8 1/2 in 35
It was an odd weekend. Friday found me dinnering in the Berkeley courtyard. It didn't arrive until I realized we'd been aimlessly alternating eating and throwing grass and clumps of ideas at each other for an hour and a half as the tree burnt down daylight and the sky outside the safe enclosure faded to a dusk blue. Three figures walked by all in white. I read them as symbols not of purity but ghosts of my summer in Paris when we'd seen hundreds dressed in white dining beneath Notre Dame. "When does the movie start?" I called across courtyard. I'd remembered a sign for the premier of the film series at the Whitney Humanities Center. It came with a command, dress in white. "8:30," the boy answered before going out the gate. So we scattered to homes and met back dressed in white before black smoothness of the women's table. Gotten into good get-ups, felt festive striding to the movies monochromatically. The picture was Fellini's 8 1/2. The film was gorgeous. So self-referential. I somehow stomached the maleness of the movie because of beauty and the director protagonist's line, "I have nothing to say and I want to say it." At the end the audience clapped like when a plane sets down safely with the joy of release mixed with sadness to have left sky and be earthbound again. Walked out wanting, as usual, to live in movies.
Saturday was not cinematic. We went Out. And strangely I enjoyed it. The lure was a party titled Gin and Jews thrown by AEPi, the Jewish frat where the fratboys are also momma's boys, often sport yamachas and most likely wear glasses, long noses, or both. After a dance party in my room and hanging around a Branford suite, headed over to the Crown Street apartment where the kippas keep a couple floors. Headed up a side staircase to find several Januses standing in the doorway prophesying hellish heat and the generic doom of beer battered floorboards and beer splattered shirts. We went in and Erin promptly got beer spilled down her back. The temperature rose to tropical conditions and I met several hands I hadn't intend to as the crowd closed around us. A boy handed me alcohol anonymous. The color of pink Gatorade, it tasted disturbingly like diluted water, less flavor than nothing. People I knew surged across pieces of the room I gave up hope of getting to. Overheated and unhappy as expected, a vaguely familiar face said "Whoa, Samantha Do." Struggling to place the wavy hair, nose, big mouth, I realized it was a boy from my summer kidnapped by Jewish organic hippies, Tiyul. It made sudden sense that Jon Goldman would be there. Hadn't seen since summer before senior year, but of course he was at the Jewish frat trying to carry on a conversation as if we were not standing under an electronic ticker tape reading Rush AEPi and Gin and Jews, jostled by the crowd, and dripping like we were hiding under a tree during a thunder shower I remember in Vermont. He'd taken a year off to volunteer in Israel, very Tiyul, and was an entering freshman. When I couldn't breathe to shout anymore, went outside, laughing at appropriateness of conjuring up someone from that summer first time going to the Jewish frat. In front, Katie and I colonized the steps leading up to a store abandoned at least for the night, perhaps to permanent blight. And like a warped Wizard of Oz, everybody was there. It was strange the range of people that passed through the milling crowd on the sidewalk. St. A's to Stiles folk to random people we've somehow accumulated acquaintances with in the past two years. Ran into odd characters together. The good girl spending time with several beers. The sincere South Carolinian boy roaming around with the more cynical of the Matts, most surprised as he didn't think I played the game (I lost the game) of going to no good parties, getting drunk, and then moving onto a worse one. The sincere South Carolinian, chewing on free midnight Atticus bread, and I had spent six hours Saturday setting up and then tour guiding a bus filled with freshmen and new grad students. Our rewards had been $100 gift certificates to Barnes&Noble, catching up with fellow friends from the President's Public Service summer in the Have, and getting to tell as many lies as we liked about the city. I'd been paired for three hours with Rob as we rode backwards and told real history of blight and urban renewal and make-believe about a cold war race with the Russians to build the biggest gym. (Although Payne Whitney, cathedral of pain, is the largest in the Americas.) With a mix of political knowledge and enthusiasm, he'd been a good guide. Seemed almost as excitable as a freshman with careless stories of rolling down the divinity school hill in stolen trash cans or playing football in ice skates on a nearby pond, hiking the ball fast as they heard cracks clustered to start and then scattering for long passes in the sturdier end zone. Not into reckless sports, but I missed something about the enthusiasm and the newness I heard in the freshmen's questions, the freshness that is instantly recognizable in the groups roaming around campus discovering college for themselves. Standing around the steps I saw in the recognitions, the discussions of summers and how are you’s, the familiarity I've enjoyed coming back. Freshman year I never knew who I'd talk to when I went out and suspected infinite potential from unknown faces in crowd. Now I know the people I know and like from the people I know to dislike and forget. How different this beginning is from the first Yale beginning. Talking with Veronica, we remembered our wild runs around Old Campus, skipping and cartwheeling in the lamplight, lit up to be at Yale and dizzy with our own giddiness and good luck. Overwhelmed and bursting with the potential of the people we would meet and classes we might take on this movie set campus we got to act on. Now I know what classes I'll be taking for the next two years, and I can imagine who I'll eat meals with, hang out. I'm excited about my classes. And I’m happy to be so far from the worries I wouldn’t find a body to keep conversation with, much less a couple kindred spirits, and wild dogs would eat me before anyone knew I’d died in my single in Lawrence. I love the friends I’ve found and kept, on purpose and by accident, the ones like me and different. But there’s a slight something like nostalgia for the time of oscillation between extreme excitement and extreme fear, of horrible homesickness and giggling freedom. For freshmen year when friendly, nervous people introduced themselves to everyone. And so when a freshman sits down with us in the dining hall or strikes up a conversation and introduces him or herself, I restrain disdain and act like this is routine, like strangers randomly recombine and befriend one another all the time in the hopes that maybe she or he'll take a little longer to catch on and the energetic state of atoms of people bouncing around randomly might last through October before people settle into the lower potential energy level of the bonds of the friendships they can sustain.
