Photo, Photo, Photo, Photo

When Photeine Anagnostopoulos makes an announcement in the Winthrop House dining hall, it's a production. She spends ten minutes telling her friends she's too embarassed to say anything, but they clink their glasses anyway. Even before the hubbub has died down a crescendo of male voices begins chanting, "Photo, Photo," Photo sheepishly rises, buries her face in her hand, and grins. "Aw. you guys..."

Photo appears to epitomize the exuberance that makes many Winthrop residents call it the most spirited House and many critics call it Winthrop High. But just as it is impossible to capture House life in one easy cliche, so it is impossible to say that enthusiasm is Photo's main characteristic.

But to an extent, that's true. When she was the House athletic secretary, Photo lived in sweats. Almost every day she would collar unsuspecting Winthropians in the dining hall to play golf or volleyball or basketball, with a look half peppy, half plaintive. And even when she found enough volunteers. Photo went to the games to cheer them on--and bag participation points for Winthrop in the process.

Still, Photo's ability to manage people runs much deeper than that. As House Committee chairman last spring, she ran a meeting at which three quarters of the House, hurt and angry about the House's No-Talent Show (which had turned into an insult barrage), showed up to discuss the problems of living at Winthrop House. A roommate calls it her "finest hour," but Photo puts the success of that meeting on the House residents themselves. "What other House would get 275 people out for a meeting about what's wrong with the House? I was proud to be a part of that."

Photo talks about her sense of pride in the House in quiet terms, but most of the time she is irrepressible, living proof of the Newtonian principle that an object in motion tends to remain in motion. She flits around the dining hall, chatting with several groups in the course of a meal, getting ready to go out or do something. "I've tried Model U.N., the Institute of Politics, the Legal Aid Bureau, ectutoring," she explains. "I'm always doing odds and ends--it's better than studying."

Photo has also done her share of crazy things: she has demonstrated that her entire fist can be inserted into her mouth. She once wanted to fit into a dress so much that she ate an entire box of Ex-Lax. And she lost $110 last year betting that the St. Louis Cardinals would end up in first place last year in the National League East (they finished fourth).

Doing any things just seems to come naturally. Her eating habits are a prime example. She raided a friend's well-stocked refrigerator at 3 a.m. once, and downed five ham and cheese sandwiches, 12 candy bars, and 13 sweet rolls. Another time she ate 16 hamburgers at a House barbeque. And the 118-pounder once challenged a linebacker to an eating contest--and won.

Or take her finals. "Every semester here I've had to read at least one of my exams to my section leader," she says. "I failed handwriting every single year in junior high. I can't do a thing coordinated with my hands except play baseball. It's so embarrassing to have to read your mistakes all over again." Her handwriting is illegible because she writes so fast, Photo says, adding that the one time she had to transcribe a Government exam, the typewritten manuscript came out to 20 pages.

Or take her study habits. Every term, she swears to most of her friends and tutors that she is failing, that she cannot possibly finish all her work, that she doesn't understand a thing. And then she aces the final exam and is nominated for Phi Beta Kappa.

Part of all this hyperactivity stems from Photo's uneasy sense that she wasn't quite prepared to come to Harvard. "It was hard coming from a public high school where good education wasn't stressed," she says. "I'm egotistical like most people have to be who are here. Basically, I'm insecure. I never felt as if I belonged here--I was the mistake. But I have more confidence in myself than in other people who didn't come to Harvard."

That sense of insecurity comes out in Reading Period, when Photo holes up in a Hilles library conference room to study in intense spurts. She's deceptively self-deprecating, insisting she doesn't know material she really does because she doesn't fully believe in herself. On the other hand, she does have enough confidence to take advantage of being at Harvard. "This place is special, not because it is elitist, but because you are lucky to have opportunities here. It also keeps you humble, especially when you go back home."

Photo doesn't show her serious side too often--it almost seems out of place in someone so effervescent. Her thesis for the Economics Department was the offspring of a mating of her scattershot nature and her resolution. Photo spent weeks working on data that eventually got garbled in the computer. Two weeks before her thesis was due, she changed the focus of her topic. She didn't start writing the text until five days beforehand. At 3:30 the day it was due, she had no introduction, no conclusion, no footnotes, and no bibliography. Photo dictated the introduction and conclusion to her typist, and handed her chapters in with only the barest bibliography and footnotes. When she got it back, Photo was dismayed that what was supposed to be the culmination of her academic experience was missing sentences, graphs, and equations. "One of my readers said it was an 'abysmal presentation,'" she says, adding an oxymoron: "I was the saddest magna going."

"That typifies my four years here. I never could write a paper until the last minute. It makes it more exciting," she says. "I once stayed up two nights typing a paper, and I typed up the side of the paper I was so zonkered. There were missing paragraphs. I'm living proof that they don't look for perfection here. And I'm as crazy here as I was in high school."

But despite her legendary procrastination, Photo says her experience as House committee chairman taught her to be efficient. "I've had to learn to always be able to negotiate with the masters and keep the respect of the students. As House committee chairman, you're a broker--you've got to keep respect and still be diplomatic. I'm not sure I always carried it out well."

Perhaps part of Photo's ability to get along with the House is that she is extroverted. Sometimes she shows it by giggling with her roommates, other times just be the fact that she knows what is happening in most of Winthrop House. More basically, she just needs people: "I can't stand to sleep alone," she says, qualifying that statement by explaining that when her roommates are gone, she sleeps with all the lights on and has the entry tutor check under the beds. When her dorm room was empty freshman year, Photo bolted the entry door and her suite door, piled trash cans against the door, put scissors by the window, kept all the lights on, and had her mother call her every hour. "I guess I read too many Nancy Drews and saw too many Kojaks when I was growing up," she says.

That admission, however, seems dubious. Photo watched too much baseball to have time for girls' mysteries. She estimates that she's been to 275 baseball games. And she can answer almost any trivia question ever devised on her Cardinals.

"The worst thing about Harvard was not being near the Cardinals. On opening night freshman year I couldn't hear the game, and I just sat on my bed and cried," she says. "My first night at Harvard--I hadn't even met my roommates--I dropped off my bags, and my mom and I went to a Red Sox-Tigers doubleheader. They were great games, too. I wanted to see Bernie Carbo play.

"My dad hates baseball because of his daughter. He grew up in Greece where they didn't have any baseball, and I used to cry after games and kick in t.v. sets," Photo admits. Her father was furious when he found out during freshman parents' weekend that every paper Photo had written at Harvard was on baseball.

Photo's parents are probably resigned by now to her penchant for decorating her bedroom with baseball pictures. "It's my wall of fame," she says, and her habit of baking cakes for the Cardinal squad. "There was one year I only missed keeping score three times," she says. "If I had to go to bed I would write the scores on old sheets."

More than half of Winthrop House knows by now that she lives in the heart of Cardinal Country--Belleville, Ill.--a city of almost 50,000 ten miles southeast of Busch Stadium. "I tell everybody it's the home of Jimmy Connors, Buddy Ebsen, and Tuborg Gold," Photo says. "In eighth grade, one of my goals was to be senator from Illinois, president of the United States, and then the ultimate goal--owner of the Cardinals."

How do you characterize a Harvard student who practically subsidizes Baker Library with $200 library fines, but who has been hired by investment bankers at Morgan Stanley? Who tells dirty jokes, but makes her roommates say the punchlines? Who loves to take showers but has been known to stack 13 beer kegs in her bathtub? Photo sums it up: "I think I'm sorta normal.