Low Register

Soener or later, every Harvard man comes face to cover with the Radcliffe Freshman Register. Soonor or later he flings down the Radcliffe Freshman Register, and stomps off into the sun-embroidered hills. Whether those hills be the rolling plains of the Cambridge Common or the path to some other aviary, depends in good measure on the sophistication, the savoir faire, the pate de foie gras with which the male approaches those imperspicuous pages.

It is indecent to snatch up the Radcliffe Freshman Register and pore over the photographs. Be neither excited nor numbed, neither aroused nor repulsed, neither elevated nor depressed. The sophisticated one (male) in search of the sophisticatee (feminine ending) is the model of calculation. His campaign has two parts: discerning the prospects, and electing the winner.

The master first organizes the data in several ways, runs an analysis of variance and rotates the factors for the best view. The approaches? List all those who come from your city; anyone on the list is a potential home town girl. List all those coming from the city where you will spend next summer, if different from home. Anyone on the list is eligible to become a summer activity, and you're just practicing up early (best wait until Thanksgiving for this). List all those living in dormitories not also housing 'Cliffies you have previously outraged or engaged. (This will yield a list of manageable size only for juniors and seniors, or precocious lowerclassmen.) Or list all those living in the dormitory your sister or sister's girlfriend (who may be freely invented) lived in. You're calling for old-times' sake, or the family tradition. The possibilities are nearly endless, and if any list is too long, ancillary conditions, such as looks (which never come into play before this point) may be used to fumigate the weeds.

Prospects selected, the procedure is to make contact. The telephone is the first entering wedge in a bastion as impermeable as the Maginot Line.

Feminine voice: "Hello?"

Our hero: "Hello, Myra? I saw your picture in the Register this afternoon and I just couldn't wait to call you up. Do you remember about two years ago, when you went cave-crawling in Saskatchewan, one of the girls with you, Lisa Urdlu? Well, Lisa lives around the corner from me and told me to be sure and look you up this fall and say Hi and I'm usually terrible about making these contacts but I'd just thought I'd call you up and say . . ."

"Hello. Barnard Hall. May I help you?"

Our hero, sweating: "Isn't this Myra Mumser?"

"One moment, please." Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.

The real voice: "Yeah?"

"Myra?"

"What?"

Other approaches may be not less successful. Engraved invitations to a private viewing of Durer woodcuts have been known to produce certain effects, but a really specialized attack requires more information. Information offices are shockingly liberal toward section-manly voices. A little skill and resonance can yield the place and date of birth, family and educational backgrounds, field of concentration, course program, weight, vaccination record, and attitude toward raw carrots, of a really special prospect. The sophisticated one then develops problems with which the 'Cliffie is particularly adapted to cope, and places himself in a position where the latent mother in them all is particularly liable to arise.

The direction, if not the path, is clear. The Radcliffe Freshman Register, favorite of serious weekend readers everywhere, offers complexities beyond the starkest dithyrambs of the Courses of Instruction.