Ian Roberts::  Hi, my name’s Ian Roberts. I currently live in Agoura Hills, California, and I’m a member of the Grinnell College class of ’87, here for my 25th Reunion. So, what do I remember about Grinnell College? I’ll just go through random memories as they come to me.
Ian Roberts::  The one thing I remember is, I don’t know if they still have this, but we used to have something called Alice in Wonderland, which was- They still have that? Yeah. Which, I always thought that was interesting because it's basically- of course, what it was you were supposed to trip, y'know, and everyone would sidewalk paint or, I guess, with chalk or whatever and people would just be out there tripping, taking shrooms and dropping acid and I always thought that was kind of funny because I'm sure that the administration must know what that means.
Ian Roberts::  And I come from the time of the Drinking Grinnell Relays. I remember one of my years, oh, it was the last or the first, a guy broke his leg doing this thing where you got drunk and you put your head on a bat and you spun around, a circle around the bat-
Sophie Haas & Ian Roberts::  Oh, my gosh.
Sophie Haas & Ian Roberts::  -and then you ran a sprint after that. And he just [ breaking sound effect] broke his leg, and, I believe, it was a year or two after I was done, there was no more drinking allowed. And also, y'know, because the drinking age was 21, so technically, really, almost nobody could be participating in it yet the whole campus was doing it. So it was, in a way, I guess, you know, a College-sanctioned underage drinking event and they realized that didn’t make sense, I suppose.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  One thing I remember about this very building, ARH, is that all the movies were here.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Mhm.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  And that was one of my favorite things were the... There would always be a movie series. One that sticks in my mind in particular was “Visions of the Future,” and it was all these different movies starting with, as far back as Metropolis and then going to stuff like Logan’s Run and 2001 and just, y'know, dystopian and utopian visions of the future. And, as I recall, they were always organized like that. There’d be a theme. And I always thought that those were organized well and kind of fun because that’s what I’ve ended up doing, is I work in TV and film.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Wow.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  And so that was one of my first, y'know, times where I got exposed to, like, films in a genre or by a director or by a theme, you know, and then later in life worked at video stores and rented four movies a night just devouring them to- y'know. That was a good little education.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  I was a Theater major.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Oh, nice.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  And so, y’know, that’s changed a little bit. That whole complex over there. But they still have my- y’know, my name is Ian Roberts and the theater is Roberts Theater?
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  So, my college yearbook picture is me pointing over at the sign, y'know, like it’s my theater, and I was happy to see that it- Well, happy to see for me that it’s still Robert’s Theater but I would’ve thought they’d gotten rid of that and replaced it ‘cause I remember, Jan Czechowski, who used to be a professor here, was never a fan of the theater because apparently it was a thing of the times where they believed scenery was kind of out and you would never wanna… You would kind of do things with the imagination.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  It was kind of a sixties kind of thing, and so that theater has no fly space, a very limited shop space in the back. It doesn’t have a lot of wing space. So, I was actually a little surprised that it was still... I thought it might’ve been a new fancy, more state-of-the-art theater, but- And there was a little black box theater across the way and that’s now been moved over. It’s now a giant black box theater.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah, yeah.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  But, there was a little experimental theater.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  One thing I can tell you about my time is that, along with a few other people, I started an improv group that- for-
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Oh.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  And that’s what I do now. I have a business, Upright Citizens Brigade. It’s an improvisational theater on the East Coast and the West Coast.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Wow. Yeah, I’ve seen that show.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Oh yeah?
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah, that's wonderful.
Ian Roberts::  Well, the first time I, y'know, was in an improv group was here at Grinnell. It was called Proteus and it was started by Jessica Thebus, who was a year younger than me. And she had studied in Chicago at the Piven Theater Company and they do improvisation at Story Theater. And then another guy from my class, Nick Glass, knew a guy from Yale who was in Purple Crayon, an improv group that they had. And so I came back after a semester off-campus at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center and I told ‘em I wanted to start doing like an acting class, 'cause we only had one acting class. And I said, “Y'know, let’s do this thing, like a student-run acting class,” and then Jessica said to me, “Look I’m gonna start this improv group and there’s not enough people. We’ll split it and neither one of us will have a big enough group, so join me.” And I said, “OK,” and then that became a fun little thing on campus.
