The results announcement was so full of drama that I’ve decided to give it its own post later. This is just a description of the scenes. Damn camera played punk with me and died out. Some days I really wish it had a battery life meter. I had a good place from which to take pictures, and with the right equipment you’d be able to see Rag Day in all its colourful exuberance. But you’ll have to look at my float and my float alone…

NUS Rag Day. I’d be tempted to call it a farce, but then others would say I have a case of the sour grapes. Credit where credit is due, that’s my belief. Don’t want to preach here. I’d rather recap the events. The theme for this year was ‘Reflections’.

First up were the faculty floats, and leading these was Engineering Club’s float. Er, I remember thinking it was quite good, but I can’t remember anything else. Was it the one with the sea demon capturing the pretty girl? Yeah okay another good vs. evil float. Not bad, not bad.

Bizad Club, the reigning champions, were next with a 1950s-themed diner, and a big Elvis effigy. Cool. The Elvis strummed his guitar and foxy ladies emerged from the diner. The Lindy Hop and Zoot Suit Riot were in attendance. No good vs. evil here… the effort put into the float was fantastic. Do you guys have nothing better to do? Haha.

Somewhere in the list were the Medical Club with a lesson on Healthy Living, where the Good Vegetables vanquished the Evil French Fries, Bacteria, Viruses and whatnot while skeletal Death looked on from his chariot. Okay Medic, we know you guys have a reputation for being cute and all that, but… come on. A CORN mascot? To be honest, I felt it was… different. My boyfriend minced no words and pronounced it disgusting. Following them was a Thomas the Time Machine (was there really a need to put a happy face on the train?) courtesy of I-forget-which faculty. Let’s see, Arts had that Dream thing, Law had Arabian Nights, Computing had the big red monster, USP had a building, SDE had the seasons… oh right, Dentistry. Yeah good ol’ Thomas the Time Machine had a happy tooth on it. So we had a bunch of 50s dancers, and a bad guy appears, and whisks a girl off to the future, pursued by the hero who wears a polka-dot shirt and green bloomers. Oh my gosh. Can you say Fashion Mistake? Yeah so somewhere in the year 3000, the bad guy is defeated, the hero takes off that hideous shirt to reveal spandex a la The Incredibles.

Now you see why they have to judge the faculty clubs separately from the Halls? Otherwise we’d cream them all flat.

Science Club had a cool float, also based on the sea. Sharks attack a peaceful colony of clownfish, crabs and turtles, whose hero the swordfish fails to repel the attack. Bla bla bla, something something, and it’s a happy ending. Or not. Someone bucked the trend by killing off the damsel-in-distress, but I think that was Computing.

Computing’s monster was huge, it towered over our Running Man. But it soon became apparent that they had put all their time and effort into constructing the monster, and very little time on the backdrop and side props. Still, they did try. It was the usual monster-attacks-little town story. Arts stuck to the theme, and reflected on how we give in to the rat race and forget about our dreams and aspirations. SDE put on a little play about the seasons, but they started with a funeral in winter, and their crepe-paper/papier mache trees revolved to reveal red-gold foliage. Summer came and went, and the trees burst into flower. The dead body got up and frolicked with the fairies. Confused? It’s Reflections! Brilliant move on their part.

Law didn’t have a proper float, they had a throne and a backdrop. Er, ok. They sort of mixed up their mythology though, they had an Anubis-lookalike stealing the princess. Now Anubis is an Egyptian God, so why is he the bad guy here? Perhaps he likes foreign brides, eh? But kudos to them on the strategic placement of Anubis’ eyes. He seemed to be permanently looking down at whatever’s in front of him, so this helped to make him more involved in the overall performance. I mean, there’s only so much emotion you can squeeze out of what was essentially a giant puppet.

