For #29 in the Far From Home series, IntoTheWoods.tv traveled to Reed College for its graduation ceremony, which on the surface sounds pedestrian and formal, like earning rent money filming weddings on Sundays. Take into account Reed is a liberal arts college with a tradition of students burning their theses upon graduation, painting their bodies blue, and slipping into three-day LSD benders and suddenly this is why we travel.
While Steve Jobs never graduated, he did attend Reed freshman year and other alumni include Pulitizer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, compact disc inventor James Russell, and lead singer Kip Berman of The Pains of Being Pure At Heart.
The legendary bender is called Renn Fayre and in recent years it has culminated with a surprise performance in the student union. This year, Trippple Nippple, an art-rock-psych-pop band of merry Asians and Australian rockers took the stage to promote the uninhibited joys of being way far gone, while holding hands with Lucy in a sky of diamonds. You're guaranteed triple nipple slips with a Trippple Nippple performance, but crowd shouts around the student union showed plenty of alumni embracing their freedom from academia and shirts.