Ian Roberts::  We’d perform over at the Forum and, I was just reminded of this, I don’t even remember it, but I guess we went out to a hospital and performed somewhere, out off campus, and so we... I remember that it made my parents' day when they came, my graduation, because George Drake, I guess had seen me improvise and went up to my parents and said, “Your son is very talented.” And my parents are just like, “Oh! You’re- the President of the College, said that our kid is very talented!”
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  And it was really nice because that group kept going after I was gone, and after I could figure out there would’ve been no one left from my- I mean, 'cause I was a.. I think a senior when we started it? Maybe. Maybe it was the second half my junior year, but I could keep track of it, and I realized there couldn’t have been anyone left from the original group, so now it was just something that was being passed down. Unfortunately, it fell apart.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Mhm.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Because I noticed this weekend there was some people from some other class that were doing improv out here.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  I thought that was funny. Everyone was coming up to me saying, “Are you gonna bum rush it? Are you gonna go? How come you’re not doing this?” I said, “Well, y’know.” What can I say?
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  What other things do I remember about Grinnell? Oh, some of the most extreme weather of my life!
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Our freshman year was- New Student Days was crazily, crazily hot. Like, you could die from it kind of hot and that’s something that I clearly remember. I also remember coming into Grinnell by Greyhound and it being one of the coldest... the coldest weather I’d ever felt in my life, and coming in the Greyhound being- and not having the money to take a cab, so walking my incredibly heavy bags ‘til my arms are burning, and i’m sweating underneath my crazy, heavy coat. My face is getting frostbitten, and making my way back to the dorm.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Oh.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  But... What other things do I remember? Well, I come from the time of the two dining halls, but I guess that’s actually, probably, lots of people. That’s- fairly recently they changed that over.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  But, it’s funny ‘cause this weekend, I said it myself, and it must be the most common reference in the world because everybody was saying, “It’s like Hogwarts.” That old- the dining room over there on, uh?
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah! Yeah.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah, that's it’s like Hogwarts.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  What else? Oh, there was a streaking.. a little streaking craze during my time. It was a... I remember one of them was a friend of my girlfriend my senior year, who was a freshman. This girl was a freshman and there were these naked runs that were scheduled and you just hear this screaming, and, y’know, and it would be them. They just ran around naked and yelling. And along the way of running there’s that kind of obelisk statue out there?
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Uh-huh.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  I remember the cross country team used to come, run around it-
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  They still do that.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  They still this?
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Get down and then kinda worship it?
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Mhm.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah. We had that.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  The Forum was still the place to meet. My main thing to do there was ping pong.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Hm.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  There was a certain year when almost all of my friends were international students for some reason, and they were mostly Asian, and so I learned to play ping pong and, as a result, I have the pencil grip where you hold it with your fingers on the back of the paddle, and people always say, “Why do you hold it like- that way?” It’s because I learned to play ping pong from all these Asian guys that I was hanging out with at the time.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Wow.
Ian Roberts::  What else? Any other things from Grinnell…? I think theater, since that was my thing. Do I have any other theater stories? ...No, I guess not. Let me see if there’s anything else here that inspires me... Oh, yeah, well, I could share this. I’m one of the.. it’s not incredibly rare, but I took advantage of the core curriculum by having no Math or Science. It just wasn’t my thing.
