I graduated from undergrad school in Athens, and I always say the University of Georgia is my alma mater, which is true. What I rarely tell anyone, though, is that I went to a different school my freshman year in college.I'll call the school "Christian College" [or CC, for short], as a pseudonym.
I'm not going to say the real name of the school because that would be mean. Lots of folks have gone there and had a terrific experience, and good for them. It just wasn't the place for me, which I quickly figured out. However, I learned a lot.
Very little of the academics stuck with me, but other things did.
When I was a senior in high school I knew a lot of kids who were planning on attending CC. It was and is a very good school academically. It's also located in East Tennessee, not far from Knoxville, where I spent the latter part of my youth. So I wanted a small school and I wanted to be close to home. A lot of my classmates went to UT [the University of Tennessee] but that seemed to me the boring, conventional choice, and I wanted something different. I wanted to go away to school, but not too far. I wanted a smaller school.
So I applied to Christian College and was admitted. My father nearly had a heart attack when he saw the tuition costs. I ended up paying the first semester's tuition completely on my own. Good thing I had been working and saving money.
I started summer school at CC exactly one week after I graduated from Farragut High. It was a rude shock.
For one thing, CC was not as big as my high school. Farragut High School is a huge school. There were around 500 people in my graduating class.The campus was brand new when I started there and had excellent sports facilities, music and drama, advanced classes, etc. A lot of the kids who went there came from well-to-do families and it showed.
From the age of 8 on, I had been living in Knoxville, which is a pretty big town, with plenty of stuff to do. CC was located in a teeny tiny town with NOTHING to do - literally. There were 2 restaurants and one grocery store. No clubs, no movie theaters, nothing. You had to drive a half hour to get to a little larger town.
Christian College was VERY Christian. It was partly funded by the Southern Baptist Convention. My grandparents were Baptist and my best friend was Baptist, and it never occurred to me that it would be an issue that I was not. I was active in my church throughout high school. Also, Episcopalians are Christians. Same God, same basic Protestant beliefs.
How wrong I was.
CC was a college in a time warp. There were only 3 dormitories for girls, and all were huge old homes that had been converted to dorms, with rooms added onto the back. One dorm was considered the goody two-shoes missionary girls dorm. Another was considered the "fast" girls, the wild ones. The third, which was my dorn, was for the "wives." We weren't missionaries or sluts. We were there to find Mr. Right. Supposedly.
If girls [in any of the dorms] went out and came back after midnight it was noted by a person who monitored the door. After 3 or 4 instances of violating the midnight curfew, your parents were notified.
Boys weren't allowed in the girls rooms, except for a few hours on Friday night, and the door couldn't be completely closed.Boys were only allowed in the front parlors, where there was always someone on duty watching to make sure there was no hanky panky happening.
Students were not allowed to dance.
Students were not allowed to drink or smoke. If one empty beer bottle was found in your room, you would be expelled.
Chapel attendance once a week was mandatory. I usually sat and read a book, bored to death.
I quickly rebelled. A regular group of freshmen girls would gather in someone's room on Friday and Saturday nights, and we'd smoke, drink whatever alcoholic beverages someone had snuck in, and play records and dance wildly. It was as rebellious as we could get. [I stole my brother's record of The Supremes and my fondest memories are dancing to this song, Love Is Like An Itching In My Heart. Great song to do the Carolina shag to...]
My best friends there were Kelly and Teresa. They were both WILD. I mean, wild by any standards. They usually were the ones bringing the alcohol and cigarettes, if they weren't on dates.
You see, the ironic, funny thing about CC was there were 3 kinds of kids who attended there.
1) Goody Two Shoes. Good kids, very conservative, very Baptist [a few were maybe Methodist or Presbyterian]. These kids made good grades, studied hard, never drank, smoke, or broke any rule. About 50-70% of the kids were Goody Two Shoes.
2) Regular Kids. Kids like me who weren't so conservative and goody two-shoes [there were maybe 5% of us in the entire student population]
3) The Wild Kids. These were the kids whose parents sent them to CC to reform, to straighten up, to find Jesus. These were maybe 30-50% of the student population.
Who did I hang out with? Not the Goody Two Shoes - they always looked down their noses at me because I wasn't Baptist or conservative, and therefore suspicious. The other regular kids? Only knew a couple of those, and they were pretty boring, too.
No, I liked to hang out with the Wild Kids. Much more fun. I didn't do drugs or have wild sex [unlike many of the Wild Kids] but man I laughed about how predominant they were.
