Last week was a very special surprise. If you already read the title of this post, I bet you can guess what the surprise was: live music at brunch!
Every weekend, the dining halls at Yale shift their regular schedules to serve brunch and dinner instead of the usual 3-meal slate of breakfast, lunch, and dinner, to accommodate students’ different schedules (on Saturday and Sunday, students are sleeping in later, for some reason…).
Brunch is always a jolly good time in the dining hall. Warm potatoes, endless eggs, and turkey bacon at 1pm — I truly cannot complain. Of course, brunch as a construct is already perfect (generally I think it’s criminal to have to wake up before 10:30 any day of the week, so having a dedicated mealtime for those who sleep in is faultless to me). But Yale does an especially strong brunch, always putting fun twists on already loved classics, like apple cinnamon pancakes or “chocolate strawberry French toast casserole.” Even when I’m not in the mood for all that razzle-dazzle (rarely), Yale Hospitality includes a consistent breakfast and salad bar with more traditional staples I can rely on to wake me up.
My most recent brunch, however, served more than just food! In the Pierson Dining hall, a student band played live tunes for an hour while everybody ate and chatted. It was so cute!
Visual representation of how eating oatmeal felt during this brunch.
A few of my good friends and fellow Piersonites play in the band (c’mon vocals, trumpet, and violin), so it felt especially lovely to get to watch them perform so serendipitously, as I often eat in other dining halls as well. The band, known around campus as Free at Five, is one of the many student groups on campus that really puts the “arts” in liberal arts college. I didn’t get a picture up close, but imagine the smell of syrup as you listen to a jazzy cover of “At Last” by Etta James. Bliss.
