Saturday, March 15, 2003Dartmouth takes game 2 behind Stempniak's hat trickStaring the end of their season squarely in the face after losing in quadruple overtime last night, Dartmouth came back to defeat the (formerly Red) Raiders 3-1 tonight behind the heroics of Lee Stempniak. Stempniak netted all three goals for Dartmouth, including two in the deciding third period to lift the Green to victory and force game 3 tomorrow night. If Dartmouth wins, they will advance to Albany to face the 2nd seeded Crimson from Harvard in the ECAC semifinals. A loss will end their season.Dartmouth outshot Colgate 34-10 through two periods, but were only able to capitalize on one of them, and headed into the third period tied at one. They outshot Colgate 44-20 for the game. Pete Summerfelt assisted on all three goals, and Mike Ouellette added a pair of assists as well. Dartmouth's top line of Stempniak, Ouellette, and Hugh Jessiman has taken part in every goal this series. Stempniak has 3 goals and 3 assists, Jessiman has 2 goals, and Ouellette has 4 assists. Top D-Men Trevor Byrne and Summerfelt have the only other points, as Byrne got the other goal and Summerfelt added his 3 assists tonight. Nick Boucher had 19 stops in net to earn the victory, a night after setting the Dartmouth record for most saves in one game with 66 (on 70 shots). ------------- Game 1 - Colgate 4 @ Dartmouth 3 (4OT) (Thompson Arena - Hanover, NH): Box Score Longest NCAA Games Game 2 - Colgate 1 @ Dartmouth 3 (Thompson Arena - Hanover, NH) Box Score Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by Ben at 10:11 PM (0 comments) Friday, March 14, 2003Dartmouth loses 4-3 in 4OT to ColgateIn a game neither team deserved to lose, Dartmouth gave up a goal 1:05 into the 4th overtime to fall to Colgate 4-3 in the best-of-3 series. Total time of the game was 121:05, the third longest in NCAA history, and easily eclipsing last year's 2OT game vs. Colgate as the longest in Dartmouth history.Dartmouth held one-goal leads thrice, and let Colgate come back to tie each time. Hugh Jessiman got two goals, Lee Stempniak had three assists, and Mike Ouellette had two assists but it wasn't enough. Game two is tomorrow night at 7 PM at Thompson. Dartmouth needs to win to keep its season alive. Game 3 will be Sunday at 7 if necessary. Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by Ben at 11:42 PM (0 comments) FIRE on O'ReillyThis is just a quick announcement to let you know that FIRE's Thor L. Halvorssen will be a guest on The O'Reilly Factor this evening. The show airs at 8pm EST and again at 11pm EST. Thor will be discussing FIRE's recent -- and widely publicized -- victory at Citrus College, where (among other outrages) a professor forced her students to write anti-war letters to President Bush. Tune in!Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by Emmett at 12:36 PM (0 comments) Thursday, March 13, 2003HehPerhaps I should get a bumper sticker that says, "I'd Rather Be Blogging."Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by Emmett at 6:05 PM (0 comments) Re: Nader Thief...In re: your question ("Anyway, Emmett, how did FIRE managed [sic] to drop the ball on this one"), please see Clark's post, immediately below this one.Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by Emmett at 6:01 PM (0 comments) Workis sooo overratedFull post and comments below the fold. Posted by Ryan at 3:23 PM (0 comments) ClarkOn top of things as usual. Aren't you supposed to be working, Ryan?Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by Christian at 3:21 PM (0 comments) Re: Nader Thief...The funny thing (or not so funny) is that this isn't news! Read the article; they've been doing it for years. One Canadian I know (who's a socialist mind; great guy for a beer if any of you pass through Yemen) said that those fees are mandatory at some Canadian universities. I haven't been able to check. Anyway, Emmett, how did FIRE managed to drop the ball on this one?Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by Christian at 3:21 PM (0 comments) EmmettThe Review covered the PIRG issue a couple years back. The plantiff in the case mentioned in the article eventually lost at the Supreme Court.Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by Ryan at 3:20 PM (0 comments) Ralph Nader Is a ThiefRalph Nader's PIRGs have been siphoning off a portion of student fees from college students. This is as though part of your funds were to go to the ACLU or the RNC. Amazing!Plus, there's a surprise plug for FIRE's Guides to Student Rights on Campus. So that makes me happy. Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by Emmett at 2:49 PM (0 comments) Wednesday, March 12, 2003New Guides to LibertyYesterday, at a press conference in DC, FIRE celebrated the launch of the FIRE Guides to Student Rights on Campus. In attendance were luminaries from our Board of Advisors for the Guides series, ranging from former Attorney General Ed Meese to ACLU President Nadine Strossen. The five Guides -- three of which have already been published -- will instruct students on their rights, so they can stand up and defend them. As our president, Alan Charles Kors, is fond of saying, "a nation that does not educate in liberty will not long survive in liberty -- and will not even know when it has lost it."The Guides are: Students can download the Guides, in pdf format, at www.thefireguides.org. Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by Emmett at 12:36 PM (0 comments) Same question......was asked by me a few weeks ago with no response. I'll offer it again with Emmett.Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by Christian at 10:29 AM (0 comments) Trustee ElectionSo does anyone have any info on these people? I just got the candidate package in the mail. I'm leaning towards this John Donahoe fellow, but Elyse Benson Allan plays up the whole "liberal arts college" thing. That's encouraging. Any thoughts, anyone?Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by Emmett at 10:07 AM (0 comments) Tuesday, March 11, 2003LionessesWell, we're not as bad as Columbia's men's basketball team.Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by alex at 2:44 AM (0 comments) Monday, March 10, 2003Making Dartmouth ProudRobert Reich '68: Rhodes Scholar, Labor Secretary, Candidate for Democratic nomination for Governor of Massachusetts, nude modelFull post and comments below the fold. Posted by alex at 8:47 PM (0 comments) Our own Steven MenashiHe has the Hoover Institution policy brief thing in the March 24 National Review.It's on--what else--academic freedom. Check it out. Also, the Review gets several mentions in yet another piece on D'Souza's Letters to a Young Conservative later in the issue. Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by alex at 6:47 PM (0 comments) If only Pres. Wright cared so much about Men's BasketballSt. Bonaventure president resigns; Athletic director and coach placed on leaveFull post and comments below the fold. Posted by alex at 12:30 AM (0 comments) "[I]f I didn't know..."But we'd agree that part of the problem is that faculty won't admit that they really don't know how students spend their time outside of the classroom.Those faculty resolutions to end the Greek system are so very dishonest. And students don't feel like being honest because with all the performance reports and action plans, students are tired. Reports are what we do for class, not for administrators interested in our social lives. Playing a pick-up game of basketball with friends should be playing a pick-up game of basketball of friends, not a "non-alcoholic programming event" or "informal engagement." Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by alex at 12:26 AM (0 comments) Sunday, March 09, 2003Re: This is long...After reading that, if I didn't know that frats are much different now (even from Chris Miller's account from 1989), I'd think twice about defending frats as stenuously as I do.Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by Emmett at 11:01 PM (0 comments) This is long...but somehow, I'd never seen this until today._______________________________________ Chris Miller's Animal House Copyright 1989 Information Access Company, a Thomson Corporation Company Copyright 1989 Playboy Playboy October, 1989 SECTION: Vol. 36 ; No. 10 ; Pg. 104; ISSN: 0032-1478 HEADLINE: Return to Animal House; writer of film revisits his old fraternity house BYLINE: Miller, Chris BODY: The man who wrote the movie revisits the scene of the crime-and finds he can still boot with the best of them. Playboy, October, 1989 IT's MAGIC MONDAY at the Alpha Delta house and the brothers have been drinking since SiX A.M. They have worked their way through Sunrise-Service Hour (tequila sunrises), Cartoon Hour (Kool-Aid punch) and Lonely-Guy Hour (Thunderbird and Mad Dog, straight from the bottle). Now it's ten o'clock, and that means it's . . . Naked-inthe-Tube-Room Hour! Seventy naked guys cram into the TV room, which is about as large as a small one-car garage. Beers are distributed by dick size-those with big ones get king cans of Bud; those with small cocks drink from shot glasses. The worst, most repellent, vile and disgusting porno tape available is popped into the VCR. The brother keep checking one another out-anyone who gets a hard-on faces rigorous punishment. No one's quite sure what !he punishment might be, since in the history of Magic Monday, no one has yet gotten a hard-on during Naked-inthe-Tube-Room Hour, but they keep checking anyway, just in case. There's a knock on the door. It's the delivery guy from the pizza place-he steps inside and freezes. Good Lord, what has he walked in on here-a bunch of preverts or something? Oddly enough, despite the large number of guys present, no one has the money to pay for the pizza-because no one has any pockets. On the screen, the cast is urinating on one another, sodomizing dead animals, all sorts of neat stuff. "If you could wait till the end of this