ARH provides alcohol education at ‘Not So Thirsty Thursday’

By JULIANE KIM

This past Thursday, March 19, the Association of Residence Halls took a shot at ending alcohol abuse with their Not So Thirsty Thursday event.

Students gathered on the fourth floor of Lee Hall for alcohol-free fun. Police officers were brought in to monitor students as they participated in activities with drunk goggles to show how alcohol affects the body.

Not So Thirsty Thursday, once called Thursday Night Dry, has been a bi-annual event for seven years put on by ARH in conjunction with the University of Mary Washington police department. ARH planned this event for February but moved the date to March due to inclement weather.

The event, according to UMW senior and ARH President Mia Boleis, promotes fun without alcohol and is an educational experience about the effects of alcohol on the body. The police department supplied the drunk goggles, a device that simulates the visual effects of being drunk in order to demonstrate how balance and perception is affected by alcohol.

“All of our complex councils have their own little events throughout. We come up with the ideas kind of from the Internet. Today we’re doing minute-to-win-it games, and a lot of them are childhood games,” said Boleis, “It’s a lot of just fun little trinket games.”

The childhood games ranged from truly nostalgic console games, such as the Nintendo 64 equipped with Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros., to fun, simple games, like a giant version of Connect Four.

Many residence halls had their own stands at the event. The Tri-Mo Complex manned a table with freshly popped popcorn and Mandolph had a human pretzel game with chocolate covered pretzels as prizes. Other stations offered fruity mocktails, temporary tattoos, face painting and finger painting. There was a photo area set up in the hallway for guests to pose with props and paper hats and a station for a ring tossing game.

Inside the main room were the minute-to-win-it games, where players had the option of wearing the drunk goggles to see how difficult the games would be if they had been drinking. The goggles were available for the Nintendo 64 players as well. One minute-to-win-it game tested the player’s aim in throwing extra large marshmallows at paper targets while wearing the goggles.

“I thought it was fun. It was a cute concept. We got there pretty early, so there weren’t a lot of people there, but they had an interesting variety of games,” said sophomore Amanda Barnes.

Barnes also noted that the activities from the event were fun and unique compared to other campus events.

“The games with the drunk goggles were really interesting and kind of a cute way of getting their point across,” said Barnes. “It felt casual, which was nice, it didn’t feel like one of those health lessons you get in high school and middle school going, ‘don’t drink, kids.'”