Friday, October 9, 2009

When Life and Movies Collide


Today's posting is my 100th blog.  I'm sorry that I don't have anything more insightful to write about than a humorous moment at my fraternity reunion last weekend.  The reunion, by the way, was wonderful.  And sometime, when I have had some time to process the event, I will blog about it at length.
Back in the middle 70's, we had a reunion of a few of my fraternity brothers, and as part of it, we went to see ANIMAL HOUSE, which had just been released.  We loved it, particularly because it celebrated (?) some things about fraternity life that we held dear like beer parties, road trips, and wild homecoming parade floats.  My favorite beer party was a Bonnie and Clyde theme party we had, where everyone dressed like a member of the Barrow gang or a cop in pursuit of that group of outlaws.  I hadn't even thought of it until this moment, but that party demonstrates life and movies coming together.  A great road trip of my recollection was from UAlbany to Boston University, where we visited one of my high school friends at a fraternity house near party central of that era, Marlboro Street.  The two fraternity brothers who came along with me didn't have such a good time, though.  In fact, on the way back, they made me stop the car at the NY state line, so they could urinate back on Massachusetts.   If I told you the positions of importance that those two gentlemen now held, you would be amazed.  
Now to the homecoming floats.   I'm not going to discuss the year that we got in trouble for our float.  That moment is better left in the past.  Rather, I am recalling the year that the brothers of Alpha Lambda Chi decided to be socially conscious.  One of our brothers had an African-America roommate.  We asked them if they would pose, shaking hands, in front of a black and white back drop of the university campus, which also bore some words of civil rights wisdom.  These guys and this backdrop would be mounted on a flat bed truck.  Remember, this was only 3 or 4 years after Lyndon Johnson's groundbreaking civil rights legislation.  Ergo, we felt pretty politically correct, even though that expression didn't exist at the time.  And the parade went off without a hitch.  Those of you who are ANIMAL HOUSE addicts and have seen it several times, (I own the 25th Anniversary DVD), may remember that one of the floats in the Faber College homecoming parade was a giant black hand and a giant white hand on the back of a truck.  I remember how hard we laughed back in the mid-70's when we realized that a float like ours must have appeared in a lot of parades in the late 60's.  So many, in fact, that National Lampoon chose to parody it in the movie.
Flash forward 42 years or so to a banquet room in the Queensbury Hotel. Twenty-seven of the brothers of Alpha Lambda Chi and their wives are having a fantastic evening.  One of the fun events was a trivia contest.  The question, which I asked, went something like, "What did our socially conscious parade float look like?" In the back of the room, one of the guys raised his hand, probably groaned, "Oo oo I know it!" then shouted it, "a big black hand and a big white hand!" "Sorry," I replied, "but that was the float in ANIMAL HOUSE!"  At that point the whole joint cracked up.
Now, this may very well have been a had-to-be-there kind of moment, but I found it really interesting that in one guy's mind, at least for a second, our lives had morphed into the movies.  Also, on the back of our REUNION T-shirts was the statement, "Forty-two years later and still on double secret probation."

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