Any regrets?" asked my roommate, as I scraped a pink eight-foot-tall naked man off the ceiling one Sunday morning in October. "Only one," I responded. My friends and I had just thrown Harvard's most outlandish, sensational, refulgent party this side of Adams House--a party so incredible, in fact, that I had to page through my Roget's Thesaurus to find the proper word to describe it. And I was saddened by the thought that ours might be the only such event I would ever experience at this school where most room parties are about as exciting as your aunt's collection of porcelain figurines.
We'd spent a week's worth of boring Economics lectures brainstorming ideas for our party. Having seen 'em all--'80s revivals, masquerades, dance parties, '80s masquerade dances--we wanted to do something different. Something that would, at 1 a.m., leave exultant partygoers' heads swimming in more than just alcohol fumes. Something that would leave them satisfied that Harvard doesn't need finals clubs to anchor a social scene, confident that occasionally they had more fun than their high school friends who went to state universities, and, most of all, glad that they hadn't spent another weekend evening pretending to do homework while watching Saturday Night Live.
"I know! How about a theme party?" exclaimed one of my fellow partythrowers. But the only cool theme we conceived was a Ren and Stimpy party, which, we all agreed, would have required large quantities of hallucinatory drugs to convince guests that they were really inside a cartoon. "A beach party!" exclaimed another roommate. "We could put all our halogen lamps and space heaters in one room, spread sand all over the floor, and fill a kiddie pool with water!" "Or beer," someone quickly suggested. But we decided that this was really more a pitiful attempt to attract large numbers of bikini-clad women than a workable party idea. Finally, someone shouted: "I've got it! We could arrange a bunch of television sets around the dance room, and play videos to go along with the music! It'll be just like Club MTV!"
Well, almost. At 10 p.m. on the night of the party, my suitemates were still balancing the TVs atop stacks of furniture, hooking them up to the VCR, and plastering loose stereo wires onto the walls with liberal amounts of tape. Meanwhile, in my bedroom, I hooked up the blacklights and, having set out a plateful of fluorescent chalk, wrote BE CREATIVE on one wall so that our guests would get the idea. Upstairs, sofas, a second stereo system, and mixed drinks were arranged to create a cozy "get-away-from-the-dance-floor-and-beer" setup. Within two hours, all three rooms and the stairwell outside would be packed with people.
The first to arrive, aside from those few close friends deemed worthy enough to be honored with the first cups of beer foam, were members of the Varsity (insert your least favorite sport here) Team, who casually finished off half of the first keg and proceeded to scrawl obscure epithets on the walls (see box). Then came the Women From Wellesley, prompting a large proportion of the men in the room to huddle in the corner where, after deciding which guy would make a move on which girl, they remained for the rest of the night.
Of course, a primary motivation for throwing this party was the prospect of meeting new, interesting, tipsy members of the opposite sex, and impressing them with the fact that we had paid for all this beer. Prior to our party, most of my conversations with women at other people's parties had gone something like this:
Me: Hi. Great party, huh?
Her: I think you just spilled beer on my shirt. Excuse me.
Throwing my own party, however, completely changed the situation, because I was on familiar turf:
Me: Hi. Great party, huh?
Her: Yeah. It was a cool idea to let people draw on the walls.
Me: Actually, it was my idea. Normally, this is my bedroom.
Her: Wow. Well, have fun cleaning up. Excuse me.
Meanwhile, a seven-foot-tall guy proceeded to draw a huge pink anatomically correct man on my ceiling. Within a short time, people had covered every available surface with fluorescent chalk--mantel, windowshades, windowframes, bookshelves, doorjambs--and began to look for new places to draw, such as their friends' backsides.
When the crowd in the drawing/keg room approached the density of a black hole, we turned on the videos in the dance room, which was soon full of writhing bodies pointing up at the TV screens and saying, "Look! It's Paula Abdul!" Suddenly, there was a break in the music, and frustrated dancers began to jeer, stamp their feet, and spit at anyone who even remotely looked like a host.
