to be eligible to donate hair. “It needs to be eight inches or longer and they (Beautiful Lengths) prefer no color-treated hair and for it to be in good quality.”

Supercuts will cut hair any time of year for Beautiful Lengths. It may not be free in the salon, but the hair will still go to a person in need. Supercuts is located in the Walmart plaza, less than a ten-minute walk from the college.

Alyssa Salerno can be contacted at asalerno@kscequinox.com

On April 28, Mac Miller and Travis Porter will be coming to Keene. Last week, the Keene State College Social Activities Council (SAC) announced they would be performing at this year’s spring concert.

First-year Justin Perka said he is really excited for the concert. “I think it’s great. It’s a really big name for a school that’s as small as Keene. I know that UMass has Two Chains and Lil Dickey, so it’s cool that we’re getting to see Mac Miller because he’s on that same level.”

The concert will be in the Spaulding Gymnasium and doors open at 6 p.m.. Student tickets will be $25 and tickets for the general public will be $50. Tickets can be bought online at ksctix.com.

Samantha Moore / Art Director

Sophomore Parker Eastman said he has been a big fan of Mac Miller for a while and he really likes the music Miller has been coming out with lately.

Eastman said, “I went to see Mac Miller in December at the House of Blues in Boston. The show was really good. He had a really interesting light show, he talked to the audience and did a lot of freestyle and everyone was singing along to the songs. He looked like he was having fun while doing it too.”

In late 2016, Mac Miller came out with a new album called “The Feminine Divine.” Pitchfork rated the album a 7.8 out of 10 and said, “As a loose concept record about the many subtleties of love and distance, the Pittsburgh rapper’s new release is the most surprising, concise and accomplished album of his career.”

KSC junior Bethany Peterson is the Concert Coordinator for SAC and said she is very excited for the concert.

According to Peterson, the process of picking the performer is largely based on who students and SAC members want to see. She said, “The way that we go about picking the performer is we send out a survey to students asking them who they want to see and then we go off of those. We have an agent that we speak with and we talk about who’s hot at the moment and what performers will be willing to perform at a college. We normally end up with a list of four or five people and take a vote in SAC on which performer it’s going be.”

Peterson said the concert is later in the semester than usual because the performer picked that date out of the several dates SAC gave them. She said students seem to happy with how it all worked out because it does not conflict with many other things going on around campus.

“I definitely think that it’s going to be an exciting concert; people are excited for when the concert is and people are excited that it’s Mac Miller and people listened to him growing up,” said Peterson.

Alyssa Salerno can be contacted at asalerno@kscequinox.com

After the supreme court made same sex marriage legal in all states, politicians have been under the microscope when it comes to their views on the issue. One topic of discussion that has been coming up repeatedly is that of conversion therapy. Politicians, however, should not have any right to say whether a homosexual person should go through conversion therapy or not.

According to the American Psychiatric Association, conversion therapy is based off of the theory that homosexuality is a mental disorder and a person can be cured through therapy and corrective behaviors.

There is not a lot of evidence to support that conversion therapy helps people in any way. In fact, for the most part it only ends up hurting the person involved by putting them in a helpless situation, where they are attracted to one group of people but are told that thought is wrong.

The struggles that LGBTQ community members face daily are numerous. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, LGBTQ youth have higher risk of depression and suicide than most other groups of people.

The arguments of people who support conversion therapy are usually rooted in that of a religious background. People also fear that which they do not know. For these reasons, politicians like Vice President, Mike Pence and more recently, Commissioner of the New Hampshire Department of Education, Frank Edelblut, have been accused of not standing up for the LGBTQ communities rights.

Most notably, Edelblut was on the fundraising board of directors for Patrick Henry College, a school that prohibits students from being homosexual.

Shameless, a popular TV show, just recently addressed the issue by putting Frank Gallagher, one of the show’s main characters who is heterosexual, through conversion therapy. The show highlighted the ridiculousness of the situation while keeping the comedic angle of the show intact. The character that was really wronged in the episode was the woman who Frank met while in therapy. She was unable to perform the acts that the therapists were asking of her because it felt wrong to her. This storyline showed the underlying evilness of the theory of conversion therapy, that people are being forced to go against their natural instincts just because other people think those instincts are not right.

This issue affects all people, even those not directly related to the LGBTQ community. The people who support conversion therapy think they are doing people in the LGBTQ community a favor by helping them get over a mental illness.

The decision to go through the conversion therapy process is an extremely personal one. If a person decides to go to conversion therapy for reasons like religious beliefs or whatever other reasons, it should be on their own terms.

The government should not have any say in it, at all. The government should not even have a stance on whether they think it’s good for people or not because of how personal of a decision it is. The government does not have any stance of traditional therapy, so this should not be any different.

