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IVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Ballet Folklórico, a Mexican dance company, comes to the Lied Center tonight. ARTS | 6A
Practice safe'sext'
What to consider when sending racy texts, if you must. JAYPLAY | INSIDE
A sample of Mexican dances
THURSDAY, JANUARY 28, 2010
WWW.KANSAN.COM
VOLUME 121 ISSUE 86
For art project, student vows to avoid reflection
BY TIM DWYER
tdwyer@kansan.com
Last Friday night, Emily Camille Boullier looked into a mirror. It was the last time for the next 365 days that she would perform that simple act.
Boullear, a junior from Leawood, won't be looking in a mirror for the next year as part of a performance art piece she calls "Pure Vanity: A Year with No Mirrors," which she started Saturday. At the same time, she will be entering beauty pageants across the state.
"I'm enacting the part of a beauty queen," Boulear said, "with no concept of my outward appearance"
Photo by Adam Buhler/KANSAN
She knows it's impossible to go with.
out at least catching glimpses of her reflection, but the greater influence behind it is an exhibition of self-restraint.
She said it's also an exploration of society's obsession with its reflection. She had toyed with the idea before, actually starting on the project in 2008, and twice she backed out long before the calendar flipped its 12th month.
This time around, she says, there won't be any back down.
"I've actually committed to do this, verbally and publicly," she said. "It's been an idea that I've tried or played with, but when I did my first pageant on Jan. 9, they had us go into a local radio show and explain our platform statement. Mine is 'A year with no mirrors.' So it would just be lying, basically, if I didn't do it at this point."
That first pageant Boullear went to was Miss Southwest Kansas in Ulysses. She didn't place.
"I think it doesn't actually quite fit into pageant culture." Boullear said. "That was something I wasn't expecting.
I was expecting it to somehow fit because it was unusual, but it's kind of an introverted statement, instead of one of public service, which is what everyone else does."
Her platform statement, similar to a campaign promise of a beauty queen, may seem a bit contradictory to the idea of a beauty pageant, but it seemed to strike a chord with her fellow contestants, who voted her the most inspirational contestant.
"It would be very hard to do," Kim Flores, director of the Miss Southwest Kansas pageant said. "That was my first thought. Society is very vain, and I don't know how you could do it, but more power to her to focus on her inner beauty and other traits."
Flores added that she had never seen anything quite like it.
"I can't speak for statewide or anything, but for our pageant it was very unique, and it was very unique for anything I've heard about on the state level," she said.
It's no simple task to do the hair
and makeup required to actually win a beauty pageant without looking in a mirror, but Bouller says she's practiced. She hopes she can recruit a few friends to help her out, though, so she doesn't have to rely on her blind skills.
"Considering the openness of what I'm doing, I think that would just have to be part of my personality, and if I looked a little disheveled, it would be because of an obvious thing," she said. "Hopefully, friends will come with me and doll me up."
"I think it's crazy," Cuevas said with a laugh. "I mean, it's such a girl thing to do. I could see maybe a guy doing it, but not a girl, especially since she's doing the whole pageant thing, it's just kind of crazy."
Emily Cuevas, a longtime friend of Boulelar's who now lives in Chicago, said shed love to see Boulear compete in a pageant, even though the idea of not looking in a mirror was quite a shock to her.
Boulear knows her endeavour is a little out there — she says so herself. But she's not ruling out actually winning a pageant.
"I think it's possible," she said with some besitation. "It's a lot of hard work, and it's very expensive, so sometimes I feel like the odds are against me, also because I have a late start into that culture. I think it's possible considering how much of a learning and growing experience the first one was."
She said that she isn't sure what to expect on Jan, 23, 2011, but that she's looking forward to it.
"I'll have a different perspective of myself, what a reflection is," she said. "I think that's part of the fun, is that it'll be such a surprise, and such an amazing feeling."
— Edited by Ashley Montgomery
HAITI AFTERMATH
Schools are closed,but the teacher's in
BY NANCY WOLENS
nwolens@kansan.com
Debra Baker went to Haiti to teach schoolchildren about the importance of birds and water quality. Seven days later, an earthquake hit the country.
Baker, assistant director of the Central Plains Center for BioAssessment at the Kansas Biological Survey, located on West Campus, packed 100 pounds of teaching supplies and traveled to Haiti on Jan. 5 to teach at schools and organizations in Bohoc. Bohoc is 45 miles from Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince.
Debra Baker, assistant director of the Central Plains Center for BioAssessment, takes one of her students on a bird tour in Haiti. Baker was teaching ecology and English when the Jan. 12 earthquake hit.
Baker was staying with JeanJean Mompremiier, a Haitian pastor, and his wife Kristie, a nurse from Iowa. The Mompremiers started United Christians International, an organization that offers nursing, agri-
"The mood here was quite somber, like after 9/11," Baker said in an e-mail.
SEE HAITI ON PAGE 3A
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
ENVIRONMENT
Westar pays millions for cleaner emissions
BY AMANDA THOMPSON
athompson@kansan.com
Westar Energy, a Topeka-based power company, has agreed to pay $500 million to resolve violations of the federal Clean Air Act for one of its plants. The company, which serves 684,000 customers across eastern Kansas, reached the settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Justice earlier this week.
The Jeffrey Energy Center, located 30 miles northwest of Topeka, near St. Marys, is Westar's largest coal-fired plant. It will install new pollution-control equipment that will lower harmful emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide per the terms of the settlement. Westar
expects to cut total emissions by more than 75,000 tons each year.
The settlement came in response to alleged violations of the Clean Air Act's New Source Review requirements. Factories and power plants that came into operation after 1977 are subject to these stricter requirements than older plants.
"Today's settlement sets the most stringent limit for sulfur dioxide emissions ever imposed on a coal-fired power plant in a federal settlement," said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for the EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, in an EPA press release. "EPA is committed to protecting clean air communities by making sure coal-fired power plants comply
SEE WESTAR ON PAGE 3A
index
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Horoscopes. 4A Sudoku. 4A
All contents, unless stated otherwise; © 2010 The University Daily Kansan
Obama promises to press health care reform agenda
President also focuses on economy and "Don't ask, don't tell" policy in his address to the nation. STATE OF THE UNION | 6A
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