I was invited to house parties at the eating clubs this past weekend. Most of you (like myself two weeks ago) have no idea what that means so I’ll sum up: 25 hours of partying in a 49-hour window. A formal on Friday night, a semi-formal on Saturday night, and a lawn party Sunday afternoon. Yeah, these Princeton kiddies are excited that their term is over. And here I was, attempting to show that a teetotaling grad student can have just as much fun.
Thus my adventure began Friday evening. I rented a tux for the first time since my HS prom and went for a bit of pink, which I believe I pulled off well. (You can judge for yourselves here.) Picked up my date at her dorm, and as luck would have it, the corsage I picked out and the boutonniere she picked out matched perfectly. After a bit of a struggle to get the boutonniere upright and stable, off we went to Quad, her eating club.
A quick aside about eating clubs, all of which are large houses on Prospect St. Undergrads join them in the middle of their sophomore year, and they function as FSILGs do on other campuses (though Princeton has a few F/S’s as well). The main difference is that only the eating club’s officers live on the premises–everyone else lives in dorms and just uses the clubs for meals and parties. Five of the clubs are “sign in”, meaning anyone who wants to join, can. The other five are “bicker” — the current club members must approve of the next crop of students. Ivy is considered the most prestigious (see downpost for a mini-rant). Quad, our base of operations last weekend, is a sign in.
Dinner on Friday night was a sit-down, be served by the club staff style, with a movie star theme. They had a vegetarian option (yay) and the portobello mushroom was excellent. To be honest, I can’t remember what dessert was…guess it couldn’t have been that good. After the meal, we went across the street to Colonial (another sign-in) and because they had started an hour after Quad, people were still eating. Suzanne knew several people in Colonial, so we hung there for a while. We ventured back to Quad to watch the end-of-year slide show and start what would become five and a half hours of dancing.
The band at Quad was only mediocre, but the dance floor was filled anyway. There was some drunkenness (especially notable were this group of five girls who were completely trashed and would rope in any free guy the second his date needed to go to bathroom — and I speak from experience). The music stopped at 1am, at which point we cross the street (or, as the say here, The Street) again to see what Colonial had to offer. Their band was great, had tons of energy, and had the crowd jumping. So we stayed their until a bit after 2:30, at which point it was time to head home.
And on Saturday, we did it all over again, this time with only half the formal. When I arrived at the dorm, we decided to wait for the whole crew to be ready (many of Suzanne’s hallmates were member of Quad as well). I suggested those of us who were ready to entertain ourselves by listening to “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me” (the NPR news quiz). Twas funny as always, and everyone learned who Stephen Colbert is. (And I thought the MIT bubble was bad.) Interestingly, Wait Wait was in DC this week, giving me hope that they actually do travel from Chicago occasionally, and the perhaps later in life I’ll get to attend a recording.
With the group assembled, we walked across campus to Quad, where a buffer-style dinner was waiting for us. The works were laid out: stir fry, salad, pasta, steak, lobster, shrimp, cheese and crackers, etc; the theme was “Paris Hilton’s Malibou Beach Party.” What an honor to be invited! <⁄sarcasm> We hopped around several clubs that evening. Colonial was mostly dead. For Tower (a bicker) we had to pretend we were other people to get in the door (they were checking a list), but the party was pretty lame inside anyway. Quad seemed like the best option that night, at least until the music (a DJ this time) wrapped at 1am again. By then, Ivy has stopped checking names on their list, and I was curious to see what all the hullabaloo was all about. I must say, Ivy threw a pretty rockin’ party — we left at 2:15, and the dancing was still going strong. Not too many public displays of drunkenness on Saturday either, though we saw our friend Spikey get “McCoshed.”
On Sunday, brunch started at 11am, but whoever could pull themselves out of bed, get ready, and walk over there by that time in the morning, clearly did not have enough fun on either of the two previous nights. In the mid-afternoon, we traversed The Street looking for good bands, and ventured into Cottage (a bicker). Now here, the alcohol was flowing like water. People were dancing with pitchers of beer in their hands. Beer was being poured from the second story balcony into someones mouth on the ground level. …. Yeah, I wouldn’t have been caught dead at a party like this under normal circumstances, but I guess I was expanding my horizons (?). In any, that excuse didn’t hold up very long, and we vacated the premises after about 20 minutes of debauchery observation. Quad was playing host to the USG-sponsored band, Rooney, later in the afternoon, so we wrapped up the weekend’s festivities by listening to them.
Of the entire three-part celebration, only two moments got me frustrated with the Princeton undergrad culture (not counting the minor ridiculousness of items such as popped collars and sweaters tied around long-sleeve, button-down shirts in 77-degree weather.) First, on Saturday, we were waiting in line for the open bar, and I hear people complaining about grade deflation. Specifically, the quote was, “Everyone who doesn’t get an A should write to Dean Slaughter [to complain].” I’m sorry: here you are, being served alcohol for free, without anyone checking your ID, on the grounds of a beautiful house on a college campus, which is (ostensibly) a learning institution, and you complain that you’ll have to actually work hard for your precious A?!?! Suck it up, please.
The second episode of frustration occurred on Sunday, when we told people we had been to Ivy the previous evening. The impressed reaction we received from people was quite disturbing. It’s unclear how being selective in the process of choosing members makes Ivy members better or worthy of admiration. The whole culture of prestige and entitlement on this campus (especially as it relates to The Street) is disconcerting and eye-opening at the same time. A word to the undergrads: judging people by their club membership seems to be an unfortunate way to go through life, or even four years of undergrad.
Those incidents aside, the weekend was a great bookend to my first academic year here. I’ll be staying at Princeton this summer to work on research, and hopefully develop a dissertation topic. Though I do have one more paper to write, so I can’t close the book on this term just quite yet.
