Campus character: Ele Woods

“Oh, sorry bros, didn’t mean to spoil your fun,” coos Ele Woods ’11.5 to the skateboarders we cross paths with as we walk along the newly melted path from McCullough to Voter.

I’ve managed to steal her away from the Porter porch, where she is usually found during off hours. Given the immense amount of time that the theater major spends rehearsing, it is convenient that her den of silliness is so close to the CFA.

“I love bros,” she whispers.

Her hands are stiffly posed near her chest, fingers splayed to allow her purple nail polish to dry. Though she describes her current outfit of a chunky sweater, Victorian lace-up boots and pink sports bra peeking out of her checkered dress as something that makes her “look like a homeless person,” anyone who knows her can attest that this is just one of her many unique looks.

Recently, friends awarded her the title of “best costumed,” reflective of her history as a “group costume dictator. I will make you wear glitter in your hair. Anything for the group aesthetic.” As far as daily fashion goes, one tidbit that she’d like to give the world is that people should start wearing “shirts as skirts.”

Her style may have something to do with her sense of place in the world, but maybe it’s just her. This is not the first time that Woods has been swept up into Midd Kid fame, having already been featured in both the Midd Kid video as part of the Quidditch scene and in Middlebury’s “How’d you Get Here” series. On being a Midd Kid —“I guess I am one, but I don’t know what that is” — she cited her extracurricular involvement and presence within the theater community as making her a Midd Kid, and a hyper visible one at that.

“It’s weird. It’s always weird, first of all hearing your voice, but also seeing how you represent yourself to people because I think it’s really hard to sum up somebody in five minutes,” Woods said. “It was really cool that I got to do “How’d You Get Here,” but I guess I always thought it was funny that I got to do it because I don’t have a particularly interesting story compared to a lot of other people. I think that just because of the fact that I grew up in Switzerland they said, ‘You can do this,’ but there was no one thing that they could really focus on. It was just me talking about myself.”

Woods wants to return to Switzerland someday, but having left the country for Midd two weeks shy of getting her Swiss passport, she has to wait for a work visa or other travel document just like any other tourist in order to return for more than a vacation.

“If I have kids, I’d love to raise them there,” Woods said. “I think it’s a great place to raise kids, specifically teenagers because the drinking age is 16 and you don’t drive so it’s just a really good introduction to nightlife and being safe about stuff like that.”

This was a lesson that Woods learned well enough; “I’ve never thrown up from drinking in college,” she said, although food poisoning has gotten her.
In the United States,  Woods is based in Los Angeles, but since she never went to high school there, she does not know many people and finds it hard to call it home.

“Sophomore year I would have considered Middlebury my home, but now as a senior it’s harder to claim Midd as anything anymore,” she said. “I’ll make one eventually.

“I like to think of myself as a flaneur, which is a word that I discovered when I was 13 in a book that I didn’t understand,” Woods said. “It’s not necessarily a homeless person or a vagabond. It’s just somebody who lives from place to place and doesn’t have a set home and just enjoys the ride.”
Woods is a performer in every right, heavily involved with both dance and theater on campus, but her true passion lies in comedy.

“That’s definitely what I want to do, most likely in Los Angeles, just because I love the sun — can’t get enough of it,” she said.

For Woods, comedy has been one of those things that has always been a part of her life.

“I have two older sisters and they always used to say I was funny when I was a kid so it was one of those things that was drilled into me like, ‘You’re a funny person. You can do funny things,’” Woods said. “I like it. I love making people laugh or trying to at least.

Woods feels that being part of her “kooky family” and the youngest of three sisters has made her who she is. She often has rap battles in the kitchen or has “curse offs” with her mom, who also shares her penchant for slang. While you’re busy trying to figure out what Woods means when she says “DFMO” or “pointmaster” or “NTTT,” her mom will be saying things like, “I’m out for reups,” which Woods translates to mean she’s going to the grocery store. Her mom is “awesome and super-supportive.”

This combination of support and a little bit of crazy may have helped her nurture a lifelong dream: being on Saturday Night Live.

“I’m going to be on Saturday Night Live, eventually. I have to. I just really want to. As a theater major, I do not care about being famous … It’s not even my favorite comedy show, but it’s just one of those things I really wanted to do when I was a kid and it’s just always stuck with me so, if not SNL, then its equivalent when I’m finally out in the world.”

Though Woods will forever live on in my mind most clearly as Eloise, the child character that she so fully embodied in an independent one-woman show that she put on last year, she prefers to imagine that her “identifying tag on campus is the girl with the red backpack” because it is more mysterious.

Close friends of Woods remember her alter egos fondly. Though they have not come out to play in a while, characters include “Hank,” the aggressor married to her roommate who she makes cook her things. Another one, “Mirabell” is a southern lady who’s just a little too aggressive.

Most of her alter egos harken back to freshman year when she was “really, really, really weird. All freshmen are sort of trying to figure out what their place is and I knew that I wanted my place to be in the comedy scene. I just didn’t really know how to get there so I was just pretty comfortable with letting my freak flag fly a lot.”

During freshman Winter Term Woods and her suitemates competed in their very own awkward Olympics in which badges were awarded for completing each awkward task.

When Woods became a Feb this semester after one of her credits from the University of California, Los Angeles failed to transfer, it was her mom’s idea to let her stay another semester so she could finish up her credits.

“My freshman year I got kicked out of school,” says Woods unabashedly. It’s a truth that she’s pretty open about because as she says, “People need to know it can happen. It’s pretty easy to flunk out if you aren’t doing anything right.”

Woods was taking three classes and failed biology. She was intending to be a biology major at the time, but “just wasn’t happy.

“I wasn’t doing any theater because I was trying to be pre-Med and it was just bad news,” Woods said. “I get a lot out of theater — out of doing it, the process of it and the performance of it. It gets a lot of my frustrations out so when I didn’t have it, a lot of my energy just went into staying up really late, taking lots of naps and loafing about.”

To stay on track for graduation, Woods took classes at Occidental College during her time away from Middlebury. While she loved Occidental, Woods returned to Middlebury because she wanted to prove she could graduate. She took summer classes to make it happen on time, but in the end when the last credit fell through her mom said, “’You’ve gone through a lot. You’ve done a lot of stuff to graduate on time. Maybe it’s just the universe’s way of saying you should take another semester before you throw yourself into the world.”

Facing her surprise extra semester with grace, Woods says that she will use her extra semester to “take advantage of all the stuff she never really got to do, including forming a sketch comedy group.”

During her time at Middlebury, Woods has realized that there may be too much emphasis on “living life to the fullest” all the time.

“[I wish] that there wasn’t such serious “FOMO” [fear of missing out] on the weekends,” she said. “There’s so much pressure to go out every night on the weekends and if you don’t you’re going to miss out on something great. I wish that it were just cool to stay in and hang out, which now that I’m a senior I do a lot more, but not only that people at Middlebury are so cool, but also we’re all so busy within our schedules and our lives that we forget how cool everybody is.”

Lastly, Woods would like you all to know that no matter how strange you may think she is after reading this article, in the words of Ke$ha, “We are who we are. Be better than Ke$ha, I think that should be everyone’s life goal.”