sequence," says the guy who made the order, "I'll run upstairs and get some money" The pizza guy looks around, swallows and says, "Never mind. This one's a freebie." He makes the quickest getaway ever seen from a Dartmouth fraternity house. Magic Monday is a tradition going back at least two decades at the AD house, or Adelphian Lodge, as its members affectionately call it. The hourly themes proliferate over the year: Volleyball-inthe-Living-Room Hour, with Beach Boys music and pina coladas; Ex-Athlete Hour, with Schlitz beer (because that's what washed-up old athletes drink); Blues Hour, when they listen to Elmore James and drink bourbon; Christmas Hour, when they chop down a tree, plant it in the living room, decorate it with condoms and panties and drink eggnog; and, finally New Year's Hour, when they cut the tree up and burn it, drink champagne and sing Aued Lang Syne. It's a good time and an important annual event. The common belief is that the first Magic Monday occurred the day John E Kennedy was shot. After all, is a not carved on the pillar by the tap system in the basement, NOVEMBER 22, 1963-J.F.K. DEAD-EIGHT KEGS? I could tell them different. You see, I was there on November 22, 1963. First, it was a Friday, not a Monday, and, second, what happened was less a celebration of surreality than a wake; though, actually, it was a pretty good time. No, the first Magic Monday occurred a few years later, when a brother named Don chanced to stay up drinking one Sunday night, and in the morning, the brothers were so impressed that they blew off classes for the day and joined him. But why muddy the underpinnings of a cherished Adelphian tradition? Myths are more fun than facts. Let me tell you another AD tradition: the Night of the Seven Fires. This is the Hell Night that, in one form or another, has marked the transition of more than a half century's worth of AD pledges into brothers. The early Sixties version: You had to hike out to the snowy woods in the middle of the night and find, with the aid of a mimeographed map, the Seven Sacred Watch Fires. At each of these would be a complement of brothers waiting to demand demented acts of you. You had to drop trou and sit in the snow, consume impossible quantities of beer and wine and vomit repeatedly, sometimes on one another. It was one of the greatest nights of my life. This is difficult for some people to understand. Fraternity high-jinks are a most particular form of behavior and are regarded with neither sympathy nor affection by much of the world, especially mothers, police officers, campus administrators and other societal voices of moderation and control. It's hard to explain to those who have missed the fraternity experience how richly satisfying mooning or booting (thats Dart-talk for recreational vomiting) or eating your underwear can be. People just don't get it. Which is why about ten years after graduating, I decided to write a book about fraternity life in which I would present America with the straight skinny-the reverse value systems, the fascination with the repugnant, the cheerful flouting of authority The book never found a publisher, but portions of it, converted to short stories, appeared in National Lampoon, where their popularity prompted editor Doug Kenney to propose that he, Harold Ramis and I write a movie based on them. The movie was Animal House. Now, I'm aware that a lot of people thought that Delta Tau Chi in Animal House was somehow based on their fraternity Sorry guys-now it can be told-the house that launched the legend was AD at Dartmouth. And although, to the best of my recollection, no one at Dartmouth ever put Fizzies in the swimming pool or offed a horse in the dean's office, someone did once boot on the dean (and his wife), and there was, in a house today known as the Tabard, a mermaid with goldfish-bowl breasts, and, in the AD house, there were guys named Otter, Mounder and Pinto, and a 'Sex Room," and numerous black R&B bands that played Shout and Louie, Louie. There was also a guy named Turnip, who placed a phone call to a dead Smithie, identifying himself as her boyfriend. Unlike Otter in the movie, he didn't get himself and his fellow road-trippers dates with her roommate and friends. In fact, that idea had never occurred to Turnip-he'd made the call out of sheer joy of sickness. "Sickness Is Health, Blackness Is Truth, Drinking Is Strength." That was the house creed, and we tried to live up to it. Pledges were taught power booting. if you drank enough beer and jumped up and down a few times, it was no big deal to boot your height-the trick was in keeping a tight stream and hitting the target, a photo of Connie Francis, say, tacked to the basement wall. There was a fellow who used to snooze atop the bar, naked but for a beer cup over his dong. When a lady would enter the basement, he would tip his cup. We built lewd snow statues, got laid in a hearse parked out back, pledged a dead raccoon and once mooned the governor of New