Before The Revelry Arts and Music Festival became the threat to the future of the Mifflin Street Block Party some see it as today, it was a conversation between two friends about college concerts.
Talking to a friend who had just attended the annual Dillo Day musical festival at Northwestern University, Revelry Executive Committee Chair Sarah Mathews tried, and failed, to think of a current local equivalent.
“It’s kind of surprising that as a major university we don’t really have a banner end-of-the-year event,” she said. “We wondered why Madison never had one. And then we realized there was Mifflin.”
What started as a peaceful Vietnam War protest broken up by arrests and billy-clubbings in 1969 is now a raucous, alcohol-soaked school year sendoff that in recent years has featured high profile incidents of violence and police crackdowns, including two stabbings in 2011 and the arrest of Badgers running back Montee Ball last year.
Mifflin cost Madison nearly $200,000 to police, a sizeable expense for a single day’s work in a year when Dane County spent $654 million in “excessive alcohol spending,” described in a March report as healthcare and crime spending associated with alcohol consumption.
To Mathews, discussions between university officials and students early in the school year made it cleart resources and effort would be put toward providing some sort of Mifflin alternative, regardless of its nature.
“There’s really nothing wrong with this, but I heard one administrator say … ‘I love the idea of a bounce castle on Bascom,’” she said. “I thought if [the school] is going to spend money on this, that [students] need to do something.”
The Associated Students of Madison voted to formally support Revelry in December. The process to make the idea a reality further progressed once the university administration and city threw their support behind it.
“[Revelry] is trying to see an opportunity where in the past administrators and the city were determined to see a problem,” Mathews said.
Concerns surrounding Revelry have been raised by students in lines at bars, before lectures and most prominently, online. Twitter, Facebook and the comment sections of news stories are filled with discussion over which event to attend and the merits of each.
A recent conversation thread on Reddit, a user-generated content website, entitled, “Revelry or Mifflin? Where will you be?” accumulated 54 comments over two days.
The perceived tension between the two events can be explained by their shared date and the fact the decidedly “anti-Mifflin” university and city administrations support the festival, but Revelry’s student organizers, some of whom live on Mifflin Street, never intended for one to occur at the expense of the other.
“By no means are we communicating ‘don’t go to Mifflin,’” Revelry Marketing Director Josh Lieberthal said. “We’re not telling anybody that in our messages, we’re not saying that [to each other] off the record.”
UW-Madison junior Nick Glattard administers the “Mifflin Street Block Party 2013” Facebook page for his Langdon Co. apparel company, which prints block party shirt orders, and worries Revelry threatens campus tradition.
“I pray that people stick to their roots and continue going to Mifflin,” Glattard said. “We should all be ashamed if a tradition that has been alive since ‘69 died out on our watch.”
Mathews understands the criticisms, but also sees tradition as something students have the ability to build upon.
“I think its part of our student body’s culture to dislike anything we perceive as a front to our independent entrepreneurial Badger spirit,” she said. “The fact of the matter is there have been traditions that have died out… depending on how the student body perceives it. Maybe this year is the start of our tradition.”
