Children Attend Party

Local schoolchildren, dressed in costumes of green dragons, the Statue of Liberty and punk rockers, got a jump on Halloween yesterday as they attended a multi-cultural festival and fundraiser in Memorial Hall.

The UNICEF-sponsored party featured a wide variety of events including a parade through Harvard Yard, arts and crafts with volunteers from the Boston Children's Museum and a performance by a local children's theater group.

UNICEF volunteer Elizabeth C. Gilmore and Jarrette T. Barrios '90 orchestrated the Halloween party with the help of 30 Harvard students and a number of volunteers from the Cambridge community.

Event coordinators said they expected 1300 children and their parents to pay five dollars a piece to attend the festival.

Since yesterday's event was funded exclusively through donations from community organizations and corporations, the fundraiser "was already in the black," before it began, Gilmore said.

Gilmore said she planned the affair to relieve her frustration with standard UNICEF fundraising efforts like greeting card sales.

"Our aim is to get people thinking about these other cultures in an upbeat, positive way. We want to shatter cultural stereotypes," said Gilmore.

Many parents, including one couple who drove from New Hampshire with their three-year-old son, said they came to Harvard because they had heard of the event on television last week.

Inside Memorial Hall, the carnival atmosphere had a distinctly international flavor. The program included performances by Indian and Chinese dancers, folk music from around the world and an African storyteller.

Children figured as key players in several planned events. A dance group from the Roxbury Center for Performing Arts, composed of a dozen third-graders, performed a Caribbean dance which they had been practicing "forever, or at least six months," according to one of the aspiring dancers.

Stephen Smith, a Cambridge first-grader, who came dressed as Chuck Norris, the "karate king," said he enjoyed playing the ball toss and the other games. "I'm having lots of fun," he said after his mother prompted him.

As a child dressed up like a young punk rocker, with hair streaked red and green and an earring dangling from his left ear, strolled by pulling a German shepherd with a patch over one eye, Gilmore commented, "this event really is the first of its kind."