The third week of Varieties “Spotlight of Imagination” has arrived and energy is still high.

“It’s been excellent,” Varieties director Laurine Gilbert said. “There have been a lot more non-traditional groups performing, although not all know how our tech rehearsals work and some skipped last week.

“We were holding our breath, but it all worked out,” she added.

This Saturday’s performances will include three vignettes, two skits and emcee group, Joe Daddy & the Family.

Vignettes will include Gentl Hearts Advance, The Shaggy Boys and a small group, Liz Gries, Emily Gries and Jessie Phillips.

For ISU’s a capella group, The Shaggy Boys, Varieties is on a long list of many performances this weekend. The group will also be performing with the Iowa State Singers tonight and at the men’s basketball game Saturday night.

But only at Varieties can the group let loose and do its best Michael Jackson imitation. The group’s rearrangement of “Thriller” will speak for itself.

“We found an arrangement and rearranged it,” Brad Seidenfeld, junior in music education, said. “We also thought it would be funny if a 240 pound guy imitated Michael Jackson.”

The Shaggy Boys will also be performing “I Can See Clearly Now,” “Lean on Me 2000” and “Tears in Heaven.”

The real reason, however, that The Shaggy Boys became involved in Varieties to make the group known throughout the community.

“We want to give more people on campus the opportunity to hear a capella music,” Seidenfeld said. “There’s not much of it around. We were hoping to use this as a springboard into the area.”

Originality in the vignettes doesn’t stop with ’80s pop-rock imitations. Gentl Hearts Advance will bring its own creativity to the stage.

“There will be a little activity on stage with a band,” Brendan Foster, junior in physics, said. “It’ll be more like a soundtrack to monotony.

“Actually, the band will be the main focus and everything else will be watching people on stage,” Foster continued. “It has a bit of a story to it, but we’re not sure what it is yet. It involves random chance and an attempt to do as little as possible and still have an interesting show.”

The biggest challenge for group members Ben Husmann, Greg Peterson, Mike Odum, Jessica Eccles and Foster is just deciding what to leave in and what to leave out.

This weekend’s skits will also add a new color to Varieties.

Members of Chi Omega, Phi Delta Theta and Pi Beta Phi will be performing “Searching for Stardom,” a skit about Varieties.

“We’re not really making fun of Varieties but we deal with the frustration of what you go through while getting ready for it,” director Kristy Henry, sophomore in performing arts and speech communications, said.

The skit will feature four characters. Each character is an extremist director searching for the perfect Varieties skit and each has completely different ideas.

“We play with different scenes,” Henry said. “One takes place in a 50s malt shop, there is a classroom scene and a music scene.

“We originally wanted to do something like this,” Henry continued. “but nothing was molding together. There was a lot of brainstorming and a lot of rewriting was involved.”

Delta Upsilon and Kappa Kappa Gamma will be performing the second skit, “Finders Keepers.”

This week’s Varieties groups expressed the same challenges the previous weeks’ groups have — time. There never seems to be enough of it for those who want to rehearse and there always seems to be more technical problems to work out.

But, like the groups that have already performed, each group this week hopes to take away more than the Sweepstakes trophy.

“Someday I’d like to be a theater professor at a university and this gives a me a taste of direction,” Henry said. “I got such a big thrill out of performing and I hope everyone else can feel that way.

“It is a good experience in writing, directing and getting costumes done,” she added. “I hope everyone has had a lot of fun and got something out of it.”

Varieties will be performing Saturday night at 6:30 and 9 p.m. in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union. Tickets are $5 and are available at all TicketMaster outlets and at the door.

Since this Saturday is the final round of the second cut, the Sweepstakes finalists will be announced Saturday at midnight and Sunday on the Varieties homepage, http://www.public.iastate.edu/~stu_org/SUB/Varieties.