Rally time: Dillon's strategy

Dillon Hall is locked into preparation mode for its annual pep rally, which will double as the school-wide Friday event for the second consecutive year. We caught up with Dillon senior and rally organizer Andrew Mrugala to check out the dorm’s plan for Friday night.

Mrugala and this year’s other rally leaders have the benefit of looking back on the model set last year, the first of its kind with a larger audience spanning a wider, older demographic. He said the dorm is aware it is “representing the University as well as Dillon Hall,” but that the show is still designed to amp everybody up for the next day’s game and to make them laugh while they’re at it.

At the heart of that plan? “One thing we're avoiding this year is trying to get the audience involved in a complicated plot,” Mrugala said, citing the difficulty of following each detail amid poor South Quad acoustics and general crowd noise. Inability to follow dialogue was the overriding criticism of last year’s rally, as voiced in The Observer and The Subway Alumni Show, among others.

Instead, Dillon will focus on the shorter, stronger singing and dancing parodies that went over well in ’09. For Mrugala, the goal is to “make the show enjoyable even if a person, say, shows up late or gets lost in some of the dialogue.”

Brainstorming and script writing started during the spring semester, and this week’s 8:00 p.m. rehearsals have lasted until midnight each evening. As if all those hours weren’t enough to prepare the dorm for Friday at 6:00 p.m., Dillon can count on the acoustics sounding at least slightly better to Irish ears when it’s Brian Kelly’s turn on the mic.

The 2009 Rally on South Quad