Big Blue F.R.O.G.: Total recall : The Saturday night edition

If you went to my college during the years I did and, specifically, had housing on the campus I did, you knew of the Saturday night parties hosted by the students who took their affiliation with the sports and medicine and/or agriculture departments of the neighboring campus quite seriously. And while a good percentage of the females from all campuses continued to hit frat row as party central on the usual Thursday and Friday nights (Saturdays were more popular for bar hopping), those of us who were older or wiser would bide our time and make our way to the junior and senior apartment apartment buildings off the beaten path on C__ campus, a little before 11PM on Saturday nights.

More importantly, if you attended school during a specific range of those years, you could have potentially had the chance to attend a party at the H2-A7 apartment, which was legendary not just for the parties but for the hosts: a foursome of guys who, put plainly, were possibly the most sought after guys on that particular campus. It was as if fate had arranged for a representation of the top four types of an undergrad's fantasy to come together under one roof. T. was the tall, clean cut, short-haired Rob Lowe look alike (the similarity was uncanny), who ran the campus paper, played classical guitar and was the serial monogamist of the lot (although the sequels happened with fairly fast frequency); S. was the rugged jock with the black, shiny shoulder length hair, who looked more at ease on his hockey skates than most people are on their feet, and whose dating motto was the more girls the merrier; R. was the skinny, earth hugging blond with waist length hair who played drums in one band and bass in another, and who never let gender get the in way, so it was rumored; and finally G. who was, simply put, the most beautiful looking male I or anyone else had (or has) ever seen, with a head and body that reminded you of the Grecian marble statues, everything was so perfectly proportioned, a surprisingly modest and humorous Indian boy studying to go to med school, who wasn't fending off the Indian (and other) girls because of said modesty but because of a reason he couldn't easily divulge without it causing much distress back home in their tight-knit community . It was like an all male college version of The Breakfast Club, and we all wanted in.

Invitations to the parties, of course, wasn't entirely easy to come by, but it also wasn't too hard either, once you knew them. All four worked in the dining hall closest to my dorm, freshman year, and a surprising number of students (male and female, it should be said) would turn up for Friday dinner (which was usually the least appetizing meal of the week), which just happened to be the shift all four worked. For all their popularity, they were actually quite decent guys and usually if you struck up a conversation with them and weren't too obviously sucking up, you could get an invitation after a few weeks of chatting with them. Of course, it helped if you knew someone they already knew; networking was the key to partying on that particular campus and, lucky for me and my roommate, our RA, who happened to have the room next to us that first year, had gone to high school with R. and was good friends with him. (She was an awesome RA, by the way: she got us our beer, would give us advance warnings of dorm sweeps by the resident counselor or the fire marshall (we were a 'dry', female dorm--and we probably had the largest amount of booze and boys per room of any other dorm, ha ha!), would hang treat bags(!) of condoms and dental dams from Planned Parenthood over all the door knobs regularly, and introduced us around to different people based on our personal partying preferences. As I said, an awesome RA.)

As it turned out, I did end up getting a standing invitation to the parties on my own, after all, with a little help from a friend (next to last song), although it did unfortunately result in my nickname of Wonder Woman from T. for the longest time, when he noticed the two silver cuff bracelets I regularly wore on each wrist, back then.

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What I remember about the Saturday treks to apartment building H2 my freshman and sophomore year is the heavy scent of pot that greeted you from 30 feet away, the very dim lighting that made it hard to navigate the stairs and the rooms and the people, once you were inside, the actually decent beer that came in bottles (instead of watered down, cheap kind foaming in suspect kegs), and the fact that people talked and hung out before possibly hooking up, instead of falling almost immediately all over each other (much more civilized and less hurried). Mostly, though, I remember fishnet stockinged legs in tightly laced combat boots, resting against the back of a chair, the top of a table, or draped across someone else's legs, keeping beat to music that played hour after hour, music that will forever mean good times on Saturday nights for me.

Runaway Train - Soul Asylum

Overplayed and overexposed? Oh, definitely--but they had a special place with that crowd, who had seen them perform live at one of our college's smaller festivals before they became popular, thanks to the H.O.R.D.E. festival and, more importantly, airplay on MTV. Side note- -our school had (has) two major festivals each year which boasted excellent lineups for their free concerts, and a handful of smaller ones that were popular with the tri-state bands.

All I Want - Toad the Wet Sprocket

Einstein on the Beach - Counting Crows
(This sticks mostly in my head because R. had a bootleg copy of this before it was ever released on the CC's compilation album, long after all of us had graduated. R's bootleg collection was amazing and he was extremely generous with making copies. I actually got my first Elliott Smith bootleg song from him.)