Section B · Page 8
The University Daily Kansan
Wednesday, June 23, 1999
Student columnist pierces into fame
Body piercing prose brings recognition to fearless writer
The Associated Press
STATE COLLEGE, Pa. — His mom cried when she found out. His dad was just a little embarrassed. Their only son, the aspiring journalist, had started his newspaper's body-piercing beat.
The Daily Collegian, Pennsylvania State's student day, put it in loftier terms: "Every week, Conroy gets a part of his body pierced and records the experience for posterity and the good of mankind."
Conroy, 21, started with his tongue and proceeded to his ear (twice), his chin, his nose, his navel, his nipple — and yes, even that place, as he called it, "down south."
"It had to be done," Conroy said.
Along the way, he gathered some attention on campus. He was quoted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, had photos taken with female fans at a party and appeared on the Internet wearing only a "censored" box.
Plus, he received dozens of e-mails each day from readers suggesting which body part to pierce next. Some wanted him to go for the back of his neck. Others targeted the webbing between thumb and index finger.
"As the saying goes, 'Never say never.' Conroy wrote in his column, "James' Adventures in Piercing," after waffling for weeks about whether to go below the belt. "If I hadn't done it, there would have been 40,000 people, the theoretically, berating me for being a wimp."
Conroy, of Aston, Pa. claims to be normal, citing as evidence his conservative taste in fashion and his education at an all-boys Catholic high school.
"I don't come across as an outlandish guy," Conroy said. "If you saw me now, you wouldn't even be able to see any of the piercings. Once I know people, they see I'm pretty nutty, but I don't come across that way to random people on the street."
But he had pierced his tongue and eyebrow before, so his editor, Jason Fagone, labeled him adventurous.
The real adventure didn't start until the column's third week when Conroy went for the relatively exotic skin between bottom lip and chin.
"The weather was crisp and there was that get a-big-need-die-shoed-through-your-lip feeling in the air," he wrote.
After the needle was out and the hardware screwed in, Conroy started to feel funky. The piercer's voice had changed.
"He was sounding like Charlie Brown's teacher." 'Wha wha-wha wha wha wha.' "Conroy wrote.
After drinking loads of Gatorade, he sat down to write and doled out one bit of advice: Eat before the pain rushes in. Then he developed the Conroy Scale, a pain-o-meter recording 1-to-10.
The worst of the nine piercings? The nipple.
The easiest? The tongue. (No nerves down the middle of the tongue, he wrote.)
The bloodiest? A barbell at the top of his ear that required two holes.
The biggest problem? The folks who pay his tuition.
His parents called one Thursday to say they planned to drive in — that weekend. First, he spent two hours trying to extricate himself from his newest piercing. Then he flipped out. He rushed back to the piercer and begged him to pull out the chin stud. The piercer did, but Conroy still couldn't remove the eyebrow hoop.
Mom, still in the family's Mercury Sable: "Take that out."
Conroy: "I've been trying all morning."
She wasn't the only person upset. One girl growled at him. One reader hoped the next hole in Conroy's body would be a .357 projectile piercing James' temple.
Michael Dameron, the man
responsible for most of Conroy's holes, said that a lot of people in the piercing scene hate Conroy.
“He reduced it to an MTV-generation fad,” Dameron said. “It really goes a lot deeper than that.”
But Conroy has his fans. One girl asked him out in an e-mail. (He passed.) When he contemplated stopping in March, several e-mailers urged him to keep going. That kind of response helped him through the rough times.
"It's painful," he said. "It really is."
Some piercings already have disappeared. One fell out, and he took out a couple that annoyed him. Two others were victims of his summer sojourn home. Neither his mother nor his construction job would tolerate the metal baulbes. Only three remain—all of them out of sight.
For pain and suffering, Conroy won a statewide award for best collegiate column and might win a journalism scholarship. And his hopes for next school year are high; perhaps another stint as a columnist or music writer.
the newspaper also fared well. By semester's end, more students seemed to be reading the Arts section, and Fagone called Conroy's column the section's best journalism.
"It's fun to get a reaction," Fagone said.
Boston Pops' 30th TV year has Shakespeare, Nathan Lane
By MARY CAMPBELL
Associated Press Writer
The Boston Pops first appeared on national television July 5,1970, with jazz pianist George Shearing as guest.
NEW YORK - The Boston Pops Orchestra starts its 30th season with Shakespeare, moves on to swing music and has Nathan Lane singing Danny Kaye songs from movies, recordings and Broadway.
Now, as produced for PBS by WGBH in Boston and the Boston Symphony, this season's opener will be Brush Up Your Shakespeare, at 9 p.m. tomorrow. Suingin' at the Pops will be July 8 and Lane's appearance will be July 15.
The 10 show season also includes Broadway singer Audra McDonald on July 22, and movie music July 29, plus five repeat concerts from 1997 and 1998.
Keith Lockhart, director of the Boston Pops, says the series is meant to be entertaining and engaging. He wants shows like Brush Up Your Shakespeare, to make people say, "I never thought I'd see that on Evening at Pops," Lockhart said. The show contains music inspired by Shakespeare — the title song is by Cole Porter — and scenes by Shakespeare and Company of Lenox, Mass.
"I'd been lobbying for this program since I got here," Lockhart says, "We finally managed it in a season where it seems Shakespeare is hot again. I'm a lifelong lover of about every word the man put on a page. He was not writing to a highbrow audience. It's bawdy — it was the R-rated movies of its day — and it has some of the most sublime
thoughts ever penned."
Lockhart, 39, recalls watching *Evening at Pops* as a child in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. "My memory is of this oelfish, grandfatherly guy with a white mustache. Arthur Fiedler really owned those programs. I still remember him looking just like what I thought a conductor was supposed to look like.
was supposed to bear the Pops from 1930 until he died in 1979. Film composer John Williams came in 1980 and Lockhart succeeded him five years ago. For TV, Lockhart says, the Boston Pops conductor should be a personality.
Pops Outnumbered the Boston Pops gives 62 performances during its summer season, which runs from May to July. Since 1929, it has given a week of free concerts on Boston's Esplanade. The July 4 concert there is broadcast by A&E, which also televises one three weeks of concerts in Symphony Hall during the Christmas season.
Guests are chosen by Lockhart and William Cosel, who has produced *Evening at Pops* since 1970. They're most interested in people who don't regularly perform with orchestras.
"Sometimes those performers get a little bit rattled," Lockhart says. "Sometimes we have to do restarts.
"Last season, Arlo Guthrie was on. He's so used to being on stage with himself and a guitar — and we had all these people — that he couldn't remember the words to a couple of songs he's sung forever. He was endearing about it. The performance ended up being wonderful."
wonderful The Guthrie concert — violinist Gil Shaham joins in on *Arlo's Rag* — will be rebroadcast Aug. 26.
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