Even more Ypsilanti happenings:

Intersection: The A2SO In Ypsilanti

Head to Pease Auditorium at 8PM on April 15 for an Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra concert with a special Ypsilanti flavor!

Eastern Michigan University professors Willard Zirk, French horn and Joel Schoenhals, piano will solo on Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 1 and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Willard played principal horn with the A²SO for 24 years and will retire after this concert—don’t miss this opportunity to hear him now!

The talented Ypsilanti High School Brass prepared by director Matthew Kazmierski will open the concert with a fanfare.

Reserved seats for Intersection: The A²SO in Ypsilanti are $16. General admission tickets are $11 (or $6 for seniors, students and children). Tickets are on sale through the EMU box office at 487-2282 www.emich.edu (click on “news, arts and events” then “purchase tickets here”). Contact amy at amy@a2so.com with any questions.

Students “Rock for Darfur”

Students from EMU will be hosting a concert, called Rock for Darfur, to raise awareness and money to benefit the genocide taking place in Darfur.

The student organization, called STAND, will be hosting the benefit concert from 7 p.m. to midnight on April 15 at Club Divine in Downtown Ypsilanti. Bands will play music while information is given, a raffle of local business coupons is drawn and Save Darfur merchandise is sold. The event is all ages with admission at $5 for those 21 and older and $7 for those younger. All the money is being donated to the Genocide Intervention Network.

War-torn Sudan has been burdened with violence and fighting for decades, including the recent three-year tragedy in the country’s western Darfur region. Violent militiashave murdered, raped and displaced millions of civilians in the area. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and millions have been forced from their homes to displaced-persons camps in Sudan or in refugee camps in neighboring Chad. Little has been done to combat these atrocities; this is where STAND comes in.

Formerly known as Students Taking Action Now: Darfur, the organization is now called the Student Anti-Genocide Coalition. STAND is an umbrella organization of over 600 high school and college chapters dedicated to putting an end to genocide, specifically the ongoing genocide in Darfur, Sudan. The EMU chapter of STAND has been operating for more than a year on campus and has been working to publicize the genocide and raise funds to help stop the catastrophe. This will be EMU-STAND’s last hoorah for the 2006-2007 school year and we hope to go out with a bang. Please help by spreading the word and attending the show.

DISCLAIMER: The second item was posted as a result of my cozy relationship with the Ypsilanti Courier. Sooner or later, every favor must be returned. Rather than “raise awareness and money to benefit the genocide taking place in Darfur“, I would have liked to have seen these kids raise money to help STOP the genocide occurring there, but college students do a lot of zany things.