It was a normal Tuesday night. Then scores of Harvard students dropped their underwear.
The undergraduates unhooked bra straps, let towels fall from their bare bodies, and braved the chill of a 31 degrees-Fahrenheit Cambridge night to sprint a nude lap around Harvard Yard as part of the fall 2018 iteration of Primal Scream.
A biannual tradition, Primal Scream takes place at the end of reading period and just before the start of final exams in both the fall and spring semesters.
Each year, Harvard students face the same questions: Will they abstain totally, preferring warmth and unshrivelled dignity? Will they watch their peers pursue Primal prominence? Or will they themselves throw clothes and caution to the wind?
For Cameron M. Cashin '22, the choice was easy.
“This is just a thing that everyone has to accomplish at one point in their career here,” Cashin said. “It's always just something you want to get out of the way right in the beginning.”
In choosing to run Primal Scream early Wednesday morning — the lap, per tradition, kicked off at exactly midnight — Cashin joined a minor army of students ranging in age from fellow freshmen to seniors to a handful of alumni, who admitted they were alumni but declined to give their names.
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