The Fordham University Campus Activities Board (CAB) hosted their annual Spring Weekend event last week, featuring a carnival, a speaker event, a comedy show, a brunch on Edward’s Parade and the main concert.
Spring Weekend started off on Friday, April 23, at 6:30 p.m. with a Spring Carnival in Fordham’s Parking Lot A. The event featured a campus-renowned mechanical bull, electric swings, a pirate ship, jumbo hamster ball racing and a rock climbing wall, among other activities. Additionally, there were three food trucks with various choices: fries, ice cream and hot dogs.
“I love a little adventure, and I love fitness and activity, so the opportunity to go rock climbing was really exciting for me as well as getting just to hop on a few rides with my friends,” Nyah Rodriguez, GSB ’29, said.
However, Rodriguez also described the long lines for certain food trucks, saying she was unable to get fries or ice cream due to them.
“There was no line for the hot dogs, so that’s why I hopped on that line,” she said.
Another Fordham student, Eva Verstegen, FCRH ’28, also commented on the long lines.
“A lot of people were waiting for ice cream and fries,” Verstegen said. “So I think not everybody got to enjoy the food and they probably should have got more.”
The next day, Saturday, April 25, consisted of a concert. Fordham student band Irish Exit opened the show. They won their place on the lineup by taking first place at Rodrigue’s Battle of the Bands competition. Indie folk-pop artist Del Water Gap performed next, before Natasha Bedingfield headlined the show.
Due to the rainy weather, the concert was held inside the Lombardi Field House. Students noted they wished the show was outdoors on Martyrs’ lawn.
“Do I wish it was outside? Yes, but that can’t happen, so good on them for making it work,” said Sophia Puccini, GSB ’26.
Puccini attended every single event: the Victoria Justice speaker event, the carnival and the concert, and she said they were some of the best she’s seen since being at Fordham.
Bedingfield is known for her 2004 Grammy-nominated hit “Unwritten,” which was featured in the 2023 rom-com “Anyone But You.” Some other hits of hers include “Pocket Full Of Sunshine,” which was also featured in the rom-com, “Easy A,” alongside songs such as “These Words” and “Soulmate.”
“Natasha Bedingfield is a very iconic artist,” Puccini said. “We like to celebrate all the things we have left and those last couple weeks until graduation.”
Del Water Gap is the solo project of songwriter and producer Samuel Holden Jaffe, according to his website. Matt Levanduski, GSB ’26, said his curiosity about the artist brought him to the field house.
“Del Water Gap seemed like a cool band,” Levanduski said. “I haven’t really heard much of them, so it’s kind of cool to get out of my wheelhouse and kind of hear some different music.”
Levanduski also said his ties to CAB motivated him to attend the concert.
“I have a few friends here and a lot of people on CAB that I know, so I wanted to come out and support them,” Levanduski said.
For Maeve McCurdy, FCRH ’27, the free admission was reason enough. She said she went to the concert regardless of her devotion to the lineup.
“I go to concerts a lot, but paying for them is always tough,” McCurdy said. “But it’s free so it helped me go.”
McCurdy, who also attended last year’s Spring Weekend concert, said she liked the lack of pressure of the weekend.
“I like that there’s no pressure to go and you don’t have to go to all of [the events],” McCurdy said. “You can kind of pick and choose which ones you want to go to.”
Oliver Fontaine, GSB ’26, said he hasn’t been to any of the Spring Weekend concerts since he came to Fordham and that he wouldn’t be attending this year’s concert either. He attributed this decision to not being a concert person.
Another Fordham student, Piper Okonofua, FCRH ’28, said she was happy to be introduced to Bedingfield.
“I would never have ever seen her in real life besides this, so honestly it was a good way to be opened up into her music and that type of music and everything,” Okonofua said.
In the fall, students were able to fill out a form with requests for Spring Weekend artists. However, not all students filled it out. Levanduski and Fontaine both said they didn’t fill out the form.
“I realize I’m just at the mercy of what the popular student body wants, so I just leave it to them,” Levanduski said.
The last day of Spring Weekend consisted of “Brunch With The Big Four” on Eddies from 11-1 p.m., bingo at 2 p.m. at Fordham Prep and an improv show with various cast members of Saturday Night Live (SNL) at 8 p.m. at Fordham Prep.
Out of the many students The Ram talked to, none of them attended the brunch. Rodriguez cited exhaustion from Saturday’s concert as the primary contributing factor towards her decision not to go.
“I think the concert took up a lot of my energy the day before,” Rodriguez said. “So I think everybody was just exhausted and still adjusting in the morning, getting ready for bingo, of course.”
According to Rodriguez, bingo was a major hit.
“It was so exciting, it was so intense, we had so many different patterns that I hadn’t even done before,” she said. “It was so funny because we were playing bingo and every single round this guy kept saying bingo and he didn’t have it. And so eventually people started booing and yelling at him, telling him ‘You need to leave’ and all of that, and by I think maybe the fifth time he called bingo incorrectly, they actually kicked him out and told him he had to leave.”
Rodriguez said that the SNL event, which opened with Henry Tremblay, FCRH ’26, who gave a standup show, followed by the guests’ improv sketches and unpublished SNL sketches, was also a good time.
“I think most people would agree with this statement, but the live comedian was 100% the best event out of everything,” Rodriguez said, commenting that it was geared towards the students. “I really appreciated that Fordham let the comedians speak as freely as they wanted to tell the jokes that they wanted to, they didn’t censor, which we really appreciated.”
Verstegen also said she enjoyed the final event of the weekend.
“I’m not familiar with the SNL cast that well, so it was kind of new for me, but it was very funny and they had a Fordham student open with his standup set, which was really, really great,” Verstegen said.
The details for the Spring Weekend in 2027 have yet to be announced, but ideas are already in the air.
“If we could have a Ferris wheel in the parking lot and then a really cool photo op, I think that would be really sick,” Rodriguez said.
