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.
"What's going on?" I asked, barging into the DJ room as the music jerked back to life. The DJ explained that there was a loose connection in the stereo and that the only thing keeping the music going was his finger, pressing the speaker wire into the input jack. "I can feel the music going through my hand," he said, somewhat dazedly.
Obviously, the situation was under control, so I squirmed back out into the dance room past a couple performing That Dance They Had to Cut From "Lambada!" to Maintain Its R Rating, only to discover that the speakers in the drawing/keg room were now dead. I traced the wires back toward the DJ room, looking for a torn connection, which I found beneath two very passionately involved people. "Excuse me, you're standing on the wires," I said. "Mmmph," they said, as I gently shoved them into a darker corner of the room. "Hey, that girl is in my Chem class," my roommate volunteered. "She's very nice. Really." At about this time, I began to suspect that I was missing out on most of the party's better moments because I was trying to keep things running smoothly.
This thought, however, was soon interrupted by the realization that people were piling up outside the door and unwittingly threatening everyone else's fun by making enough noise to attract the attention of the House librarian, who lived across the courtyard and spent his weekend evenings with a microphone trained at lit windows in the hope of detecting a party to bust. "Out of the hallway!" I shouted from the doorway, where I remained for the better part of an hour, nursing a mug of Milwaukee's Best Extra Gold Draft Lite while hordes of first-years, who can smell keg beer from anywhere on campus, tramped up and down the stairwell.
Fortunately, the last keg was tapped shortly after midnight, and the crowd thinned out enough for me to squeeze, arms over my head, back into the party. During my absence, several of my co-hosts had disappeared with assorted Women Without Last Names (or so my co-hosts claimed the next morning). Heartbroken that the woman of my dreams had failed to show up at the party--perhaps she was discouraged by the long walk from the Quad, or Mars, or wherever she lives--I took solace in the fact that, at the very least, I had helped bring a few hours of sweaty joy into the lives of a number of people whom I had never seen before.
The moral of the story? There are two. One is that you really won't meet people at your own party, especially if you're pretending to be responsible. The other, more important moral is that with a little innovation, three common dorm rooms can be transformed into a steaming pit of hedonistic recreation; just add Harvard students and stir. I am hopeful that a few prospective partythrowers are reading this article right now, and have been inspired to plan their own daring soiree. In the meantime, be on the lookout for our next event--bigger, better, and more refulgent than the last. How does the weekend after Thanksgiving Break sound?
OVERHEARD
A few of the gems found in pink, green, blue and orange flourescent chalk on the walls of the author's room:
Morrissey Rules--Fuck All Those Who Don't Think So Vote on November 3rd Don't Forget
Legalize Marijuana
Gay Pride
Silence=Death
Trendiness
Booty
Gotta Do It
3 Fat Pigs in an Air Conditioner
Rabbit Frog Pog
Lunch Box
CH3CH2OH
Welcome to the World of the Penis People (Beware Of Strokers)
Mm Ouch