Alyssa Salerno can be contacted at asalerno@kscequinox.com

Last week, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) removed all reports from its website that contained information about the way places like laboratories and puppy mills treat their animals. It is not okay for the USDA to take these reports off of their site without giving the public a fast and free alternative to access the information. The reports were about facilities that operate under the federal regulations of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) and the Horse Protection Act (HPA). As far as I can tell, there is no other way for the public to access this information other than by filing a request under the Freedom of Information Act, an act which allows citizens to request government documents that were not otherwise released to the public. These requests could and often do take months or even years to be approved.

Someone needs to be looking out for the rights of animals in these facilities, and these reports allowed for groups to do that. While the USDA did not necessarily have to do anything with the information in the reports, it allowed for other interest groups to hold facilities accountable for poor treatment of their animals. The reports were open to the public and let people know what facilities were testing on animals like dogs, primates and other animals.

These reports allow for groups to reach out to laboratories to tell them that once they are done using an animal for testing, the groups would adopt the animals. Often times, once the facilities have no use for the animals anymore they are euthanized. These reports told people what labs were testing on what kinds of animals and they were able to arrange with the labs for the proper treatment of the animals.

The reports also showed when places like puppy mills were treating their animals inhumanely by keeping dogs in crates that were too small for them to do things like turn around comfortably. Now that the reports are not accessible, people will not know there is a problem at a facility until it’s too late for many animals.

There also seems to be no reason for the sudden disappearance of the reports on the site. A statement put out by the USDA said, “We remain equally committed to being transparent and responsive to our stakeholders’ informational needs, and maintaining the privacy rights of individuals with whom we come in contact.” By taking the reports down, however, the USDA is being anything but transparent. The USDA is solely protecting the “privacy rights of individuals with whom [they] come in contact,” which could be dangerous for many animals.

If the USDA were really looking out for all stakeholders, it would omit personal information about people who work in the facilities but still release the reports. It’s wrong to turn a blind eye to these animals. They need to be looked out for. It is not acceptable to allow animals to be mistreated and to know about it but not tell anyone else.

I don’t see any reason to even take the reports off in the first place. The USDA will still be receiving the reports. Putting the reports up on the site should not be an issue, in fact, it’s basically just scanning a piece of paper into a computer and uploading it to a webpage. It’s not challenging in any way and any person with a scanner can do it. In fact, you can do it with most smartphones, so it should not be a problem for the USDA to get the reports out to the public.

The USDA did not take the reports off of the site in the interest of all stakeholders. The only reason these reports would not be accessible is for the benefit of people who are abusing the animals. That is wrong. The only reason these reports are made is if animals are being treated inhumanely. The USDA is sentencing animals to death and allowing them to be tortured by keeping the information in these reports from the public.

Alyssa Salerno can be contacted at asalerno@kscequinox.com

Last Saturday, the Colonial Theater hosted a show that was as close to the real thing as it gets, without being the real thing. Almost Elton John rocked the night away with his band on his “Remember When Rock was Young: Elton John Tribute” tour.

Almost Elton John, Craig A. Meyers, played piano, danced around the stage and had a few tricks up his sleeve. He had three different costume changes, each outfit made of sequin, velvet and mesh. To top it all off, he wore matching top hats and platform boots that matched all his outfits. Even the platform heels did not stop him from doing a half handstand on his piano in the second half of the show. According to gigmasters, he is the third best Elton John impersonator in the states.

Samantha Moore / Art Director

Meyers started out the show by saying, “If you know the lyrics to the songs, sing loud. If you don’t know them, sing louder.” Most of the people in the crowd knew the words though, and belted out some of Elton John’s top hits like “Tiny Dancer,” “Rocket Man,” “Your Song,” “Bennie and the Jets” and “Don’t go Breaking my Heart.” He even took a moment to crack a few jokes about the most common misheard lyrics in Elton John’s songs. Like “Hold me closer, Tony Danza” instead of “tiny dancer.”

For many of the songs, most of the crowd was on their feet. Meyers said the dry air was making his throat sore and asked for everyone to sing along to every song.

Julie Moulten, who had been singing and dancing for most of the show, said, “His voice sounded a little tired, but he has all the same inflections in his voice.” At the end of the show, Almost Elton John and the band left the stage as the crowd cheered for an encore. Moulten was cheering, “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me,” and when the band came out to play their final encore, they played Moulten and her husband’s favorite song,” stated Moulten.

At the end of the night, Arlene Edes, a Keene resident who attended the show, said that Almost Elton John was “second best.” She also said she was excited to come back to see more shows at the Colonial. Ticket prices start around $40, and the theater is open for patrons of all ages. The Colonial is a popular spot for residents of Keene and surrounding towns.

Donna Hilow, another Keene resident, and her husband Mark said Meyer was “not quite Elton John, but he d[id] a really great job.”

Alyssa Salerno can be contacted at asalerno@kscequinox.com