Some places get bombed-out ruins, some places get totalitarian dictatorship, some places get the bright city with a seedy cyberpunk underbelly, but Stanford’s post-apocalypse looks a little different: stalking through the main quad colonnades and knocking on dormitory doors are roving bands of finger-snapping, tap-dancing a Capella groups. That’s right, readers: while we were turned away, worrying about “pandemic this” and “quarantine that,” Stanford’s once-beloved a Capella groups have seized the means of post-production and turned the power of song towards racketeering, drug trafficking, and fraud.
If you’re headed back to campus, watch out! On your way to collect your belongings, you might just find a member of Fleet Street leaning against the door to your room, eyes smoldering and bowtie askew at an alluring angle, wondering aloud if it’d be funny to see how long it’d take you to crawl home with broken kneecaps if you didn’t agree to do ol’ Papa Giovanni a few favors, eh? The Mendicants are back in town, too, and their N-95 masks are the same red as their jackets—red like the blood of people who didn’t pay up in time, capisce? Then you’ve got the femme fatales of Counterpoint, Talisman’s sudden interest in Italian music, and the rest.
If there’s one upside to the situation, it’s this: if you find yourself being cornered by some singer-songwriter saps, just run. At press time, the ruffians haven’t yet figured out how to keep tempo with their finger snaps and tap dancing while on a high-speed chase, and can only follow at a musically-menacing-yet-sluggish pace.
