Party All the Time

THERE ARE some questions that may forever remain unanswered. Why is the reindeer Rudolph's nose red? Why does Bears quarterback Mike Tomczak still play in the NFL? Of greater importance to our lives is the unanswerable question of why the new alcohol policy (Version #45.6b) restricts houses to one campus party a year.

Apparently the Administration felt that Harvard developed a party image comparable to UCLA or Miami. There were too many parties, too much dating, too much of a good time had by all. Admissions officers were running from Byerly Hall in panic crying, "Before you know it we'll be as fun a school as U-VA or Stanford, and our GPAs, LSATs and XYZPDQs will go down the tubes."

It was time to turn over a new leaf. The deans conferred and debated, weighing the different strategies by which Harvard students could be reined in, while drinking strong martinis and getting stoned. "How 'bout mandatory breakfast? Yeah that's the ticket. How 'bout a dress code, tuxes for the guys, silk bikinis for the girls?" said one dean.

Finally, the all-knowing, toupee-wearing scholars-gone-to-pot decided to reduce the number of open house parties down to one per house per year.

Historians have wondered why the number one was picked. If our parents-away-from-home truly feel that parties open to the entire campus are festering dens of drunken, underage insanity, they should have just shut them down, not restricted them to one a year.

The deans could have set the limit at a more reasonable number like 2.3, the national average of children per family. (The .3 would be a party with warm beer and no music). As part of the new leaf, the deans invested the Senior Tutors with additional powers and a new title, Allston Burr Senior Tutor and Dean Wharmer Party-Buster, in honor of the famous dean who brought Faber College's Delta House under control.

THE NEW Quincy Senior Tutor was quickest to set up a network of paid informants who let her know whenever a party was becoming too fun. One night this fall, one sophomore knocked on the Senior Tutor's door.

"Your holiness," he said, "The guys in 1234 are dancing with beautiful women, laughing and listening to raucous music by U2. It's an insult for those of us without real lives to have our miserableness put in our not-too-pretty faces."

The action was quick. The Senior Tutor crushed the party in its infancy (1 p.m.). Those who resisted were Ad Boarded and made to parse Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and get up early enough for breakfast four days in a row.

In Winthrop House the Senior Tutor heard reports that the weekly Thursdayfest was going too well, that Harvard students had dropped their books for an entire evening and were dancing at the ungodly hour of 2 p.m.

Within minutes the dancing ended. All the merrymakers were reported to their professors and had their paper deadlines moved up one week. The hosts were repeatedly chastised and finally forced to agree to become monks after graduation.

For those of us who have already decided to become tie-wearing monks, we need parties where our out-of-house friends can come. We need parties which go past 9 p.m. Lights in the monastery (and on Wall Street) go out at 7 p.m.