The USP float was just a nice-looking arch. Following this was our float. Our pride and joy, the product of 3 months’ effort… We had a golden Running Man, facing a huge mechanical hand which we fondly called Medusa. The backdrop was a collection of squares which could be turned during the performance, hence changing the backdrop. Yeah that was pretty nifty. Personally I preferred last year’s float, because it was so… awesome. You just looked at it and felt scared of the giant scorpion. You wanted to jump up, grab the centaur’s spear and drive it in yourself. My heart swells with pride every time I watch the video of last year’s Rag Day. But time moves on, and we have Man and Medusa. Our dance was pretty cool, we had these cocoon things (not condoms, ok guys?) and each dancer was either ‘left’ or ‘right’, hence keeping with the Reflections theme. We stuck to the Good vs Evil plot, with actors bursting out of the innocent-looking boxes at the front of the float. Our Mr Eusoff had pride of place, wearing the aluminium bat-wing skeleton structure. The Man ran his mechanical gears out, and Medusa waved and glinted in the sun. Ahh. Everything went according to plan.

King Edward VII Hall surprised me with the innovation in their dance. Their mechanics were nothing special, but they used the coloured streamers to good effect at the end. I was honestly impressed, because I’ve never had reason to take KEVII seriously as a contender. Temasek had a big praying mantis on their float. And not much more. And there were jeers from our side, particularly the seniors, who felt that their performance and costumes were far too similar to our own from last year. The detachable spears of the blue side, the music, the dance steps… well, I’ll reserve comment, since it’s not my call to judge them on originality. And well, they do say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. *smirks*

Sheares Hall had a carnival theme, with a ferris wheel, a big top, a giant joker’s head and harlequin patterns. No good vs. evil here, just a bunch of toys coming to life at night a la Enid Blyton’s children’s stories. Their mechanism, it must be admitted, was very smooth. The joker blinked an eye, or I assume he did, since I couldn’t see. His hand, holding a goblet, tipped over, and a ball fell out. The treasure chest opened but nothing came out, but at the end, a clown jumped out and started dancing (again, I’m assuming since by now I was on level ground among taller people). Shit, we muttered. It’s good. We hoped that its lack of relevance to the theme would give us a fighting chance.

Raffles Hall had a bunch of skeletons and scarecrows, and two snakes on the float, and a snake-god. Nothing special, really. Not putting you guys down, but, it’s very yada-yada-yada if you get my drift. Kent Ridge had a… a something. I couldn’t see from my height, but those who could see didn’t think much of it. In fact the boys started to make crude jokes about ‘lan cheow with wings’. Another good versus evil plot, with Good represented by a dude wearing stars. I seriously had no idea what they were going on about. Their float was called Illuminati, and that was the tie-in to the theme… because, you see, the ambigram for Illuminati was spray-painted on the float. And as we all should be aware by now, an ambigram is a sort of reflection. But not quite. It’s more of a rotation, really.

Then just as we were going to gear up for the results, the staff float appeared. In my opinion, it’s a good thing it wasn’t in competition, because it would have made a mockery of the 2 months the raggers spent assembling their float. Everything on the float was manufactured! Excluding the people standing on it lah. Everything was unmistakably bought or pre-made… in contrast to the competition floats where everything is hand-crafted. And it moved… so slowly… when we just wanted it to quickly pass so that we could get down to the results.

Following the staff float was the alumni float by the class of 1972. We thought it’d be over quickly. We were wrong, so wrong. They stopped, came out with guitars (and by now I knew we were doomed) and started to sing songs from ‘their time’. We sang along badly but it only seemed to encourage them. I swear, as they sang, the sky overhead turned ominously gray, and cleared up as they left. Now I know we shouldn’t make fun of alumni with sincere wishes, but after about the 3rd oldie, our patience wore thin. Just then one of our raggers exclaimed, “Hey! I know that woman! She’s my old secondary school teacher!” That livened things up some. As they finished, we yelled out the lady’s name, and she seemed very flattered by the attention. Hurr hurr hurr.

Next: The results special