tl19911107_017 "FEATURES FEATURES FEATURES FEATURES FEATURES qATURL -EATUREc FEATURES FEATURES FEATURES FEATURES TSU alum returns for Shakespearean evening ""Roc"" moves from hard-time to prime time Diane LaMorte Assistant Features Editor Two-time Tony nominee and Thu alumni Charles ""Roc"" Dutton will give a benefit performance of ""Classic Entertainment: An Evening of Shakespeare with Charles S. Dutton"" on Sunday, November 10th at 8 pm in the Fine Arts Center's Mainstage The-atre. Dutton is the star of the new tele-vision comedy series ""Roc."" The show is centered around a charac- - ter named Roc Emerson, a good-natured Baltimore garbage man trying to make a better life for himself and his family. Dutton has been credited with creating one of the 'more robust comic heroes since Ralph Kram-den and Archie Bunker. Dutton is the star of the new television com-edy series ""Roc."" The show is cen-tered around a character named Roc Emerson, a good-natured Bal-timore garbage man trying to make a better life for himself and his family. -Roc- has been Dutton's nick-name ever since he got into neigh-borhood rock fights as a kid. ""I Al-ways had a habit of trying to lead the charge and I would get my head busted twice a month, so my friends called me 'Rockhead.' Then when I started boxing as an amateur it was shortened to Roc'."" Dutton was born and raised in Baltimore in the shadow of the state prison. Dutton dropped out of school at age 12 to run the streets where he quickly built up a reputation as a skilled amateur 16#recomiy 197 Julia Harding boxer and, like most of the guys he knew, was in and out of reform schools and prison for a variety of offenses. Then a street fight turned ugly. Dutton's opponent pulled a knife. When the battle ended, Dutton's attacker lay dead, and Dutton was on his way to prison for manslaughter. A self admitted 'prison terrorist' and former member of the Black Panthers, Dutton's interest in the-atre began nearly 20 years ago while he was in solitary confine-ment. A dedicated Marxist-Leninist, Dutton read only leftist literature in prison. When a fight with a Roc got five years for manslaugh-ter - a sentence he managed to stretch by four more years through constant rebellion and in-subordination. Fine Ms prison guard landed him in soli-tary, Dutton grabbed a book which turned out to be a collection of plays. ""I had never read a play,"" Dutton � � � affd a loe"" o Staff Writer Homecoming weekend is tradi-tionally one of the highlights of the academic year for Towson State students and this year was no exception. Nov. 1 kicked off three days of ""magic and memo-ries"" for the campus community. The weekend started off at 9 a.m. on Friday morning as mem-bers of campus organizations gathered at Newell Field to build their floats for the Home-coming parade. The field was mobbed with Greeks building floats and socializing well into the wee hours of Saturday morning. The University Union opened its doors at 9 p.m. on Friday evening for the largest Club 101 of the year. The event was a success and, as usual, Bob and 18 � The Towerlight � November 7, 1991 Jeff's show was packed. The reggae group Uprising had the Potomac Lounge filled with stu-dents and alumni. Joey and the Jammers and Planetary Zygote, although not as well known, pro-vided good entertainment for ev-eryone. Saturday's events began with the parade which followed an off-campus route for the first year. Included in the parade were the Tigerettes (TSU's dance team), the marching band, the floats built by the sororities and fraternities and the eight finalists of the Out-standing Man and Woman of the Year Award. Immediately following the pa-rade was the ""Yell Like Hell"" competition. It took place out-side of the Towson Center. Competing in this event was Al-pha Phi with Sigma Alpha Ep-said. ""I was mesmerized. Especial-ly by 'Day of Absence' by Douglas Turner Ward. It's about the day all the blacks in a small Southern town decided not to come to work and the whites realized they couldn't live without them. It's played by a black cast in white-face and it's hilarious. I read it over and over and told myself, 'When I get out of here I'm going to stage this'."" ""I found my humanity in that cell and I was a changed man when I got out,"" Dutton said. ""The prison officials all thought I'd gone crazy, but they let me put on the play, and when I looked out over that audience and they were rapt! This was a bunch of guys who wouldn't be rapt over anything, but I had them, and a weird sense of power came over me. Suddenly, I knew what I was put on this earth to do.,"" Dutton obtained his high school equivalency and two-year college degrees while serving time. Upon his parole, he enrolled in the dra-ma department at TSU, receiving his BS. In 1980, his drama profes-sor suggested he apply to Yale. Much to his amazement, Dutton was accepted. Dutton resisted the lure of series TV until he received a call from an old Yale friend, Sasha Emerson, senior vice president of HBO Inde-pendent Productions, a newly formed production arm of HBO that develops TV series for the commercial networks as well as low-budget features. ""We made a deal with Roc and then we tried to figure out what see Roc, page 24 firaff014/ee silon, Alpha Omicron Pi with Sigma Pi, and Pi Delta Epsilon with Delta Sigma Pi. Awards were presented during halftime of the football game. Alpha Phi along with Sigma Al-pha Epsilon won the, ""Yell Like Hell"" competition and Pi Delta Epsilon with Delta Sigma Phi won the float competition. The Grand Prize Spirit Award went to Alpha Phi and Sigma Alpha Epsilon for their overall partici-pation in the Homecoming activ-ities. The Outstanding Man and Woman of the Year awards were presented to Chad Gobel and Erika Ragland. Gobel is a junior majoring in Political Science. He is a member of the 11-cam-pus University of Maryland Sys-tem Board of Regents, Vice- President of the Student Gov-ernment Association, and a brother in Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. Ragland is a junior majoring in Mass Communica-tion. She is assistant public af-fairs director for WMAR-TV, news coordinator at WTMD-FM, and president of the Towson State University chapter of the National Broadcasting Society. The runners up in the competi-tion were senior Matt Goddard and senior Joy Marie Daven-port. Bobcat Goldthwait performed at 8:30 Saturday night in the Stephens Hall Auditorium. The event was a success due to the turnout of students, alumni and the planning of the Student Ac-tivities Board. Known for his roles in Police Academy 2 and Scrooged, Goldthwait's energetic performance concluded the list of events scheduled for Home-coming weekend. "
