As I stood in the dateroom waiting for my blind date to show up, I began to wonder if everything would go well. It was my first invitational ever, and I was nervous. When she finally walked in the door she was a vision of beauty. (Well, beauty hidden underneath a cloud of hairspray and several sedimentary layers of makeup). She smiled at me and my knees grew weak. Gliding into the room she approached me and introduced herself. “Hi, I’m Stephanie from Alpha Phi,” she said. Then, like a deer in headlights, her eyes grew wide and a giddy cry came from her lips: “Like, oh my God! That rhymes!”
Clapping her hands together and hopping around in a circle as her head bobbed back and forth, the exuberant sorority girl chanted “Stephanie from Alpha Phi. Stephanie from Alpha Phi…” Her sorority sisters gathered around in an inquisitive empty-headed mass, clapping and shrieking with glee as my witless date continued to prance and chant “Stephanie from Alpha Phi. Stephanie from Alpha Phi.”
With no regard for rhythm or intellect, the girls of Alpha Phi continued to marvel at my date. Among the squeals of happiness a cry of frustration came as one girl turned to another and said, “Stephanie is so lucky, Melanie. I wish my name rhymed with Alpha Phi.”
With a comforting reach-around, Melanie cried back, “I wish my name rhymed with Alpha Phi, too, Valerie.” Soon the other girls, including Tiffany, Marjorie, Brittany, and Anne Marie, all began crying and pouting, wishing they could share Stephanie’s joy. Then, like the voice of God (or at least what God would sound like if He spoke in a high-pitched, airheaded trill), a cry came from a distant corner of the room: “STOP!”
Stephanie stopped in shock as she forgot what she had been chanting, and the other girls quickly turned their heads to see where the cry had come from. Then the voice spoke again. “Look! Something shiny!”
Like a herd of anorexic buffalo, the sisters stampeded toward the object in question: a small foil gum wrapper lying on the floor. The lamplight delicately glinting off the folds of the wrapper hypnotized the girls, and awestruck whispers could be heard from the onlooking crowd: “Wow, it is shiny.” “This is so much more fun than clapping our hands.” “Do you think I look fat?” As the unyielding power of discarded foil overtook the girls the loud speaker suddenly boomed: “Hurry up! The buses are here!” But this modest announcement could do little to disrupt the trance which had been created by the wrapper, and the girls of Alpha Phi ignored this invitation and remained fixated on the small bit of shiny.
Then, like a cry for help, the loud speaker boomed again: “Come on! The buses are here and we need to go get drunk!” Like a lightning bolt the word “drunk” shattered the wrapper’s enchantment, and everyone present hurried toward the hulking metal carriages which would convey them to a night of unbridled debauchery.
Well, to make a long story short, we all got on the bus, went to the cheesy bar, came home, and I got some.