Hampshire. We had fun. But how much fun, I wondered, were they having up at Dartmouth today? After all, it was the Eighties now, the era of AIDS, religious fundamentalism and the conservative backlash against the indulgent Sixties and Seventies. What was more, to those of us alumni who followed the news out of Dartmouth, it often seemed as if the college had declared war on its fraternity system. The opening gun was firects in 1978. An English professor, James A. Epperson, circulated a petition among the faculty to have fraternities abolished for "interfering with college life and the health and well-being of students." The real stunner came when the faculty voted 67-16 in favor of the proposal. Obviously, there was serious resentment harbored against the fraternities at Dartmouth. To a degree, fraternities were under serious scrutiny nationwide. College faculties had always tended to view them as elitist, sexist, racist, anti-intellectual and overly involved with alcohol. Now, in the Eighties, with their ranks swelled with veterans of the Sixties-who by arid large hated &aternities-they were on the attack. At many schools, especially the smaller, private ones in the Northeast, boards of trustees formed study committees. In 1983, Amherst and Colby abolished fraternities outright. Gettysburg came close to doing the same, and at Middlebury, there's a continuing controversy over the fate of their fratemity system. Indeed, aspects of Greek fife have been under some form of study at approximately a third of the 650 colleges where fraternities exist. At the same time, though, fraternities have never been more popular. On the rebound from their Vietnam-era doldrums, undergraduate fraternities grew in membership from 230,000 in 1980 to more than 400,000 in 1986. This was widely regarded as a reflection of the return to establishment values and conservatism on campus, though it may have had more to do with the resurgent desire of college men to raise hell and have fun with their buddies, which, after all, is what &aternities are all about. In any case, it seems unlikely that larger schools, such as USC or the University of Illinois, will ever do away with them-they're simply too popular among both students and alumni. Meanwhile, back at Dartmouth, the proposal to abolish the houses was ultimately voted down by the board of trustees, but there did ensue a period of crackdown that resulted in many houses, being put on probation and given shapeup-or-ship-out ultimatums. Then, in' 1983, came the instituting of "minimum standards" for fraternities and sororities. Since this program called for, among other things, expensive renovations to the deteriorating houses, most of which had been built in the Twenties, .it was widely perceived as an attempt to do away with the fraternities by breaking them financially Then, in 1987, the board of trustees released a Residential Life Statement calling for a reduction in the fraternity system's dominance of social life on campus, and shortly after that, the Hanover police conducted their notorious undercover sting operation, deputizing an 18-year-old girl and sending her, with an out-of-town policeman posing as her boyfriend, on a round of fraternities during the big spring party weekend known as Green Key. Naturally, she was served beer, and eight fraternities and two sororities faced the possibility of criminal charges for serving alcohol to a minor The college got them off the hook, but it made it dear that next time, the houses would be on their own. This had a chilling effect on the admission of nonmember guests to parties. Finally, in 1988, the administration announced that starting with the class of 1993, rush would be delayed until sophomore year. Since this would decrease fraternity membership-and their already pinched treasuries-by 25 percent, there was bitter resistance to the measure, all the more so because it was a dictate from on high that ignored heavy student opposition. After all this, you had to wonder if fraternity life at Dartmouth was any fun at all any more. Specifically, I was curious to see how the boys were doing at the house that had inspired Animal House. I decided to find out. I enter the lodge with trepidation. What am I going to find, 25 years and all those regulatory institutions later? A skeleton crew of intimidated weenies, sipping oolong and discussing Proust? But no. The first thing that hits me is the smell. It's the same smell; it hasn't changed in two and a half decades! Mainly beer, with certain miscellaneous nuances. The place looks pretty much the same, too. A bit more wre cked-up, maybe, but it's the same tube room, the same tap system and, running the perimeter of the basement, the same beloved AD gutter (today known as "the gorf"). In the erstwhile basement bathroom-converted to a broom closet a few years back after a brother tore out the toilet to mix a punch in it-I can still make out the carved names of brothers from my era: Y BAGS, LAPES, SNOT, MAG F