Video by Bailey Hight
The evening of March 28, the Phi Alpha Theta Honors Society hosted a faculty and staff talent show in SUB 7. Faculty and staff from Milligan College and Emmanuel Christian Seminary came to sing, recite poetry and perform various hidden talents.
First up was Nick Blosser, an art professor, who performed three original songs. He strummed an acoustic guitar during his first two songs and broke out a steel guitar for the third song, called “Jesus is a Nightlight.”
Lindsay Kenderes, a librarian and archivist, came up next to read aloud her original poem, “Blue Safari Van,” a retelling of a trip she took during her high-school years. She also performed a short baton twirling routine, an act she had learned in marching band.
Dennis Helsabeck, Jr., history department chair, read aloud one of Ted Thomas’ favorite poems, the spoonerism-laden “Prinderella and the Cince” by Colonel Stoopnagle. As the title suggests, a spoonerism is “the transposition of initial or other sounds of words,” as Dictionary.com defines it. It can also be defined as “Ted Thomas’ favorite literary device;” he laughed through the whole performance!
Gary Selby, a ministerial formation professor at Emmanuel, followed up with the classic song “I Am My Own Grandpa,” strumming along with his acoustic guitar.
Philip Kenneson, a theology and philosophy professor, citing his talent for reading, brought up a huge copy of Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth’s “Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of the Word of God, Part 2,” the second book in Barth’s 14-volume exploration of Christian doctrine. Kenneson proceeded to silently read a page to himself for a minute and a half.
Jil Smith, an occupational therapy professor, came forward with an interactive song called “Dan’s Quest,” which she accompanied with acoustic guitar. The audience chose Dan’s next action at the end of each verse and determined where Dan went and which verse Smith would sing next.
Heather Hoover and Kayla Walker-Edin, two of the college’s humanities and English professors, performed with Walker-Edin’s two sons. The group sang a Moby Dick-themed parody of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe,” titled “I Call Him Moby.”
Ted Thomas, a humanities and German professor, closed the night with three songs. Thomas began with Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee (Plane Crash at Los Gatos),” a tribute to a catastrophic plane crash near Los Gatos Canyon. He ended with the upbeat children’s songs “Sippin’ Cider Through a Straw” and “My Brother Bill (The Fireman’s Song).”