Twin Greeks (Twin Peaks Toga Party)

March 14, 1998

This project is quite an oldie, but a goodie. It was one of those random ideas that comes up while in college, and you obsessively work on it until it's complete.

It was March of 1998, and the quasi-academic fraternity house that I was a part of was planning their annual toga party. The theme was selected to be "Twin Greeks: Who Killed Julius Caesar?" Contrary to what most believed, I wasn't the one who came up with this theme. The Julius Caesar line came from the fact that the toga party occurred on the Ides of March that year. The Twin Peaks theme came from Farkas or Tourist (two other house members who were Twin Peaks fans, and I think they were the social chairs too).

Earlier in that school year, the house had a Peaking (watching the entire Twin Peaks series in one weekend), so we wanted to one-up that event. I believe it was a house member named Evan who provided the red fabric, and then we create a whole brown and tan zigzag floor. It took all night, and I mean ALL night. It was mostly just Farkas and me doing all the work while everyone else was alseep. Taping all the scrap cardboard together to make the paint surface took hours. Man, I must have stayed up 36 hours that day... and amazingly, it's all caught on film!

While we were converting our dorm lounge into a red room, Tourist put a camcorder up in the light rafters. Every minute, the camcorder turned on and recorded one second of footage (at least that's what I recall). Above, you’ll find the timelapse video of us creating the floor and decorating the room. Note the number of people who are around helping cut out cardboard to make the floor, then how everyone disappears except Farkas and I while we work through the night and the sun comes up, and finally how more people show up right at the end. There’s also a cut at one point where we went away for a few hours to let the first base coat dry.