PIE, HYDRANT, DUMP TRUCK. . . . Having recently concluded a very successful rush, the house has nearly 100 members, and it looks as though most of them are here tonight. They seem a little cool; I wonder if I'm welcome. Or maybe ies just a generational style-they don't make a big deal of things. There are so many of them, though, more than twice the number we had ! The living room is like a subway car! And, God, how'd they get to be so young? I have brought with me, ,on video cassette, an assemblage of eight-millimeter movies taken back in my era. As I show the old flicks-glimpses of forgotten snow statues, of the brothers cavorting on the lawn, of parties and our great perennial R&B band Lonnie Youngblood and the Redcoats-pledges are periodically sent to "run a rack." They return with lengths of plank covered with brimming beer cups, so that the brothers may indulge their taste for malt beverage. As the tape proceeds, the crowd especially appreciates the sequence in which several old ADs eat the shirt of Bert Rowley, '61, off his back. When the show concludes, they signify their appreciation with a round of snaps and sing a friendly (albeit obscene) song to me. Then one of them hands me a full 12-ounce beer cup, and I see all these faces looking at me with expectation. Good God, I think, can I still chug one of these things? Well, it takes a little longer than it used to, but, yes, I can! All rightstill got my chops! The ADs cheer, the ice is broken. We repair to the basement, where fine music is played, multifarious brews are demolished and laughter fills the room. Sometimes, it occurs to me, despite the passage of much time, the essence of things remains the same. I stay at Dartmouth for ten days. I check out the sororities, the coed houses and, in addition to Alpha Delta, several "mainstream" houses. I go to parties, drink off kegs, hang out in small groups in &aternity rooms, doing a little herb and getting philosophical. I find out two things. First, fraternity life at Dartmouth is a lot more complicated than it used to be. Parties must be registered; you have to fill out a form at the campus police station before five P.M. on weekdays and noon on weekends. Since a party is defined as any time you go on tap, that means that you can no longer drink a keg without registering with the police. Furthermore, since the sting operation, the houses have had to post guards at all entrances to their tap rooms during parties to check I.D.s and make sure no underage nonmembers slip in. In addition, house presidents and social chairmen, aware that they risk $ 25,000 fines and even jail sentences if persons drunk on their beer crack up a car, say, take great care to prevent such drunks from departing, at least with their car keys. Meanwhile, there's the ongoing paranoia that Dean Wormer-like authority figures are out to get them, that any time now, fraternity life as they know it will be banished forever, the way the samurai were abolished in Japan in the 1870s. That's a pretty tough row to hoe, compared with the relatively laissez-faire early Sixties. But the second thing I notice is that, despite the many modern complications, the peculiar Dartmouth genius for having fun is undiminished. And although much is different at the Big Green, what's more interesting is how much has stayed the same. Take the AD house. We had nicknames, they have nicknames; the house currently contains the likes of Goon, Chubber, Turd, Hedgehog, Cowpie, Merkin, Mule, Gator and, in a nice link with the past, a new Snot. We had a house lexicon; they have a house lexicon, In 1962, we invested much of our neologistical energy on descriptives for throwing up-there was "power booting," "spray booting," "nose booting," "sick booting" and the "Technicolor yawn," the last of these resulting from the preboot consumption of food colorings. We also spoke of "wind tunnels" (when your date breaks wind while your head's up her skirt), "reltneys" (hard-ons so big they stretch your skin until your head flips backward) and "hooded hogs" (uncircumcised penises). The current ADs have two great terms for an uncircumcised penis"turtleneck" and "covered wagon." Also from today's vocabulary: Dorky people are known as "lunch meats." Drinking is "hooking." "Sweet!" is an expression of approval. ("Hey, we just went on tap." "Sweet!") Smoking a bong is "pulling a tube." Doing mushroom is "'Shrooming." A "chode" is a dick that's wider than it is long. "Piling" and "strapping" are fucking. And a "spank sock" is the thing you keep by your bed to beat off into. We did weird things to our pledges; they do weird things to their pledges. In my day, as a sort of nod to AD's past (it started life in 1843 as a literary society), the pledges had to compose and present papers to the brothers with titles such as "My Sensations at Birth" and "How to Use Afterbirth in a Garden Salad." After one fellow-Seal-left a notebook containing his pledge paper ("The Last Time I Sucked My Father's Cock") at Smith, ere