By now you’re well versed in the stats: The U of M faculty teaches 60,000 students on two campuses, some of whom have formed groups of five, coughed up 20 bucks, and started one of the 600-plus student groups registered during the 2005-06 school year. These grandiose figures may reassure overwrought parents that their children will be able to find a niche on our sprawling campuses, but they do nothing to reflect the true cultural wealth of the U’s student groups.

From the Medieval Combat Society (re-enact your favorite battles from history class with foam-padded weapons!) to Keshet (targeted at queer Jewish folk) and the Theater of the Relatively Talentless (a medley of law students who sing and dance in the school’s annual musical), there’s an organization for even the most obscure interest.

AB Kilombo Capoeira
“Break dancing took off in New York [in the ’70s] because of Capoeira,” says Andrew Yerkes, president of the Afro-Brazilian Kilombo Capoeira martial art group. Spend a few minutes at one of their biweekly meetings in North Hall or watch the highly dramatized fight scene on the group’s website, www.abcapoeira.com, and you’ll see why.

Opponents dance on their hands, swing their legs beneath their bodies, cartwheel, flip and kick—all while bobbing back and forth in an elaborate dance-fight to the beat of Brazilian tambourines, drums and bells.

“It’s very rigorous and physically intense,” says Yerkes, a big, lanky guy who didn’t pack much muscle before he joined the club last year.

A mestre, or teacher, leads each meeting, where a predominantly female crowd practices footwork and attacks before they exercise their hard-won skills in a match.

“It’s not like hitting people,” Yerkes says. “You’re always moving with your partner,” and adapting hits to match the speed of the music thrumming through the building’s run-down gymnasium.

Although the university’s club emphasizes form over contact, injuries are inevitable when newbies are throwing their weight into a kick aimed two inches from their opponent’s face.

“People get hurt often,” Andrew says. “I’ve got bruises and scrapes in a lot of different places.” But as the saying goes, no pain, no gain.

Chicks with Flicks
Grab your best girlfriend (or guyfriend), sneak a piping-hot bag of Pop Secret into your purse (or man bag), sit back, relax, and let the hot guys appear … on the big screen, that is. Chicks with Flicks features movies with “engaging plots, memorable dialogue or uncomfortably attractive men.”

“It got out of control,” says the club’s president, Ella Schovanec, while describing the number of people interested in kicking back for a few hours of mindless entertainment and hunky men. “Our email list keeps growing.”

Don’t let the group’s name, or mission, fool you. There are plenty of guys in the club too.

“They show up to meet girls,” Ella explains.

The group meets monthly at Coffman Union or local theaters for new films, and throws a yearly Oscar party in the Great Hall. At this year’s soiree, the boys donned sport coats and ties while the girls dug up old prom dresses to watch the awards ceremony in style. Naked Barbies were spray-painted gold and given out to the best dressed. In 2004, this may have included students dressed as hobbits in support of Lord of the Rings, or as fish wearing windbreakers, cardboard fins and goggles for Finding Nemo.

While the Oscars are awash with drool-worthy men, Ella complains that there “haven’t been a lot of hot guys [in films] recently. … We found out the guy in [Aeon Flux], Martin Csokas, is a pan-sexual, and that totally ruined it for me.” Rob Schneider, on the other hand, was a surprisingly popular pick for hottest guy of the year.

Campus Crusade for Cthulu (CCC)
“I started CCC in 2003, after the heartbreak and disappointment of an uneventful millennium,” writes Dan Bayn in an email. “It was then that I realized you can’t just wait around for the apocalypse, you have to do something to make it happen.”

In Dan’s case, this meant corralling a few dice and a group of five to 15 imaginative students once a month to play cards and act out role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons and Call of Cthulu. During the former, Dan writes that students narrate scenes and improv dialogue about “a group of hapless investigators who come face-to-tentacled-face with Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.”

The Dread Cthulu is one such creature. H.P. Lovecraft, the cult hero of horror writing, describes the Great Old One as a cross between “an octopus, a dragon and a human caricature” with “a grotesque and scaly body, … rudimentary wings,” and “prodigous claws on hind and fore feet.” And you thought communal showers were scary.

To learn more about the obscene number of student groups hungry for new members, or to find out how to register your own wildly inventive extracurricular with the U, flip open your laptop or hit the nearest computer lab and check out the Student Activity Office’s website, http://www.sao.umn.edu/groups/.