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Last Saturday night, an appalling number of Brown University students flocked downtown to gape at some ordinary bonfires sitting on an ordinary river when they could have been partying it up in New Pembroke #4, Room 419, like any cool person would have.
The New Pembroke party was not just your regular excuse to drink, dance, and vomit, but rather a celebration of this reporter's birthday. Nevertheless, hordes of students chose to go to WaterFire instead and gawk at some fires that a Boy Scout could have created by rubbing a pair of sticks together.
The audience members whipped out their digital cameras and took a lot of dark and blurry photographs of the event, when really a series of drunken, self-taken photographs with everybody's heads squashed together would have made a way cooler Facebook album.
Although the event failed to provide any kind of discernible excitement, such as a fireworks show or somebody flinging himself into a fire in a random act of suicide, the audience members continued to ogle the fires as though they couldn't just go home and light one in their own fireplaces before running off to the wild party in New Pembroke #4, Room 419, dudes!!
"Sure, I could have gone to that one guy's party," said Lester Duffel '12. "But sometimes I just like to chill out, check out the fires, you know."
No, this reporter does not know. The Brown Noser is also investigating Duffel for residual brain damage from when he stood up too fast in the shower and banged his head on the spigot.
"This is where the party's at," added Duffel's friend Gordon Bradley '12, obviously not realizing that the real party was actually taking place in New Pembroke #4, not downtown Providence, and that a bunch of middle-aged adults and their clueless children standing around a river did not qualify as a party.
At one point in the evening, WaterFire volunteers, mistakenly thinking they were continuing to entertain the crowd, sailed along the river in a gondola and refueled the fires with more wood, painfully prolonging the pointless event.
Disappointingly, none of the volunteers tried to shove each other into the water or drown each other, which would have been excellent entertainment, or at least an excellent excuse to call the police so they could shut down the event and redirect everyone to the way more legit party rocking the 'Broke.
However, a small group of audience members, apparently realizing the grievous error in their choice of evening activity, attempted to salvage the night by shelling out vast amounts of cash for their own gondola ride.
"It was truly magical," insisted Providence resident Theodora Cremer, who would have had a way better time boogying down in her flower-print dress in NP4.
When WaterFire finally shut down after midnight, many audience members lamented that the festival ended "so soon" and expressed their desire that it could have continued "all night long!"
These people had obviously never been to a real party, like the one in New Pembroke #4, where people would have gotten naked and jumped out windows in drunken glee, if anyone had bothered to show up. But yeah, whatever, standing around with all your clothes on and staring at some fires is cool too.
