Spring Break, State School Style

Not a single day too soon, Spring Break officially starts tomorrow. With it, the entire campus will fracture into groups bound for myriad destinations. First-years, of course, will head home for the week. (They haven’t quite caught on that Spring Break is our one-time, one-week excuse to go somewhere with close friends before the end of the school year.) Upperclassmen who have caught on can choose between a variety of Spring Break hot-spots: The socially conscious among us will perform Habitat for Humanity manual labor. The adventurous can backpack through Europe or Asia. The science-concentrating seniors may journey to Cambridge’s illustrious bio labs to complete their theses. The semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization which used to occasionally publish a so-called humor magazine might choose to crash at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion in Los Angeles.

And the students who really know how to have a good time will spend their Spring Break on the eminent beaches of—in alphabetical order—Acapulco, the Bahamas, Cancun and the Dominican Republic. The sand might be white, the waves crashing and the breeze blowing at any one of these balmy vacation destinations, but no one makes the trek there, or to Key West or Jamaica, to take pleasure in the salty beach air. More likely, the only pleasure anyone gets from these beaches is by finding a spot to nurse a hangover and attempt to forget any of the previous night’s debauchery.

These Spring Break trips must hold a special place in the hearts of Harvard students. It’s the opportunity to travel to a foreign locale, thus eliminating America’s strident underage drinking laws and enabling students to wreak havoc on their livers as they have never done before. There are bright-eyed high school senior girls (think of all the romance that is Pre-Frosh Weekend—for an entire week! and in bikinis!) for the guys, and older men staking out the beaches and hoping to play the role of temporary Sugar Daddy for the girls. Most important, though, is that students can assume anonymous identities—choosing to drop the H-bomb or not, but most definitely leaving their familiar selves behind in Cambridge.

Preparation for the transformation has already begun: The students about to embark on this particular variety of the Spring Break trip have logged umpteen hours at the gym as of late, desperately trying to firm up the winter’s extra padding in one week. (This also explains the group of guys dropping for push-ups every half-hour on St. Patty’s Day.) They have frequented the tanning salons in an attempt to hide their pasty-white Cambridge complexions. They have endured the torment of the waxing chair, modeled their trunks and bikinis in front of their closet mirrors and purchased all commodities that they will definitely (or hopefully) put to use next week.

Slimmed, bronzed and plucked, these students embark for far-away tropical beaches to live a life outside of their own—for a week. They will drink by the handle (seriously damage their bodies), compete in wet T-shirt contests (exploit their sexuality) and become people who they are not (frat boys and sorority girls from state schools). Best yet is that these Spring Break revelers can return to campus the following week slighter tanner and perhaps a bit less healthy than when they left but for the most part able to carry on with their routine Harvard persona.

Spring Break is a time for Harvard students to let loose, forget their inhibitions and open themselves to experimentation in a way that many are unable to while here at school. There’s a good reason that the craziness and debauchery of Spring Break doesn’t happen at Harvard every weekend—and it’s not because of the weather. There is not exactly an abundance of focus on the social here at school. Not only must we deal with Massachusetts’ archaic blue laws and Harvard’s lack of a student center, but even more importantly, we must contend with out own driven, competitive and success-oriented mentality. Harvard might not provide the space for us to have a good time, but we’re the ones who don’t give ourselves the time.

But then there’s Spring Break, and the opportunity to experience what most other college-aged students across the nation enjoy every Friday and Saturday night. Everyone can play up their rowdy sides, play down their collegiate ones and masquerade in a different personality for the week. Only to return, of course, to Harvard’s version of the spring: papers, exams and Astroturf for all.

Jordana R. Lewis ’02 is a history and literature concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears on alternate Thursdays.