Ian Roberts::  And it’s funny, I only found out this weekend that it wasn’t like that. I just so happened to have this advisor, Howard Burkle, I believe his name was Howard Burkle, but he was a Philosophy professor, and he was a really, really nurturing, caring guy. And I think he got that I was having a really rough time, and it was interesting because I was picking classes and he just stopped- just stopped the process as we were picking my next-semester classes and said, “Ian, can I ask you something? Do you wanna be here?” I was kind of taken aback. I said, “Yeah, yeah why?” He said, “Well, I'll tell ya. I have people come in here with 12 classes that they can’t decide between and you can’t pick your fourth class.” And because I was having a really rough time and I was looking for easy classes, I wanted Intro classes with no more than a five page paper, and I didn’t want Math, I didn’t want Science.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Anyway, he never made me take any Math or Science and after that, you know, you're on your own with your advisor that’s for your major. But I found out this weekend that some guys were really rough, and I know I wouldn’t have been able to... I wouldn’t have pushed back if my Tutorial professor had said, “You have to take Math and Science.” I would’ve done it and it just about would’ve killed me. So, that was intere- I found out I was very lucky to have the advisor that I had.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  I remember really, really liking that class, it was called.. my Tutorial was called, “Intimations of God in Contemporary Fiction.”
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Oh.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah, I remember thinking it was just like- sounded like such an awesome class and it was. It was great. I took a lot of classes- I would’ve been an English major except when I took the intro class, I found poetry unbearable. But, mostly because the teach- the professor I had, I found her to be, like, really immoveable in her views and I found, since it was interpretation I couldn’t understand how it could be so black or white. And I was really-
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  I came in to discuss the grade I got, thinking this was gonna be a dialogue and I'd explain to her, defend my points. She just told me flatly, like, “You’re just wrong.” And I said, “Well, I found out today I’m not an English major.” Because I-
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Yeah.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Y'know, I... I don’t know. I mean, it just- yeah, it was funny, 'cause that's what-
Ian Roberts::  So, as a result I took everything I could 'cause I loved literature. I took the Irish Short Story, and I took- I did take Intro, although I didn’t like the poetry part of it, and I took, y'know, Intimations of God in Contemporary Fiction was my- I loved anything where I could read, but I couldn’t commit the major because you had- Oh, you also had the foreign language, which flummoxed me, too. That was something in my freshman year. I’ll record this as saying I find it unfair, is that when you take a language a lot of kids, that’s the- a give-me class for them, because they take it in whatever the language was they studied for four years in high school. And I didn’t, because I thought I’d be an English major and I think it was French, or German. You had to take another language. I think it was... And I took the French class, and it was just going along at such a clip, and all these kids had had four years of French and I’d had no French. And I found it to be completely unfair and dropped it, and so that also added to my inability to be an English major, which...
Ian Roberts::  Actually, I circled around. I always knew I wanted to do Theater, even when I came on New Student, you know, like a prospective student. I was interested in the Theater, and... but I thought that, it seemed weird because I wanted to be an actor and I thought being an actor, wanting to be an actor to me seemed presumptuous, because to me at least, like, “Well, who am I to be an actor?” And so I never would admit so I kept on sniffing around everything else. I went Philosophy and Psychology, and then finally just admitted, “I’m going to be a Theater major,” you know, and went ahead and did that.
Ian Roberts::  I'm trying to think, anything else... There was a funny situation in the dorm I was in. We were all talking about this. I was in Haines, and I was on Haines third, and the basement, the Haines pit for some reason had an incredibly dysfunctional relationship. It was just so- it was like Sartre’s No Exit. They were all made to torment each other.
Ian Roberts::  And there was one guy who was... came off like he was somewhat of a gun nut and pro-military, and then there was this guy who was very, kind of a... did a lot of drugs and his room had, like, a sheet over the lamp and always looked like some crazy, you know, drug den or whatever. And then, there was a... a very straight-laced guy who was room-mating with- who was roommate with someone who was gay, as a freshman. That freaked him out. And the whole- so I ended up with- a bunch of those people gravitated to our– One guy moved off-campus illegally or whatever because he was- he was- it was... They were always fighting. Oh! They started a commune was one of their things. Three of the people put all their beds into one room and that was going to be communal living. So, the whole basement of Haines basically exploded and they all hated each other and drove each other nuts. That was a funny thing in my freshman year.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Anything else? Yeah, I guess that’s it.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Great. Thanks so much.
Ian Roberts & Sophie Haas::  Oh, good. All right.
