Life of the Party: Shmuel Padwa
Shmuel “Shmu” Padwa ’25 is everywhere. If he isn’t your favorite teaching fellow for Statistics 110: “Probability,” he’s probably let you into one of his Quincy balcony suite ragers. Maybe he’s shown up at one of your friend group’s kickbacks, or you saw him at Adams Drag Night, tasseled-out in a cherry red wig and flaming tights. If you’ve attended any karaoke-related function, Shmu was probably there.
“This is the thing — he’s a universal character in everybody’s lives,” Andrew C. Nober ’25 says. “I can’t name the amount of times where I’ve randomly seen Shmu at an event and had no idea how he’s connected to it in any way, but he seems to know everybody there.”
This is likely because Shmu is such a yes-man. A couple of Sundays ago, he ran the Cambridge Half-Marathon, then changed into traditional Indian attire to spend four hours cooking for a Diwali dinner in Mather. In between cooking and serving dinner, he led an Orienteering trip for the Harvard Outing Club, and after dinner, it was roommate bonding night, featuring a Jeopardy game he made himself. “A typical Sunday in the life of Shmu,” one of his roommates Honor Pimentel ’25 attests.
Even more than a yes-man, Shmu is a “Why not?” man. When I contacted him to arrange an interview for this article, he replied that he was “actively boarding” a flight to Berlin. A week or so before, he’d bumped into some friends who told him that Berlin would be crazy for the 35-year anniversary of the wall falling and that flights were also cheap. Shmu’s reaction? “Sick, that sounds awesome.” Recently, a friend invited him to a line dancing club in Boston. “I was like, ‘I have never done that in my life. Sure, why not?’” Shmu says. Someone else asked him to come along for a cheesecake tasting: “Why not?” A stranger’s birthday party? He’s on his way.
This might be the essence of Shmu’s status as the Life of the Party: taking experiences as they come. “If people are going to some turtle-themed party — that was a pretty great night actually,” he says, smiling wistfully. “Say ‘Yes,’ go along.”
The man is spontaneous and inconceivably optimistic. He always has been, having grown up as the middle child of five in The Bronx. In high school, he read 17th-century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s “Theodicy” — “this is the nerdiest answer I’m gonna give in this entire thing,” he says — finding in it a philosophical justification for his optimism. Young Shmu latched on to the big idea that “everything kinda happens for the best. This is kind of the best world that could exist.”
In high school, he also came to believe that, unlike in the movies, cool and popular kids weren’t necessarily the same thing. Though Shmu says he wasn’t cool and wasn’t trying to be, he loved saying hello to everyone in the hallway, they loved saying hi back, and he was invited to stuff all the time. “Oh wait, I’m becoming somewhat popular, question mark?” he realized.
To Shmu, coolness entails a level of style that he has no interest in. “Cool” seems to involve jeans, but jeans are not ergonomic enough for Shmu. What if someone spontaneously invites him to something, and he can’t take off in a dead sprint? Adidas track pants allow for this flexibility at all times. He owns 10 pairs. They have been a staple in his wardrobe since ninth grade.
As for the rest of the outfit, “very simply, you got the baseball hat, you got the chill t-shirt, you got the sweatshirt,” he explains. Finally, the “Shmu sense of style” involves running shoes — Brooks, to be exact. “Remember, I was saying I was popular, but not cool. This plays directly into that,” he explains.
When going out out, though, Shmu elevates his uniform. “Whenever I’m going clubbing, I’m a big fan of a nice shirt with something a little goofier underneath, like short jean shorts,” he says. “It just creates intrigue.”
To Shmu, intrigue is highly important in a party setting, along with making sure the party has a “central focus.” Birthdays are “the ideal medium for a party,” because that focus is built in. Themes, according to Shmu, “make you not have to worry about who you are, but instead, have to worry about a platonic ideal of something else.” Instead of presenting as yourself, Shmu explains, it’s way more fun to instead figure out how to best represent, say, the Cat in the Hat with the stuff in your room.
Soon, Shmu’s giving me the down and dirty on his expansive philosophy of parties. At parties, people can “let loose in a low-pressure environment that is very clearly designed for everyone to have a good time,” he says, a phenomenon that’s existed since “like, the dawn of man.”
The two essential aspects of that, to Shmu, are “the having-a-good-time, and the everyone.” “So my philosophy is, well, I want to make sure I’m having a good time — you know, maybe drink a little, maybe dance a little, maybe have a little fun. And then, the everyone — I want to get to know everyone there,” Shmu says.
“People are fundamentally interesting,” he says. “So if you’re at a party and there’s people, go talk to them. Go have fun. Go socialize. You can make a new best friend. You can make a new dance partner. Great things can happen.”
— Associate Magazine Editor Sam E. Weil can be reached at sam.weil@thecrimson.com