[nggallery id=133]
By Scott Carefoot
The comedy duo the Devil’s Advocates stood on the stage at Centre Island, addressing the crowd of students on Friday afternoon. Andrew Currie, one of the Devils, reached in his pocket and said, “Wait, Ryerson, I’ve brought a gift for you!” He revealed the universal hand gesture for heavy metal: the devil horns. “Oh, look! It’s rock and roll!”
Rock and roll, indeed. This day, 3,000 students had one last chance to get rocked before they had to roll back into their school lives.
Starting at Yonge and Gould Sts. And ending up on the island, the parade and picnic is a time when students get to wear their school spirit on their sleeves for the community.
And what better way is there to show school pride than getting drunk, pelting each other with water balloons and showering friends with shaving cream?
Some programs came out in full force.
The engineers were in the purple jump suits and yellow hard hats, while the O’Keefe house dwellers donned their bee outfits.
The Architecture parade float, made out of wood and Kraft Dinner Boxes, featured a “RYE ENG” sign with an arrow pointing down into a toilet.
The procession, made up of a tightly-packed students unintelligibly hollering, drew baffled looks from bystanders while it made its way down Yonge Street.
Corey Dunham, a fourth-year Aerospace Engineering student, has joined the party the past four years. He had fun on all of them, but said it could still be better.
“The only thing I really disagree with is the no-name bands they bring to this thing. Before I came here they got bands like MOIST. Now it’s like, Collective Soul, or whoever the hell is playing this year.”
The band was Gypsy Sol and its drummer, Darren Shearer, described the seven-piece group as “kind of a funky-groove-pop band with an edge.”
Intoxicated students were dancing on the edges of the picnic tables to their phat vies enhances by a two-piece horn section.
Perhaps it was the heat, but the overall atmosphere on the island was subdued compared to past years.
Either that, or Ryerson’s school spirit was like the beer on the island that day: watered down.
Leave a Reply