Saturday was not cinematic. We went Out. And strangely I enjoyed it. The lure was a party titled Gin and Jews thrown by AEPi, the Jewish frat where the fratboys are also momma's boys, often sport yamachas and most likely wear glasses, long noses, or both. After a dance party in my room and hanging around a Branford suite, headed over to the Crown Street apartment where the kippas keep a couple floors. Headed up a side staircase to find several Januses standing in the doorway prophesying hellish heat and the generic doom of beer battered floorboards and beer splattered shirts. We went in and Erin promptly got beer spilled down her back. The temperature rose to tropical conditions and I met several hands I hadn't intend to as the crowd closed around us. A boy handed me alcohol anonymous. The color of pink Gatorade, it tasted disturbingly like diluted water, less flavor than nothing. People I knew surged across pieces of the room I gave up hope of getting to. Overheated and unhappy as expected, a vaguely familiar face said "Whoa, Samantha Do." Struggling to place the wavy hair, nose, big mouth, I realized it was a boy from my summer kidnapped by Jewish organic hippies, Tiyul. It made sudden sense that Jon Goldman would be there. Hadn't seen since summer before senior year, but of course he was at the Jewish frat trying to carry on a conversation as if we were not standing under an electronic ticker tape reading Rush AEPi and Gin and Jews, jostled by the crowd, and dripping like we were hiding under a tree during a thunder shower I remember in Vermont. He'd taken a year off to volunteer in Israel, very Tiyul, and was an entering freshman. When I couldn't breathe to shout anymore, went outside, laughing at appropriateness of conjuring up someone from that summer first time going to the Jewish frat. In front, Katie and I colonized the steps leading up to a store abandoned at least for the night, perhaps to permanent blight. And like a warped Wizard of Oz, everybody was there. It was strange the range of people that passed through the milling crowd on the sidewalk. St. A's to Stiles folk to random people we've somehow accumulated acquaintances with in the past two years. Ran into odd characters together. The good girl spending time with several beers. The sincere South Carolinian boy roaming around with the more cynical of the Matts, most surprised as he didn't think I played the game (I lost the game) of going to no good parties, getting drunk, and then moving onto a worse one. The sincere South Carolinian, chewing on free midnight Atticus bread, and I had spent six hours Saturday setting up and then tour guiding a bus filled with freshmen and new grad students. Our rewards had been $100 gift certificates to Barnes&Noble, catching up with fellow friends from the President's Public Service summer in the Have, and getting to tell as many lies as we liked about the city. I'd been paired for three hours with Rob as we rode backwards and told real history of blight and urban renewal and make-believe about a cold war race with the Russians to build the biggest gym. (Although Payne Whitney, cathedral of pain, is the largest in the Americas.) With a mix of political knowledge and enthusiasm, he'd been a good guide. Seemed almost as excitable as a freshman with careless stories of rolling down the divinity school hill in stolen trash cans or playing football in ice skates on a nearby pond, hiking the ball fast as they heard cracks clustered to start and then scattering for long passes in the sturdier end zone. Not into reckless sports, but I missed something about the enthusiasm and the newness I heard in the freshmen's questions, the freshness that is instantly recognizable in the groups roaming around campus discovering college for themselves. Standing around the steps I saw in the recognitions, the discussions of summers and how are you’s, the familiarity I've enjoyed coming back. Freshman year I never knew who I'd talk to when I went out and suspected infinite potential from unknown faces in crowd. Now I know the people I know and like from the people I know to dislike and forget. How different this beginning is from the first Yale beginning. Talking with Veronica, we remembered our wild runs around Old Campus, skipping and cartwheeling in the lamplight, lit up to be at Yale and dizzy with our own giddiness and good luck. Overwhelmed and bursting with the potential of the people we would meet and classes we might take on this movie set campus we got to act on. Now I know what classes I'll be taking for the next two years, and I can imagine who I'll eat meals with, hang out. I'm excited about my classes. And I’m happy to be so far from the worries I wouldn’t find a body to keep conversation with, much less a couple kindred spirits, and wild dogs would eat me before anyone knew I’d died in my single in Lawrence. I love the friends I’ve found and kept, on purpose and by accident, the ones like me and different. But there’s a slight something like nostalgia for the time of oscillation between extreme excitement and extreme fear, of horrible homesickness and giggling freedom. For freshmen year when friendly, nervous people introduced themselves to everyone. And so when a freshman sits down with us in the dining hall or strikes up a conversation and introduces him or herself, I restrain disdain and act like this is routine, like strangers randomly recombine and befriend one another all the time in the hopes that maybe she or he'll take a little longer to catch on and the energetic state of atoms of people bouncing around randomly might last through October before people settle into the lower potential energy level of the bonds of the friendships they can sustain.