it into the hands of the dean, we got in a bit of trouble and the practice was discontinued. And then, of course, there was boot training and the Night of the Seven Fires. These days, the pledge period is shorter than it used to be but correspondingly more intense. The threatened punishment for pledging infractions is the "Rack of Gnarl"-as many as a dozen 12-ounce cups containing a mixture of catsup, soy sauce, dog food, mouthwash and whatever other unappetizing liquid or semiliquid substances happen to be on hand. You're supposed to drink every cup and, sorry, it's bad form to boot too soon. One thing you must know for this next pledging story-the ADs have always been big on dogs. It's still true today In the current Alpha Delta composite, there are pictures of no fewer than four of them, including one that's deceased. So, OK; one of the current pledging practices is that if the pledges can take over the house and prevent a single brother from coming inside for 24 hours, they don't have to go through Hell Night. Well, a few years ago, the pledges managed to take over the house, throw out the brothers and actually held the place for 12 hours. The brothers were getting worried. No pledge class had ever pulled off what that one seemed on the way to pulling off; how would the brothers ever live it down? Then one of them had an idea. They grabbed one of the house dogs, taped him up, wrapped him in a rug and hurled him through a living-room window. That was it-the takeover was ended, the pledges had to go through an even worse Hell Night than usual to compensate for the inconvenience they'd caused everyone. For, you see, in AD, the dogs are considered brothers. There are some interesting hazing stunts at other houses, too. One &aternity drops its pledges a few miles out of town, naked, with an ax. The point is to get back to campus. Ever try hitchhiking naked with an ax? The pledges of another fraternity must participate in an event called Boot-on-Your-Brother Night. The kicker is, you can't change your clothes for 24 hours afterward; you have to wear them to bed, to class, to meals. . . . A last pledging story: Some brothers in one house drove a pledge to New York City divested him of his clothes and money and left him there to make his way back to Hanover The pledge found a dime in the street and called the Dartmouth Club, where he made contact with a sympathetic alum who'd been through some of the same shit himself The guy set the pledge up with fine new clothes and plenty of bucks, the pledge flew back to Dartmouth, and when the exhausted brothers finally made their return to the fraternity, they found the pledge, resplendent in his new duds, waiting on the front porch with a glass of champagne for each of them. Of course, one thing about Dartmouth that is different today is that between then and now, the Sixties happened. And so now, in addition to the standard types from my day-stoic jock, cool stud, conservative zealot-you have introspective hippies, crazed psychedelic pranksters and firebreathing radicals. You tend to find these folks, when they join a Greek society at all, in a couple of the coed houses, where they believe that, rather than changing members to fit the house, you change the house to fit the members. You also dispense with a lot of the hazing and hierarchy-things are more communal. You are also, by definition, nonsexist. But what I love about these folks is that although they're Sixties, they're Dartmouth, too. Each year, one of these houses holds something called a Decadent Decathlon, which includes 12 events: Keg Throwing for Distance, the Tap Suck, and so forth. One of the events perfectly symbolizes the Dartmouth-Sixties fusion-the Bong Chug. In this event, you must take a full hit from a bong, chug a beer, and only then do you get to exhale. There are other differences. Although there are three fraternities and two sororities that are predominantly black, the mainstream houses seem genuinely unconcerned about their racial or ethnic composition, which is a nice change from my day. The AD house has black brothers, Hispanic brothers, Jewish brothers, even a Moslem brother It's not a big deal. Also not a big deal is sex. I mean, they like it and everything, but it's more or less taken for granted. There were stories about getting laid on a pool table, and in the 1902 Room at Baker Library and even in bed, but, as I say, these were no big deal. In the early Sixties, of course, sex was a very big deal. But that was before coeducation and the sexual revolution. With greater availability comes a blast attitude, I suppose. But it's odd how things turn around-in 1962, as far as the deans were concerned, drinking was no big deal, but if you and your date were caught with your pants down, you were in deep shit. Today, they couldn't care less what you do sexually, as long as it's consensual and you're being careful about AIDS-but drinking infractions can get you in serious trouble. One thing that definitely