The Kong Collection

Any veteran Harvard student knows that a few one-dollar bills and a can of mace are all you need for a raucous night at the Kong—but deep pockets?

No, they haven’t made drinks any more expensive. Rather, you’ll need plenty of space to fill your britches with those colorful plastic animals that adorn the Kong’s signature spirit, the Scorpion Bowl. According to page 336 of this year’s Harvard Student Agencies Unofficial Guide to Life at Harvard (read: one big, sometimes inaccurate advertisement, see page 9), you should stock up and “donate the little plastic animals to UC Vice President Annie [R.] Riley [’07]’s collection.”

“We started collecting them last fall,” says Riley, “but not very diligently.” She says that most of the “little animals,” as she calls them, were gifts from others, including her roommate, Anne B. Romatowski ’07.

Romatowski says that it all started during a Lit and Arts B lecture. She reached into her pocket to get a pen, and out popped a little plastic figurine. “Two days later,” says Romatowski, “one of them showed up in [Riley’s] university mailbox.” Romatowski declined to say if she was the mysterious mailer.

When asked how HSA found out about her collection of now dozens of the small mermaids and elephants, Riley pled ignorance. But she hopes that the donations keep coming. “We’re saving them forever,” she says, but quickly recants. “We might recycle them, because recycling is good for the environment”—a convenient truth for this VP.