Party Over, Out of Time

As an intrepid investigative journalist and wistful senior, I've been going to a lot of senior bars lately trying to find the source of their dubious appeal. After all, the illicit thrill of drinking when you are underage is gone if you're a senior. Three-fourths of the partygoers are not seniors, the people you presumably came to see. Conversation is impossible, and the press toward the keg of lame beer resembles a British soccer match.

If you do manage to find some other seniors and can raise your voice above the din, senior bars can be a good opportunity to see once more those friends that you know you'll lose touch with after Commencement. The problem is that conversation inevitably reduces to The Question. Sometimes I wish I could make things easier and less painful by saying, OK, let's go around the room. What are you doing next year?

"Law school."

"Law school."

"Grad school."

"Wall Street."

"Med school."

"I'm going to be an executive intern at the U.S. embassy in Botswana."

"I'm going to Europe for a year, then grad school."

"Law school."

Me? I hate this question. Pardon me for a moment while I decide my future. "I'm going to assassinate a third-world leader and set up a petty dictatorship. "I don't know what I'm doing yet, thank you. Why should I be made to feel guilty because I don't know where I'll be in a couple months?

THE reason is that we seniors view the response to this question as an encapsulation of our victim's merit as a person. We did the same during Freshperson Week, except that we now ask where everyone is going instead of where everyone came from.

What is truly insidious about senior bars, then, is the way they threaten to bring our years at Harvard full circle. Have you noticed, for instance, how many people at senior bars are people you haven't seen since Freshperson Week? In fact, almost all the scheduled senior events, from the brunch at the Harvard Union to the various fetes during Commencement Week, are advertised with the slogan, "It'll be just like the time our class did this Freshperson Week!"

Thank you, but what if I don't want to relive that week or even my entire first year? When I was young and naive, I enjoyed those giddy, carefree days as much as the next person, but now that I'm older and naive, do I want to experience them all over again? At 22, aren't we a bit too young to be nostalgic, especially about events that happened not quite four years ago?

Well, maybe not. A couple of weeks ago, I was at a senior bar where, wonder of wonders, there was room to dance. After several of the computerized drum tracks that pass for dance tunes these days, the Village People's 1978 hit "YMCA" erupted over the stereo. And in a burst of 1970s nostalgia, the dance floor exploded with seniors doing the dance we all remembered, forming the letters of the title with our bodies during the chorus.

One would think that most seniors would prefer to forget "YMCA," not just because it epitomizes the worst musical excesses of the disco era, but also because it evokes memories of roller rinks where we, as prepubescent skaters trying to form the letter C in "YMCA," would invariably lose our balance and careen into each other or the wall.

In fact, it's hard to understand why people are nostalgic for the late 1970s at all. I can't imagine that anyone truly misses disco, leisure suits, white polyester, pop rocks, Shaun Cassidy, mood rings, John Travolta, sideburns, Billy beer, pet rocks, Jim Jones, Starsky and Hutch, macrame, fern bars, Leif Garrett, Dynamite magazine, Craig Morton, Carter Country, Orca the Killer Whale, the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders, Debby Boone, Pong, the Captain and Tennille, gas lines, or the movie Ice Castles and its execrable theme song.

Yet for a moment, we were back in the late 1970s, making giant letters, unabashed as 12-year-olds. Layers of cynicism and anxiety peeled away as we became kids again--taller and tipsier, but still kids.

MAYBE recapturing our lost youth, even if we only lost it four years ago, is what senior bars are all about. Freshperson Week, our proctors told us to eat, drink and see Love Story, for tomorrow we had to start working. Today, we stand in a similar position, poised over the abyss of boundless promise. Is it any wonder we should want so intensely to party so desperately, as we once did? We'll never get to experience such delirious claustrophobia again.

"And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Thanks, F. Scott. Pass me another Bud.