Underneath the fluorescent lights of Sunset Bowling Lanes, Michael “Brad” Harrison, grounds maintenance worker at Texas State, prepared to meet his match.

Harrison eyed the 10 pins with a ball in his hand. Ten is a significant number to him because that is the age he was when he bowled his first game of 100. 

He stepped toward the lane, pulled the ball back and released it. Swirls of red and blue somersaulted quickly down the lane in a straight line before crashing into the pins, knocking them down in a flurry of white. 

Strike. 

A former Texas State student spent nearly a year battling leukemia, and now his sister, touched by her brother’s trials, is fighting to make the need for bone marrow donations more widely known.

Mark Moreno came to Texas State in fall 2006 as a music education major. He attended through fall 2010, after which he became dissatisfied with his academic progress and left Texas State. He spent a portion of the next year working construction alongside his father. 

In April 2012, Moreno began to experience fatigue and chronic pain from a toothache, for which he was prescribed antibiotics for two weeks. The pain failed to recede, so he had the tooth pulled on Easter weekend. His symptoms, however, remained. 

In various categories ranging from writing scripts to designing sets, four Texas State students went to Washington, D.C. as finalists in a competition for their work in theatre, and one won a national award.

The students recently returned from a trip to the Kennedy Center American College National Theater Festival where they attended plays and made connections with other finalists across the country.

Rita Anderson is a Texas State graduate student who competed in a playwriting competition, which required her to submit a collection of plays. She submitted “Early Liberty” and “Carousel,” full-length plays, and “Final Conversations,” a one-act play.

“Early Liberty” is a story about love, hope and the darker side of what it means to dream. “Carousel” is about what happens when the worlds of three couples affiliated with the same college are forced into collision. “Final Conversations” explores the wish for many chances to say goodbye to a loved one the right way.

A group of Texas State theatre students will question the circumstances of unconditional love conflicted with hardship in their upcoming short film “Love is Blindness.”

Centered around a young couple, Julian and Emma, “Love is Blindness,” tells of Julian’s struggle to adjust to Emma’s going blind after a car accident. The couple’s future is uncertain as they deal with the mutual frustration of just how unconditional their love is for each other.

Writer and director Shane Wellesley, theatre junior, began writing the script for his short film in lecturer Bryan Poyser’s spring 2012 screenwriting class as an assignment. He was inspired by a blind man he met in high school, whose happiness in life moved Wellesley.

“Originally, it was a very personal script, and I hadn’t shown it to many people,” Wellesley said. “Eventually, I asked myself, ‘What question can I ask to get others to connect?’”

The Gallery of the Common Experience and the Indian Student Association hosted a henna tattoo workshop April 19 for students to learn the art of henna.

The Honors College hosted a workshop that taught the art of Indian body painting Friday afternoon as part of the Common Experience series.

The president and secretary of the Indian Student Association came to present the body art form, henna, to students. The purpose of the common experience event was to educate and immerse students in different cultures. 

Two Texas State alumnae have made it their job to help improve children’s writing skills, whether that means going to juvenile detention centers, classrooms or halfway houses. 

A year ago, alumnae Katie Angermeier and Sarah Morrison began working for Austin Bat Cave—Angermeier as volunteer coordinator and Morrison as program director. The program focuses on helping children from ages 6 to 18 better their writing skills, teaching them to write college entrance essays as well as focusing on expository and creative forms of writing.

Austin Bat Cave was founded in 2007, a year before Angermeier and Morrison initially volunteered in 2008.

Austin Bat Cave depends on volunteers and has anywhere between 40 and 150 volunteers working for them at any given time.

Texas State students, staff and alumni will collaborate for a unique combination of performances in an upcoming weekend event.  

The ensemble will feature live music by the Texas State Chorale and dancing by the university’s Merge Dance Company, as well as the The Shay Ishii Dance Company.

Shay Ishii, coordinator of theatre and dance publicity, is the choreographer for both dance companies and designed their costumes.

In several pieces, dancers will be moving in and out of the choir with both groups on stage.

“It’s really exciting for us as dancers to have that energy of being inside of the sound, instead of the sound being just projected out to the audience,” Ishii said. “I think it’s also exciting to the vocalists and musicians—for them to have movement whizzing past them and around them and swirling them up in the movement.”

Students walking through the LBJ Mall Tuesday morning witnessed their peers standing with signs and yelling compliments at them as they passed by.

The Student Leadership Team’s new Compliments Booth started last semester to cheer up the student body as an expression of social excellence  and enthusiasm.

Ashley Jones, team president and international studies junior, said students are surprised at an organization giving away praises while only expecting a cheerful mood, smile and additional compliment in return.

“It makes us really happy when people come up to us and (ask), ‘Why are you doing this?’ and we’re just like, ‘It’s just to give compliments,’” Jones said.

The team’s signs display compliments and encouraging statements including “smile,” “you’re beautiful” and a Texas State Bobcat original, “have a pawfic day.”

Initially, the group was unsure as to how students would respond to such gestures.

Students feeling the urge to explore the cultural habits of prehistoric civilizations are given the opportunity through the Experimental Archaeology Club.

Texas State students are given the opportunity to explore the cultural habits of prehistoric civilizations through the Experimental Archaeology Club.

The Experimental Archaeology Club is a group of primarily anthropology students seeking to test the survival habits of 11,000-year-old Texas inhabitants. Club activities include networking, testing pre-historic tools and weapons, and practicing Paleo-American (the ancestors of Native Americans) cooking habits.

Members do not have to be licensed archaeologists experienced with excavating prehistoric remains. Current members are simply students testing existing archaeological theories.

“We’re trying to better understand human behavior,” said Stephen Black, assistant professor of anthropology and club facility sponsor .

Children, families and elderly couples filled San Marcos Plaza Park with laughter, conversations and relaxation Thursday night during the second of five concerts in the Keep San Marcos Beautiful Spring Concert Series.

The evening kicked off at 6:30 p.m. with catering services provided by Whole Foods, selling chicken tacos, buffalo wraps and more. Other vendors sold incense, stoneware and other merchandise.

Among jewelry vendors was The Imperfect Bones, selling necklaces made with chicken and rat skulls and raccoon jaws as pendants, and a jewelry stand made out of a chicken’s scaly leg. All items were handmade by Hannah Parks.

“My mom actually knows this man who butchers quails and sends them to meat markets,” Parks said. “He just gives me the heads, because they throw them away anyway, and I just go ahead and taxidermy them so they don’t go to waste, and use them in necklaces.”