As the week draws to a close, the men of mystery from Pine View’s annual Mr. Pine View show are getting ready to take the stage. As we look forward to this year’s performance—taking place on Friday—let’s take a moment to look back at not only a previous Mr. Pine View show, but also a Miss. Pine View show.
Don’t miss out—get your tickets now for Mr. Pine View 2025!
by Isabella Kulawik— published in The Torch, May 19, 2023
Each year, Pine View hosts the annual Mr. and Miss Pine View shows, where seniors showcase their talents and compete against each other with often humorous acts. The Torch (T) met with this year’s winners, Lily Maglio (LM) and Cole Nebel (CN), to ask them about their experiences with the show.
T: Can you tell me what the inspirations were for your acts?
LM: My inspiration was a joke with you [Isabella Kulawik, one of the Miss PV directors] and Grace [Chung, the other Miss PV director] from last year, and we were just saying random acts that we thought would be funny, but like funny bad. And that one seemed potentially good, but still funny.
So then I just went with it.
CN: My inspiration was… I always do performances with [my sisters] Bella and Ava, and I was like, okay, in elementary school… we were like eight or nine years old, we did “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better,” and I was like, let’s just do it again, senior twin-style — and that was basically why I chose to do that.
T: Was there anything you would like to have changed about your act?
LM: I probably should have rehearsed [my dance] more… I was going to choreograph something and then that didn’t work out.
CN: Yeah, going into it, I rehearsed my act once and then we did it for people the day before, and it was all over the place. Nathan had to improvise piano, Bella and I didn’t know the words — I didn’t know the words. And then literally in the dressing room before, [Bella and I] were doing the performance — we did it one time through and for some reason we got the words down, so yeah, I would be better prepared like what Lily said, so somehow it came together.
T: Do you have any memorable experiences from the rehearsal process?
LM: I think the classic answer for Miss Pine View this year is our worm sessions, which I had a bruise for like a month after that. And it was painful but worth it. I also had to go to dance and explain the fact that my arms were really sore and I wouldn’t be able to dance to my full potential because of doing the worm for hours. And my dance teacher, she found it really funny, as I think we all did, and I’m now better at the worm — so there you go.
CN: As Lily would know, our dance rehearsals were something else. We always would do this stupid thing called log cabin, which was… all [of us] just right on top of each other for no apparent reason, and another one of my favorite memories was when we did a bonding night. It was at Chloe Niebuhr’s house and we went there and we filmed the making of Mr. Pine View or whatever, and we did a dance in the backyard which was by the water and then we watched YouTube videos. We watched Lizzo and we were screaming like “Lizzo.” It’s just stuff like that.
T: What was your reaction to winning?
LM: It’s hard to distinguish between the rush of the show and the camaraderie you felt with the cast. And like actually winning, I mean, obviously it was very fun to win and everything, but I feel like any one of us on that stage had such a good chance of it.
CN: For me, I don’t know, it’s funny, I enjoy it. Because the fact is like, it’s weird to me. I was literally walking — I came in late to school one day, and Mrs. Marcotte and Mrs. Abela were giving a Pine View tour to a whole bunch of up-and-coming students… and I was walking by and I said, “Hey, good morning,” and they were like, “Over here we have Mr. Pine View.” And I was like, “Oh, stop!” It’s just like, the most random things… It’s a funny thing to have the name attached to it because I never saw it as a thing.
LM: It’s kind of the same for me. It’s such a random thing… I had Schweig for Gov. first semester this year. I don’t think he ever learned my name — like from the beginning of the year I was never one of the people he called on, so he didn’t know my name. And then after the show, he would say, “Okay, MPV, what do you like?” And he just kept calling me MPV, and I had no idea. Nobody knew what that meant. It wasn’t like a direct switch after the show. It was like at some point he started calling me that. And eventually we figured out it was Miss Pine View, but no, it’s just random. And then also the office, if they are trying to flag me down specifically, again, they don’t know my name, but they can just use the Miss Pine View title.
T: Do you have any memorable moments from the event?
LM: I remember two things. One, right before Simona’s act, which was Conjunction Junction or like the general Third Grade Rocks. Nobody remembered which side of the stage we were on — so we’re all standing on the wrong side of the stage… and we were all trying to put on the random costumes we had. And there was such a panic, a group panic… and also we thought that the act was going to start immediately and it started like five minutes later. But being really panicked together with that group of people is retrospectively really funny but also in the moment it was, other than stressful, really fun because again, you felt that bond with everyone. And then again, right before Arya’s act, because we were all trying to learn the lyrics. We were all like desperately reading the lyrics that she had sent. We were like zoomed in on our phones and Arya was there panicking.
CN: For me… I mean, I would say not just “Man or Muppet”; it was the fact that “Man or Muppet” was stuck in every single person’s head for probably two or three weeks after the show, because it was so funny. I was literally walking and like I saw Mrs. White, and she was like, “Cole, I’m so mad at you and Simon because I have been singing ‘Man or Muppet’ in my house for no reason.” And it’s not even that, my parents do it too and then in the Mr. Pine View group chat, they’ll always randomly send something about “Man or Muppet.” It’s just like the fact that it’s become such a memorable thing, Simon and I sang it.
Every week, we select one of our previous stories to republish, as a glimpse into the past. Stay tuned every single Throwback Thursday for new installments of this PVTorch.com exclusive series.
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