Lip STINK

This year’s Lip Sync yielded a number of surprising results—here are a few highlights:

Boys Dorm’s Performances. Boys dorms are known for their lackluster numbers, often not participating entirely or sending out enough participants to be counted on one hand. Only two dorms forfeited this year’s competition: HD’s (clearly recoiling from their negative reception of last year’s “Juno”) and Holmes’ (as Dorm Head Ryan Holmes of the Judge’s Table repeatedly recounted over the course of the night). Of the remaining boy’s dorms, all of them involved at least double-digits of boys arriving like rambunctious waves crashing against each other. This year, not only did Lip Sync see a 2,475-year record of boys participation in numbers, but also in effort put in. Previous years have yielded 10-minute performances of one boy “soloing” while everyone else stands in the background. This year, the closest we got to that was Brendan Koh ’28 starring in “Let It Go” while wearing a . . . distinctive apron, which was merely an “intro.” Dorms such as LeRoy’s, William’s, and Riley’s maintained their chaotic does-anyone-know-what’s-happening energy while attempting to weave together a storyline and create actual synchronized choreography, an effort that paid off at judging time. Every year, the Judge’s Table is hypothesized to inflate scores for boys dorms—this year, perhaps they were a bit more justified.

Judges Inflation Speaking of the judges, it’s no surprise that biases creep up again and again—whether it’s boys outperforming girls, Lower Schoolers getting pity points, or later performances scoring higher than early ones. But this year, despite record amounts of creativity, choreography, and dorm participation, the judge’s scoring remained fairly consistent throughout the night. However, there was noticeable inflation in the overall scoring, and the score range may remind one of the grade inflation happening at our school: mostly 8’s and 9’s, with a couple 10’s and a few well-justified 3’s. Unlike previous years’ judges, who made use of zeros, negative numbers, and scores above 10, this year’s judges let their variation gather in the 8’s and 9’s by adding decimal points—a feature that was thoroughly overused by the time the fourth “9.3” was scored. However, it did make time for some funnier judge’s jokes, including Mr. Holmes rating William’s a “6.7” for their meme audios and a “4.5/4.7” for that one dorm’s Trump/Island Boys performance that made everyone uncomfortable. (Can “pants on” be the minimum requirement to perform?)

Storyline Variety Storylines often fail to appear or come out muddled and messy—just think of last year, when Michael B. Jordan (Timmy Smith ’25) crowned the “Banana King.” But this year, storylines became slightly more readable. Notably, LeRoy’s Dorm’s “Thriller” performance tied together a murder, coffin dance sequence, and zombie apocalypse with enough cohesion to rival the confusion. Wall’s Dorm staged a club breakup resulting in the arrival of Zara Larsson (Ellie Burnett ’27) and “another crush” (Nishad Das of the Judge’s Table) that won the crowd’s hearts. The Riley’s prefects arrived in construction gear and swung their massive tools at the front-row audience. And despite William’s Dorm’s muddled mess, Philip Holland ’27 finally got to re-live his “But we could be MORE than cousins!” era.

Other highlights include two all-out fights (one between boys pretending to be girls, another between boys being zombies), stunning dance performances from MacBride’s, Wall’s, and Corcoran’s, an appearance by Trump, and—for the first time ever—zero weddings! This year’s Lip Sync was certainly a memorable one—though next year, maybe the SAC should provide eyedrops, bleach, and/or brooches (think Oedipus) if they can’t reinforce the “keep your pants on” rule.