It’s 1:30 in the afternoon on Dillo Day. You’re standing on the Lakefill on a beautiful Saturday, just as the festival is starting to get underway. The sun is shining brightly overhead and beats down on you as the music plays. You’re probably heavily intoxicated from a solid morning of tailgating, and you scour the immediate area for an attractive member of the opposite sex upon whom you plan to get yo’ grind on.
But when you glance behind you, you catch an extreme glare of sunlight directly in the eyes. You shield yourself, and when you can get a better look, you realize that the glare shot right off of the braces of a 5-foot-4 adolescent with a mushroom cut.
How could this be? You’re not drunk enough to be seeing things. This kid definitely doesn’t go to Northwestern. Then, you look around, and realize that they’re everywhere. Teenagers. ETHS students, mostly, although there are some New Trier and Loyola kids mixed in. They jump up and down, giggle amongst themselves, and mosh to the chaotic noise of Reel Big Fish. Students you know are glaring from all directions, visibly fantasizing about picking up these kids and tossing them headfirst into Lake Michigan.
I know this because I was once one of those little kids. I graduated ETHS in 2012, and started going to Dillo Day in 2010, my sophomore year of high school. So yes, I have as much or more Dillo experience than most of you reading this. Evanston kids love Dillo Day almost as much as Northwestern students, and travel in huge packs every year to the Lakefill to enjoy the free concert.
“Evanston kids think of it as our big beginning of summer bash,” said Lora Kelley, 17, a current senior at ETHS. “I guess it’s kind of ironic because it’s really not our festival, but it’s still a really fun way for us to start off the summer. All of my friends go, a ton of ETHS kids go.”
But back when I was still considered a townie, it was much easier to experience the campus-wide shitshow if you weren’t actually a Northwestern student. Any human being with two legs was able to waltz in through the gates and get in on the fun. But times have changed. Now, to quote John Goodman’s character in The Big Lebowski, “this isn’t ‘Nam ... There are rules.”
The Dillo Day website explains rules from last year: “You will NOT be permitted if you are under the age of 19 unless you are the registered guest of a Northwestern student.” In 2012, Dillo Day's created a test pilot policy requiring guests under the age of 19 to wear designated wristbands after being signed in. Evanston residents had to have proof of residence in Evanston, such as a state identification card or driver's license, to sign in guests. This year, Mayfest, in collaboration with the administration and university police, will institute a wristband policy for guests and create two different colored bands, one for guests over 19 and one for guests under 19. The younger guests will only be allowed access to a wristband if they are signed in by either a Northwestern student or an adult over the age of 25, and these guests are required to stay with their guardian for the entirety of the festival.
“We welcome and enjoy any guest of Northwestern students who are coming and responsibly enjoying the music festival,” said Wil Heintz, co-chair of Mayfest. “We like to have as many people enjoy it as possible, so long as they’re enjoying it responsibly and safely.”
Additionally, Mayfest plans to add a regulation that links the wristband of a guest to the person who signed them in by a serial number in 2013, so the guardian will be responsible for the actions of the guest. These rules were enacted in response to a range of issues stemming from high school students including hospitalizations for alcohol, damage to property, and physical fights. Any incidents at Dillo Day are reported directly to University Police, and the administration saw that a large amount of the offenders were not Northwestern students, and many were under the age of 19.
“We saw a rise in the high school population at Dillo Day,” said Jesús Román, director of university relations for Mayfest. “A lot of these kids don’t have a link to Northwestern, and there were a couple bad apples that did things like starting fights with New Trier kids. They were very visible, and they detracted from the enjoyment of Northwestern students. And since it is an event for Northwestern students, we thought it was necessary to take some steps to make that experience a little bit better.”
According to Mayfest, University administration and Mayfest were pleased with the results of the 2012 wristband policy. Flaws from the 2012 policy were accounted for when being revised for 2013 plans. Compared to 2011, there were less high schoolers at Dillo Day 2012.
