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I went to a party once where the conversation turned to worst-ever living experiences.
“My friend and I found a really cheap room in a brownstone in New York City,” one guy recounted. “The price was so good that we knew there had to be a catch, but we were desperate, so we moved in.
“The first night, we could hear these two guys talking on the other side of the wall, saying, ‘I wonder why the sun rises in the east.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘And it sets in the west.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘I wonder why the sun rises in the east.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘And it sets in the west.’ ‘Yeah.’ This exact same conversation went on for hours, every single night! And we started noticing that all our neighbors were a little strange. We finally found out from a visitor that we were living in a halfway house for the criminally insane.”
I laughed along with the rest of the crowd but, honestly, I knew exactly how he must’ve felt.
Because, for one year, I lived in a sorority house.
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You’d think a houseful of carefully made-up coeds would be all about pillow fights, late night gab fests and nail painting, but the reality is that pretty girls are, well, pretty nuts.
My sorority house was filled with prom queens, pageant queens and even one Rattlesnake Roundup Queen. Now, there’s a reason other countries don’t allow more than one queen to rule at the same time; the resulting catfights would almost certainly destroy the realm. Unfortunately, my school’s Greek Advisory Panel never caught on to that possibility, so the sorority I’ll call Theta Beta was allowed to move no fewer than 65 Royal Highnesses into its campus stronghold.
As one of the few freshmen in the house, I tried very hard to keep to myself. Yet somehow word spread that, thanks to my Neiman Marcus-addicted mother, I had the most enviable closet in the house. One evening when everyone else was downstairs at dinner, I opened my door to find a Sister I hardly knew going through my clothes, two of my favorite dresses already thrown over one arm.
“Oh hell no,” I said before I could stop myself.
“I just wanted to borrow something for date night tomorrow,” she retorted. “I didn’t think you’d mind.”
“Put my clothes back. Now,” I said through gritted teeth. Flinging my dresses back into the closet, she stalked past me and slammed the door.
It wasn’t long before a few of my outfits simply went missing, never to be seen again. To say I was irritated was an understatement. These girls all had fat bank accounts and hardly needed my wardrobe to tide them over. Still, for all my troubles, at least I never fell victim to the Theta Beta Panty Raidah.
“Y’all, someone is stealing underwear from the laundry room,” our president said sternly at a chapter meeting one night. The rest of us giggled sheepishly.
“Seven girls have reported that their panties were taken from the laundry room,” she continued. “Whoever you are,” and at this, she fixed several notoriously kleptomaniacal girls with an enhanced-blue evil eye, “Stop.”
Geez, I thought, glancing around me. Who would’ve thought these pearl-wearing princesses were so bizarre?
Or so slutty. My mom had begged me to join a sorority so that I wouldn’t fall in with the wrong crowd. Little did she know that my Sisters actually pioneered the way for the Paris Hiltons of the world. For instance, one house tradition involved taking any boy successfully smuggled inside straight to the attic so that he could write his name and the date of his conquest on one of the rafters. The trouble was finding a space to write that wasn’t already taken. Those beams had more scribblings on them than Jim Morrison’s tombstone.
Not everyone had the guts to bring boys inside our Theta Beta-bedecked walls. Many of the girls would simply sleep over at a frat house instead. Saturday mornings, those who spent the night solo would gather in an upstairs window to see who was doing the Walk of Shame outside on Greek Row. While we snickered in our pajamas, dozens of girls stumbled by in last night’s heels and smeared mascara, trying to reach their own beds as quickly and quietly as possible.
By the end of the school year, I decided I’d rather go Geek than Greek and announced at one of the meetings that I planned to de-sister. Immediately afterward, our Junior Sorority Chaplain gave the news that she’d gotten pregnant with her date from Semi-Formal Night and was leaving school, so my announcement didn’t create the quite the stir I’d envisioned.
But gosh, I’d hate to give the impression that all sorority girls are beer-chugging, bed-hopping, Gucci-stealing hussies. I’m sure there are plenty of upstanding Greek women who are a credit to their schools and their sisterhood.
I just didn’t know ‘em.
Read more Suburban Turmoil at www.suburbanturmoil.blogspot.com or on the Scene’s blog at www.pithinthewind.com.