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Law Ball In Review

Law Ball 2

By Jacquie Richards (4L)

Photo courtesy of the SLS

Despite valiant efforts to keep things “fresh”, every year there are a whole lot of reassuring “givens” at law ball.  Expectations, if you will. There’s the hoard of well groomed, freshly bathed and “suddenly sexy” classmates. There’s the part of the night when R- Kelly’s ‘Ignition’ starts playing and 75% of the dance floor has memorized every lyric. There’s the “Wolf of Wall Street” meets “your cousin the Shania Twain fan’s Bat Mitzvah” vibe and valiant efforts on the part of several post “holistic admissions process” 1Ls to quadruple fist. There’s a table of 3Ls yelling incomprehensible inside jokes at the projector screen and a grumpy Photobooth lady that leaves just enough time between takes to let you blink and pull a monkey mask halfway over your chin so you look like a pirate with a ginger beard in every picture. All of these things are quintessential and important parts of the ball experience, and I’m happy to say that this year delivered.

However, this year’s law ball also had a few things that made it different. First up was the venue. The Atlantis was a welcome change from the Eglington Grand in that it both was accustomed to hosting guests over the age of twelve and was literally a disco fever club on a frozen lake island, which, if you think about it, is really exciting. The security guards and bartenders on this magical oasis, unlike the staff at nameless mainland venues of years past, were friendly folk who recognized that we are technically legal adults rather than recent escapees from the local middle school, so they let us do cool grown up things like stay past midnight, drink our drinks in the foyer and even, if we asked nicely, order doubles. The Atlantis also had tons of space, eerie purple lights and floor-to-ceiling windows all around the dance floor that looked out over the beautiful frozen lake. All of this added an element of 80’s romance to twerking in a formal dress that I’ve yearned to experience in real life since I first saw “Dirty Dancing”.

This new and different venue also, however, had its downsides. Because it was tucked away from the rest of Toronto like Alcatraz or Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, guests had to complete feats of dedication to get there, such as a cab ride on an actual freeway and a 300 mile long tunnel hike. Also like Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, the place was a maze to navigate. This made finding friends, photobooths, washrooms, snacks and the exit somewhat difficult.

There was also a new and different dinner. The “goods” of this freshened up fare included much better service, killer tomato/olive tapenade, deliciously “mostly just dessert” candied nut salad, shockingly decent mass-served salmon and a big chocolate lava cake thing at the end that was tasty enough to undoubtedly ensure that several students would explode into giant blueberries and have to be rolled out of the factory by Oompa Loompas who felt them unworthy of paid internships. But I digress. The food’s seeming weak points were few but included a vegan pad thai that did not have enough peanut sauce on it to be unhealthy or, by extension, edible, not nearly enough coffee cups per table and no pizza. Every disco chocolate factory should have pizza.

Finally, there was the entertainment. Highlights of this year’s offerings were a short and sweet Law Follies video with semi-surprising amounts of male nudity, loudspeakers in the entrance room that sounded a little bit like Charlie Brown’s teachers when giving (what I imagine) were the venue navigation directions, more Notorious B.I.G than I ever could have dreamed of on the soundtrack and again, that snappy “nobody puts baby in the corner” dancefloor. Weaker links to the fun machine included a photobooth with fewer props than in years past (where were the fake medieval weapons and complicated pirate headgear?) and a sort of belaboured transition between dinner and dance mode that left many a student tucked away on the balcony eating pickled ceasar beans and looking for love or lost forever to the sands of time because they tried to find somewhere to smoke. This weird transition also made for a slower start for later, non-dinner arrivals. Finally, there were a few weird transitions between deep house and Taylor Swift on the playlist that probably negatively impacted the moves of some people who can actually dance but mostly just helped the 4Ls finally master a slowdance version of “the sprinkler”.

Overall, while not quite a golden ticket, I’d say this was one of the strongest law balls yet.

By the Numbers:

Food: 7.5 (8 if we imagine there was pizza)
Venue: 8
Music: 6.5
Photobooth: 4
Video: 8.5
Service: 9
Overall: A-, or, for those on the new grading system, P.

 

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