Football, Pool & Fried Chicken (or Tales of a Freshman Year)

When I sat down to write this chapter, I looked through some old journal entries to try to remember some events more clearly.

There was so much that happened in those four years, that it’s hard to pin down just one particular memory.

When I was a freshman, the Resident Assistants and Orientation Leaders organized a bunch of events during the first weekend on campus.  They were a great way to get to know people on campus, and have a good time before classes started.  One event was a dinner cruise.  It was the same boat that my senior class in high school had our Senior Banquet on.  It was a fun event, and I met a lot of people.  There were three or four people that I hoped to spend more time with.

Over the following weeks, our little group expanded as we all invited friends, roommates, and classmates to join our outings.  One time, we all went to an event on campus, where a speaker came to talk to us about legends of ghosts on campus.  It was a fun event, and it led to our group wandering around the woods near campus every night for the first couple of months of the semester.

Over time, our large group broke off into smaller groups.  Somehow, one of the groups started playing football every Wednesday night.  Eventually, the football group broke off into smaller groups too, and it led to the group that I would spend most of my time in college with.

There were three of us who replaced the Wednesday night football with Wednesday night Billiards.   We always ate dinner together in the campus center cafeteria, and then we would make our way up to the game room.  We were all so horrendous at pool that we started naming techniques after ourselves, inanimate objects, and various countries.  We even had “Djiboutian pool”.

Many nights, after a game of pool or a marathon study session, we would walk down the street to the grocery store, a convenience store or coffee shop to extend the evening and our time together.   One of my favorite nights, was in the spring, and after a particularly busy and stressful week.  We ate dinner and played pool as usual, then decided that we wanted snacks.  We made our way down to the  Kentucky Fried Chicken/Pizza Hut/Taco Bell (or, KenTacoHut, as we college students affectionately called it.)  At that point in the evening, the dining room was closed, but the drive-thru was still open.  We actually tried to WALK through the drive-thru.  As it turns out, that doesn’t work.  We tried jumping up and down in front of where we thought the sensors were.  We tried waving through the window to see if someone would see us.  Passers-by offered to drive through for us to get our food.  We eventually conceded defeat, and headed back to campus laughing the whole way at our own silliness.  At that time, only one member of our little group had a car.  When we got back to campus, we got in the car and drove back to KenTacoHut, wondering why we hadn’t just thought to drive in the first place.  We got our fried chicken, and the rest is deep fried, greasy history.

So many silly, weird and wonderful things happened throughout the four years I spent in college, that now it’s difficult to remember what events happened what year, and with what friends.

Being a member of the college’s Program Committee is another memory that I’ll always treasure.  We were a group of students who worked to plan events for the college community.  We sponsored concerts, coffee houses, bus trips, and larger events like Homecoming and Springfest.  I met many great people from that group too.  I was never as close to them as I was to my core college crew, but the members of Program Committee were my Tuesday night companions for most of my college career.  We planned events together, celebrated birthdays together, celebrated together in times of success, and commiserated together in times of stress.  One particularly memorable event was the celebration of a fellow Program Committee member’s 21^st birthday.  We made our way to the 99 Restaurant near campus, and ate dinner together.  We laughed and joked together for hours, and stayed until closing.   I was employed at the 99 as a dishwasher at the time, so I joked with my loud friends that they were going to get me fired for being so loud and silly.  One of the funniest moments of that evening, was when one of the more inebriated members of our group left the table to use the restroom, and almost walked into the wrong one.  Writing about this now, it doesn’t seem nearly as funny, but that evening, we laughed about it until the tears ran down our cheeks. 

Being a member of Ensemble Theatre was also a great time.  We were a group of theatre lovers, most of whom never got the chance to act on campus, but just wanted to support the theatre department.  We did a lot of public relations, and staffed and supported events.  One of my friends and I quite often sold concessions at intermission during shows.  We would bring all the supplies to the lobby outside the auditorium, and greet the audience members as they passed us, offering them a snack or drink to enjoy during the show.  Some nights we snuck in the back of the auditorium to catch a glimpse of the show, and other times, we played card games to pass the time.

One night when one of my friends and I were going to sell concessions, there was a power outage on campus, and the play was postponed.  That night, we ended up playing cards in the hallway of one of our dorms, as the hall lights were all that stayed on during power outages.  We got so many strange looks that night, but to us, it was just another one of our silly college adventures.