has not changed is the high quality of partying at Dartmouth fraternities. In the early Sixties, parties were mainly free-form, though I do remember Phi Gamma's Fiji Islands Parties and a real good End-of-theWorld Party during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Strange alcoholic concoctions with names such as fogcutters, or gin and juice, or purple Jesus punch were served, and people got even more blown out than usual. The AD house, it was generally conceded, threw the best parties. We introduced R&B music to campus with such luminaries as the Flamingos, the Five Royales, Red Prysock, joey Dee and the Starliters, the Crystals, and Little Anthony and the Imperials. And the brothers put on behavior displays that foresaw performance art by two decades. The moment in Animal House when John Belushi pours mustard on himself was inspired by Seal-the fellow whose pledge paper so amused the dean of Smith-who at one party covered himself with yellow mustard and crawled about on hands and knees on the dance floor, biting dates' asses and shouting, "I'm the Mustard Man, I'm the goddamned Mustard Man." Another time, Doberman or Dump Truck or Troll or someone skied down the stairs naked, just as the band went into Shout. Nowadays, theme parties are the rage. One house has something called the Party Without a Cause; everyone dresses as James Dean and Natalie Wood. Theta Delta Chi throws a Louie Lobster Party, wherein the guys wear lobster costumes, and there's a live lobster crawling around in the punch. Gods and Goddesses, another Theta Dolt party, involves everyone dressing as Zeus or Aphrodite-it's basically a toga party SAE is known for its annual Saigon Party (recently renamed Welcome to the jungle), in which the house is filled with trees and live monkeys. And Alpha Chi Alpha throws Beach Parties, for which vast quantities of sand are trucked in and dumped all over the house. The Medieval Banquet, a joint party thrown most years by the Alpha Chis and Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority started life as a Fifties Party, but one year the guys showed up dressed in the fashion of 1050, and it stayed that way; the celebrants go as wenches, serfs, knights, and so forth, sit around big tables and eat with their hands. King Arthur and Guinevere order people to chug and the party always turns inw a huge food fight, with tankards of ale poured on people's heads, roast turkeys flying through the air and everyone soaked and ripped to the gills by 9:30. Now, at the AD house, they're not too big on theme parties. The more usual thing is get a deejay, invite a bunch of people over, order a lot of kegs and see what happens. But each spring, during Green Key Weekend. . . . Saturday, my last day; tomorrow it's back to the freeways and smog and mortgages and the diaper changings of real life. Turns out the ADs have their major annual party this afternoon on the front lawn. They have this terrific funk band on the porch, wailing away, and the yard is packed with partyers. But I'm not dancing-I'm feeling grumpy about having to go home tomorrow and, hell, a little burned out from trying to keep up with these 20-year-olds all week. Thanks to last nights killer rain, much of the yard is a mud puddle today. After a while, predictably enough, the brothers decide to do a little mud diving. In fact, half the guys in the house quickly join in, as do many of the dates and friends and onlookers, and suddenly, it looks like Retum of the Mud Monsters out there. And then-uh-oh-I spot seven or eight beslimed pledges headed straight for me with crazed, demented smiles. Well, I don't feel like going in any mud, that's for sure. Later for that, jack. I put on my most persuasive smile. "Come on, you guys, let's just forget it, OK?" They blithely ignore me; I barely have time to toss my wallet and shades to my amused wife (who has been egging them on), and then I'm being carried across the yard by all these guys-Donk and Oddjob and Mulch and Scurvy and Snot II and Toast and Remus and Spock-and they find a particularly juicy mudhole . . . and plop me into it! And-whaddaya know? -it's great! Suddenly, I'm not tired and I'm not grumpy-it's as if I've just had a burst of adrenaline. And, man, I'm dancing my ass off, exchanging high fives and whooping like a maniac, and it all comes back, that total party feeling, where time is suspended and you're in an eternal, fun-filled now. This is it-the thing people join fraternities for-one of those peak bacchanalian moments that know no equal. My sense of closeness and connection with these boogieing mud maniacs could not be greater, and I feel more in touch with the me I like most than I have in months. Ah, fraternities. Sweet. Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by alex at 8:20 PM (0 comments) Extra CreditWhy didn't our professors think of this?Full post and comments below the fold. Posted by alex at 12:10 PM (0 comments) |
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