Daily Skiff

Programming Council will incorporate new events into Family Weekend with the TCU Stars talent show and a lecture series.

Danae Spencer, Programming Council member and Family Weekend director, said SGA Adviser Kim Appel suggested making the performance part of Family Weekend because of its success last year.

TCU Stars was started last year by junior music major Christa Bentley and junior music education major Claire Stewart as a fundraiser for the professional music fraternity Mu Phi Epsilon and the Music Educators Organization.

"Claire and I took it on ourselves because we thought it would be a great way to get students involved and would be fun to watch talented people perform," Bentley said.

The show will feature students with various talents including a singer-songwriter, pianist, bagpiper, comedian and dancer. Last year's winner, senior social work major Sawyer Powers, will return to baton twirl. The talent show will begin at 6:30 p.m. Friday in the Brown-Lupton University Union Ballroom and will include dinner. Families must have preregistered for tickets, which has now ended.

There will also be a showing of the performance for students at 7:30 p.m. Thursday in the PepsiCo Recital Hall. Tickets are $5 and can be bought at the door.

Before the Friday talent show, a lecture series featuring professors from campus will be in the Ed Landreth Auditorium. The topic of the series will be the "Last Lecture," inspired by the memory of Randy Pausch, who was a Carnegie Mellon university professor. Pausch gave his final speech to an audience in September 2007 titled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams" before he died of pancreatic cancer in July.

"We thought it would be really cool for professors to talk about their life lessons in their personal fields," Spencer said.

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