Was it the twin plasma screens flashing our ugly mugs out over the dance floor every few minutes? The Long Island iced teas quaffed, the tramp-stamps and plunging decolletage on view, the booty-shaking top-40 hits of yesteryear-I could go on and on. Leave it to the School of General Studies to turn Low Library into prom night in Sheboygan.
This year's GS Annual Spring Gala was a bust, but I don't blame the organizers. Apparently there's a fine line between capturing the fuddy-duddyness of the Ivy League and turning one of New York's classic buildings into a rent-a-hall rumpus room. All it took were a couple of seemingly minor cosmetic changes to scupper the entire thing.
They lost last year's live band. They served us stuffed cutlets that oozed cheese when poked with a fork. Their only white wine was an oaky chardonnay that tasted like butane, and a couple of us lost shoes stepping in a particularly sticky spill congealing in front of one of the cocktail stations. I don't mean to suggest GS scrimped on luxuries. With the money we apparently saved, they added a cocktail table in the dining room and the aforementioned audio-visual setup, plus a team of prowling, paparazzi-like photographers.
What went wrong was in the details. There was nothing GS or Columbia-like about the Gala. You see, whether we admit or not, if we're shelling out 55 bucks for a GS Spring Gala, we want all the fussy pomp and circumstance you'd expect from a 250-year-old institution. Sure, it's maddening at times, but aren't those clubby little cosmetic differences the only thing separating an Ivy League education from the one you'd receive from No Loan State?
Perhaps I'm being a tad judgmental. My date and I did have fun. We skulked around the cocktail lounge, hoarding canapes, stalking the beef wellington trays, and sniping at other people's outfits. We both agreed that this year's crowd was an order of magnitude skankier and creepier than last year's.
So why have I decided to declare myself an authority on all things Ivy, you might ask? Well, in the weeks leading up to the gala I had the chance to scope out another campus, our New Haven neighbor to the north, Yale.
I've always considered Yale to be the quintessential Ivy League school. Not because it's any better than Columbia-more because it coheres with this fuzzy picture I have in my head of what an Ivy is supposed to look like.
I can't articulate this vision very well-suffice to say that if I squint my eyes just right while walking around New Haven, I can picture the teams of oarsmen, the straw hats, the mortarboards, hear the thwack of polo mallets and fight songs drifting through the air a lot easier there than I can at Columbia.
Not that I would ever, ever want to be a student there. At least not since they rejected my application for graduate school. Anyhow, I was up there to provide both moral and muscular support to my prom date, Mrs. Lucky Jim. She's a painter and she applied to their School of Art and was invited to come up for an interview.
Yale likes to see artwork in person, so applicants have to bring six canvases for their interview. You leave your work there for a week and then come back and get it. This is more difficult than it sounds, although I should mention that some of the applicants had it a lot harder than we did, shipping their artwork over from places like Korea, Dallas, or Oregon instead of simply driving U-Hauls back and forth from New Haven to New York.
While Mrs. Lucky Jim began her day-long interview, I prowled the Elm City, looking for Ivy League-ish things. What I found was what I thought was a scruffy statue of a white bulldog in glass case behind the welcome desk in the visitor's center.
"Oh, that's no statue," said the guy manning the desk when I asked him about it. "That's Handsome Dan [the Yale mascot]. And he's real." Apparently they'd taxidermied the poor thing. I pressed on. Yale's student body was more polite than Columbia's, although I admit I'm kind of biased after two-and-half years of fighting my way through crowded Hamilton stairways. I stopped into J. Press on State Street, the self-proclaimed "Ivy League standard" suit-maker, George Bush's favorite. To my dismay, there were no seersucker blazers in a 36R.
Mrs. Lucky Jim texted me and told me she needed help setting up her paintings during her big interview. I sat outside with the other applicants while two faculty members grilled her. It felt like waiting around an emergency room. Occasionally one of them would run out clutching their chest saying, "they said my work lacks cohesion."
The morning of the gala, Mrs. Lucky Jim's acceptance letter arrived. She tore it open and squealed. My reward for lugging her paintings back and forth? She's doing a portrait of me in my cap and gown, inspired by the presidential portraits in Low Library