The plan seems almost flawless. It completely eliminates the threat of ETHS kids ruining the festival for the students that it was created for, and drives out every last trespassing high schooler from Dillo Day for good. Northwestern students are finally going to have their peace of mind, and they can rage by themselves without worrying about youngins getting in their way.
Except not really. The stricter security may weed out the lazy ETHS kids who don't have that much interest in the festival in the first place, but for the others, it just forces them to get more creative. The obvious way out of the problem – and by far the most utilized among the Evanston youth – is the simple loophole that 25-year-olds can sign up to four under 19-year-olds into the festival as long as they act as a chaperone and stick with them for the entire day. However, there aren’t many parents in the world who are going to be willing to rage with a bunch of rowdy college students. So several parents might just end up walking their kids to the gates, signing them in, and bailing.
“That’s how I got in,” said Nathan Stein, another ETHS student who was in attendance in 2012 where he had to be signed in. “It was pretty simple. They also kind of loosened up later in the day.”
Sounds easy enough, but that only worked last year for the privileged few who had older siblings or cool parents that didn’t mind sending their high schoolers to a massive, alcohol-soaked college party. (Don’t you just miss high school?) Others had to be a bit bolder in their endeavors. While it was difficult to get a wristband last year without an older friend or a parent, it was not impossible, especially for ETHS's 2012 junior class. One such student, who wishes to remain anonymous, acquired a few wristbands from a friend’s Northwestern faculty member parent and sold them among his friends for a small profit. He sold them to a few of his friends, racking up $30 in the process, before giving up and handing the rest out for no cost. He didn’t use one of the copies at the gate himself, and neither did most of his friends, but once they were all safely inside the festival they slapped them on their wrists in order to show security guards who roamed around.
“The photocopies really didn’t come out well,” he said. “We had to draw over them with highlighter to make them look more official. They were pretty shitty.”
The stories got wilder and wilder. Some kids went a step further and manufactured their own fake college IDs for the festival. Ben, a current sophomore at ETHS, found a template for University of Northern Colorado IDs online, and photo shopped his own picture into it. He then made around 30 cards for a group of his friends, and took them to the Kinko’s on Green Bay Road and laminated them. One might imagine that security would be slightly intrigued when they saw dozens of “students” from a place as obscure as University of Northern Colorado, but low and behold, they worked – at least at the beginning.
“They looked pretty legit,” Ben said. “I think at one point, security started to catch on to the fact that fourteen-year-old kids were coming with college IDs and they started confiscating them. They just laughed and told us to go home, and then I got my friend’s uncle to let me in.”
But what happens for the kids who have no connections, no fake IDs, and no general sense of innovation? What is left in the book of tricks? Only an all-out, Prison-Break-style stealth mission to sneak past security. David and Chris, the two ETHS students in the video, both had no way back into the festival after leaving during the day and coming back without their parents. They tried unsuccessfully to get in through several different checkpoints, and ended up camping out near Norris and Regenstein Hall, eyeing the security on the bridge that crosses onto the Lakefill. And once security turned their back, they jumped the fence and made a run for it.
“We army crawled around on the sand until we reached a point where we had no cover to hide ourselves from security,” said David. “I ran up the rocks and realized there was a fence, so I hopped over it with ease. As soon as my feet touched land I ran straight ahead back to the main event and met up with my friends.”
The success rate wasn’t very high for these daring missions – Chris wasn’t as fortunate as David – but a surprising number of kids completely snuck around the security. No matter what the rules are for admission to Dillo Day, Evanston kids will find ways around them. It’s guaranteed. Northwestern students don’t like it, understandably, but it’s inevitable. Just as you can be certain about the sun coming up in the morning, you can be certain about ETHS kids and other unwanted visitors under 19 coming to Dillo Day.
“Everyone has a friend or a parent at Northwestern,” said Kelley. “They try to keep us out, but they really can’t. I don’t really know how I’m going to get in this year. Maybe I’ll swim and party in a life vest the whole time.”
How did I get in last year? I’ll never tell.
Editor's Note: This article was updated with clarifications about Mayfest's wristband policies for 2012 and 2013.