Reading: Margaret George, Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles

Listening: Tracy Chapman

Moving: Thirty minutes on the elliptical trainer (level four, "fat-burner" program), plus a weight-circuit

Learning: "Moonlighting" is in Bravo at 5:00 every evening!

 

 

 

19 January 2000: Fire Alarms

A Dutch construction worker on welfare is the reincarnation of a Ghana tribe's king.

This isn't from the Weekly World News.

Pranksters pull false fire alarms in dorms all too often, which is another reason I was glad to live in a women-only dorm.

Eventually, that is. Where I lived at UConn is very important to my experiences there. The summer after 12th grade I requested a large coed dorm. I was placed in Shippee, a six-storey single-sex housing about 300 students, hereafter referred to as LES, since that's how it is in my off-line journal.

Lester E. Shippee donated a passel of cash to UConn in honor of his wife. In honor of his wife, LES housed only women; in honor of himself, his was the name over the door.

It was a huge single-sex dorm with its own cafeteria. That's why I ate a lot of meals at Hilltop and Buckley. Buckley was right next store, coed, larger than LES, with its own caf, and Hilltop comprised two nine-storey dorms and a rec center with its own caf. LES was aptly named "the nunnery."

Sophomore year my roommate, RMD, and I were anxious to live coed, but the only coed dorm we could get into was two separate rooms in Hicks. We were placed with freshling, but when the time came, the freshling were happy to swap and live with each other instead of with us. So we were left with each other, an arrangement that didn't work out as swimmingly this year as last.

When RMD dropped out at the end of our third semester, I was delighted. I feared that a new roommate would be foisted upon me, but that never happened. I had an effective single, and at the end of sophomore year I did what I should have done a year before: move into Holcomb.

I moved into Holcomb with a sweet sophomore whom I'd known before. I didn't know how I would handle a roommate after having a single; I didn't know how I would manage my sex life. But that was okay: in a month I scored a single--in Holcomb. I had survived the danger that was the campus-wide singles waiting list and could remain in Holcomb; itsbeing all-women worked in my favor.

Holcomb was a lot different than LES. Single-sex, it shared a caf with adjoining Sprague, which was single-sex in the other direction. Holcomb attracted crunchier folk than the general crowd packed into LES; it wasn't a nunnery. Men at our fingertips without men in our dorm, which meant that for the five semesters I lived in Holcomb, I suffered through many fewer fire alarms than I had in Hicks or even in LES. In Hicks lived drunken aggies who brought goats into the aptly named dorm; in LES the higher proportion of lower-div students meant more stupidity.

There was one time and one time only I was extremely grateful for a false alarm, and it happened before my freshling year even began.

The week after I graduated high school, I attended a two-day with-an-overnight orientation at UConn. By the time September rolled around, I was glad to be able to afford to go anywhere; in June I was still immensely rancorous against public education. So I copped a charming attitude and fell in with another attitudinous girl named Stacey.

Late at night (late for me), she suggested we go out and explore the campus on our own. Our leaving the dorm was forbidden and thus a far better reason than taking a walk or breathing fresh air. So we scampered down eight flights of stairs (since the long-suffering R.A.s presumably would be in the common area downstairs with the elevator lobby) and out into the night.

But not so fast. We knew the exterior stairwell door would lock. Stacey had a notepad (paper, this being 1986, not a computer) that we closed the door upon. Anyone else coming out would either use the other staircase (we hoped) or have the sense (or decency) to replace the pad in the door.

So off we went. Down Hilltop, past where the Alumni House wasn't yet, between the ROTC Hangar and where the Alumni center was then housed, and there we arrived on Stadium Road facing Jorgensen Auditorium. We could go left or right along Stadium or dogleg north or south around Jorgensen. The campus was ripe for exploring in the June night. We stood there looking around in the orange sodium light. We had no idea where to go and I, for one, didn't want to get lost. We turned around and headed back.

In retrospect, that was the funniest aspect of the whole adventure. Within the first few weeks in September, I would know the campus's 3000+ acres intimately. I would get to know the trees in the apple orchard. I would know where the sidewalks got knobbly. I would know all the buildings and all their three-letter abbreviations. (The habit I got into when I started my diary at 16 would be strongly reinforced by working in Scheduling, where we referred to the Humanities building as JHA when everyone else called it Arjona. But *everyone* called the Math-Science Building MSB, not just me.) I never climbed the water towers or tipped a cow, but everything else I did do .

There are still two spots on campus that I remember more clearly from orientation than from any other time. One is on Mansfield Road, in front of the Gulley Hall, facing the sidewalk between Wilbur Cross and Chem, where the road curves up the hill to the Co-op. The other is beside Psych building, looking down Whitney Road between Arjona and Monteith to Mirror Lake. I don't remember what the orientation guide was telling us about at Gulley, but there on Whitney you can see all the frat houses, build from Sears & Roebuck kits in the Ô30s I think, and the guide was telling us about the frats' bed races.

At the time, we were nearly lost, but later that exploration (which I had pace out, when I could laugh at myself) would seem as tame as finding my way through a supermarket.

So. Stacey and I climbed back up the hill to the dorms. We looked up at the building (highest point between Hartford and Providence: UConn's in the quiet corner) and walked around it, looking for our entrance. There was the door, but the pad was gone.

We were locked out.

We were at the point that, giggling madly, I was going to try to climb on Stacey's shoulders to try to reach the first-floor landing when we realized that there were two buildings on Hilltop. This one was Ellsworth, not Hale. We pelted across the grass, and there was Hale, and there was our door with the pad still there to let us in. Laughing and gasping, we threw the door open and charged upstairs.

But there were all these people coming down! Had we triggered an alarm, had they ensured we'd stay inside the building by alarming the doors? In that case, the alarms would have rung when we'd escaped, and here we were back again!

So back down the stairs we trotted, outside with the madding crowd. The R.A.s wanted to keep us outside--in June, but still--until someone confessed to the deed. No, the doors weren't alarmed, but someone had pulled a fire alarm. Anyway, thanks to that perpetrator, Stacey's and my misdeed went unnoticed.

Such big adventures.

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