Around the library there were beautiful, well-manicured bushes. All the Wild Kids hid in there to drink, do drugs and have sex. I am amazed the bushes survived all the nocturnal activities.
After enduring a lecture from my English professor one day about how a Christian College student should look and act, I started wearing a tee shirt around campus that said "Big Mother's Is A Likker Store" Destin Florida.
I went to a very formal "tea" for freshman girls wearing skintight jeans, a tube top, and spiked heels. I also wore a lot of makeup. I could barely walk in the heels. I looked like a very young, drunk hooker. [I was 18 and looked about 15]
As a freshman, I had to learn the school song and be ready to sing it when any upperclassman demanded it. To my regret, I never had to stand in the cafeteria and sing. I loved to sing. I was a ham.
During freshman "hell week" we had to wear our clothes backwards one day, walk backwards one day, etc. It wasn't mandatory. One night there was a panty raid, and the boys gathered outside one of the dorms and we threw panties at them. It was all in good fun, because only one or two of the girls threw any panties. There was just a lot of giggling, as I recall.
I could've dealt with all of it. Even the classes, which were academically quite challenging. I made friends. I loved the beautiful campus. I just didn't like being constantly whispered about.
I constantly had kids coming up to me and asking "Are you SAVED?!" with a serious look on their face. The first time I heard this I was puzzled and said "What ARE you talking about?!" Then I had to listen to 20 minutes of how I had to accept Jesus or burn in hell. I walked away in disgust, after explaining that I was a Christian, but I didn't appreciate that sort of confrontation.
Pretty soon, word got around that I was running with the Wild Kids, AND I was not SAVED. The fact that I said I believed in Jesus and was a Christian and a devout Episcopalian didn't mean anything to them. Some of the kids were from remote areas and had no idea what an Episcopalian was. One boy kept following me, hounding me about "giving my testimony" and I took to avoiding him at all costs. I couldn't get him to leave me alone.
The final straw came one day when I was in the bathroom in the dorm. It was quiet and peaceful and I was sitting there reading, and a girl came into the stall next door and told me she was worried about the state of my soul and she had to try and SAVE ME, right there in the ladies room. I started laughing. She was offended.
By Thanksgiving, I was telling my parents OK, that's IT. As soon as the year is over, I am transferring. No more of strangers trying to "save" me. No more curfews. I didn't like all the restrictions on my freedom.
(The next year, I went to UGA, which was another culture shock. I'll save that for another post.)
It always amuses me to hear CC alumni [several of my Facebook friends are alumni] reminisce about CC and what a fine school it was, and how everyone there was such a Fine Christian.
The one thing that school taught me was that the sort of very conservative thinking they espoused was NOT my cup of tea. I learned to drink beer there, and smoke. I learned a lot of interesting trivia about sex, from my Wild Kid friends.
I learned to hate hypocrisy, which I saw everywhere on the campus. (Not everyone shaking the bushes around the library was a Wild Kid.)
I became an agnostic as a result of having my core beliefs ruthlessly questioned. I decided, if this is Christianity then I want no part of it. [Fortunately, I got over it before I became totally cynical and heathen]
I often wonder about what became of some of my friends. One Wild Kid who was a friend of mine married a professional wrestler and had a half dozen kids before age 30.
Another, Kelly, is probably a pole dancer in Chattanooga. (Kelly came home with me one weekend and witnessed my dad sleepwalking through the house buck naked. He was bad to sleepwalk. She thought it was funny. I was mortified.)
Now, the whole freshman year wasn't all bad. I had a lot of fun. That fall I went with a group to New York City and saw plays and toured the city and had a great time. I was also in Fiddler On The Roof that fall. It struck me as funny that a conservative Christian school was doing a very Jewish musical. The director had to get special permission for us to be able to do folk dancing in the show. That spring, I was a judge in a speech contest. I also joined a sorority and we had some good times, although it was simply a service and social group, nothing like sororities at big schools. So there were fun times at CC.
One of my fellow CC alumni, a guy I also went to high school with, became a pro football player, then an actor. We are still in touch, although we weren't friends as teens. [I was basically a nerd and he was the Big Man on Campus]
I guess what started me thinking about all this was that I was in the car the other day listening to the oldies radio station and heard Seals and Crofts "We May Never Pass This Way Again" [you can listen to it here] which used to be played at all the graduations. