POSTCARD FROM CAMBRIDGE: Waiting for Prince Charming

I think it all started when some friends of mine and I saw Moulin Rouge at the end of the school year. Ewan “come what may” MacGregor, his smile beaming and eyes twinkling, bewitched me into thinking that Hollywood-style, their-eyes-met-across-a-crowded-room love, or at least its sweaty-knockin’-boots-meet-me-in-the-back-alley step-cousin lust, was waiting just around the corner. (At the intersection of “I will always love you” and “Me so horny,” to be exact.) I had fooled myself into thinking that a summer at Harvard would be equivalent to a summer of love: same familiar location, wild-dog-in-heat weather and international summer school men—er...students—jaunting through the Square that had been filled only a few months earlier with pasty, androgynous H men. Ah, summer lovin’—gonna have me a blast. Summer lovin’ it—would go by too fast. I’d meet a boy, cute as can be...

The odds of meeting Mr. Right, or even Mr. Right Now, seemed pretty slim at my summer jobs; I planned to edit a “self-help” book for a Harvard medical school psychiatrist and to teach music to kids with HARMONY, a PBH summer program. Since I’m a closet workaholic and could always use more money, and since my plans to do “thesis research” were all lies anyway, I added another job to my schedule. I got one working at the Harvard Events and Information Office in the Holyoke Center. Basically, I stand behind a counter and prostitute my oh-so-politically correct, melanin-blessed skin and yes-I-am-flirting-with-you pearly white smile to the various confused tourists, prospective nine-year-old students, and batty Harvard Square characters who constantly make their way to our air-conditioned, glass-walled palace. Oh, and I give tours too.

With a giddy Hollywood-induced hope that would have been better suited for a pimple-popping pre-teen than yours truly, I began my info center job and eagerly awaited the special tour filled with 22-to-26-year-old male Oxford students who had jaunted over to the States on holiday and were in desperate need of a guided stroll around fair Harvard. Instead I got, and still get, the belligerent mother of two who won’t accept the fact that there is no super secret formula for admission to the College, or the frantic Hungarian businessman who just didn’t realize that Cambridge was so crowded during the summer and is willing to pay big bucks for two nights in a Wigglesworth dorm.

The job isn’t all that bad, though. Besides my co-workers’ crazy antics and the Class Day tape of Conan O’Brian that got “stuck” in the display monitor’s VCR, there are also the “interesting people” I meet when I give my tours. The first tour I ever gave was to a group of middle-aged Latin American professionals who didn’t exactly speak English and didn’t exactly understand that here in North America, we don’t get touchy-feely with the girl pointing out the historic bricks used to construct Johnston Gate...even if she is looking for love in all the wrong places. Three posed pictures in front of John Harvard statue and a phat $15 tip later, I resolved to tone the smile down from yes-I-am-flirting-with-you to I’d-be-glad-to-direct-you-to-the-Coop.

I’m quite sure that a summer in Cambridge has its romantic possibilities. Yes, quite sure. (By the way, if the couple living one floor above me—somewhere in Dunster G, I believe—is reading this: three times on a Wednesday night is just plain showing off!) In fact, I get the distinct feeling that everyone around me, like the couples taking a peppy afternoon jog by the river or nauseatingly sipping from the same strawberry frappe at Bartley’s, must have received the name of his or her Mr. or Mrs. Right Now in the mail when summer began. Too bad the Cabot House superintendent thinks that mail forwarding is an optional duty. My summertime Mr. Right Now envelope is probably wilting under stacks of un-forwarded telephone bills and Widener overdue notices, while my Mr. Right Now has been forced to move down his “ooh baby baby” list to lucky contestant number two.

If the older men at the info center weren’t enough, there was the 11-year-old “kingpin” in one of the all-boy, 11-to-13-year-old classes I teach for HARMONY. We call the ringleaders in any given class the “kingpin”—usually male, he’s the class clown who doesn't know any of the answers but somehow manages to talk all of the time, distracting the other children from the lesson and making an hour-long class seem like it will never end. My silver-chain wearing, Eminem-reciting, classical-music-is-only-for-white-people kingpin informed me one sticky afternoon that he couldn’t play the scheduled freezedance because, besides me, there were no “women” in the class with whom to freezedance—or should I say “freakdance.” He then produced a “picture” of his ideal woman that he had drawn; it featured a topless homegirl with Jessica-Rabbit-style hair seductively covering one eye and a chest as believable as Lara Croft’s. Ah, the joys of community service.

No matter, I still stick by my decision to see this place in all its summer glory. Listening to Not the Beatles play “Can’t Buy Me Love” at 11:30 on a Tuesday night while shamelessly finishing a pint of Ben and Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk has never felt so good. And though I have no Mr. Right Now to call my very own, there are the occasional flirtatious encounters with cute guys who didn’t expect the campus to be so big. They’re easy to spot, really: big brown puppy-dog eyes and a slight crease in their bronzed brows. Nothing that an apple-cheeked rising senior with an infectiously loud laugh and a general idea where 51 Brattle St. is can’t fix. I figure if one of them doesn’t ask for the “special after-hours tour” soon, I'll just have to remain content with the voices in my head.

Antoinette C. Nwandu ’02, an English concentrator in Cabot House, is associate magazine editor The Crimson. This summer she has promised herself not to hook up with the Spare Change guy outside of 7-Eleven who thinks she is “bootylicious.”