Soup night serves up entertainment, art and food

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Aubtin Heydari, Staff Reporter

The return of the National Art Honors Society’s Soup Night was on May 1, which attracted a sizeable crowd of audience members and performers. Mimicking the format of the previous Soup Night, which took place the spring of 2012, the night consisted of students and family buying a soup meal and enjoying a wide variety of acts put on by HHS students. Every attendee picked a ceramic bowl from the plethora produced by the art classes, and then proceeded to a soup bar and chose different types of bread and dessert. While the bowls were intended to have soup eaten out of them, some were designed to be purely aesthetic. Senior Michelle Waligora, a veteran of the Art Honors Society, spent her time helping out.

“We spent several months in advance making plans and letting our members know that we need bowls. The officers of Art Honors Society were instrumental in organizing it all. We had to make and glaze bowls in the prior weeks and then wash them all before soup night,” Waligora said.

Freshman Megan Labarge also was involved in the preparation process.

“I helped out with the preparation by setting out the bowls, and organizing the dessert tables. I didn’t make any of the bowls, but they were all gorgeous,” Labarge said.

Not all students made bowls and not all the bowls were from HHS. Like the soup, some of it was provided by outside sources.

“Some of the bowls were donated to us by JMU’s Art department so I don’t really know how those were made. From HHS there were several kinds of bowls. The wrapped bowls were basically tightly coiled ropes of cloth wound together in a coil pot. The clay bowls were made one of three ways. Either using a pottery wheel, or shaping to a premade bowl, or coiling a rope of clay around and smoothing the edges out. After the clay pots dried out they were baked, glazed, and baked again,” Waligora said.

Aside from creating bowls, the actual cafeteria needed to be transformed into the renegade soup kitchen it was.

“The day of was spent setting up the chairs/tables/ and food line. In the weeks before soup night we signed up for shifts and then were assigned a place to work, like soup table or bowl table. When we arrived we found Mrs. Brooks and her amazing clipboard to know where we were working,” Waligora said.

Following the meal, attendees were entertained by the dance class, jazz theory class, and several other independent acts. Two a cappella groups, two poets, and a student run band capitalized on the performance opportunity offered by the Art Honors Society.

“My favorite part of the soup night was watching all of the different performances,” Labarge said.

Soup and other food were graciously donated by families of the students and local businesses. It was served by the National Art Honors Society students themselves, who spent most of the evening behind tables.

“A lot of it was donated to us, for example Grill Cheese Mania donated some creamy tomato soup, and much of it was made by teachers,” Waligora said.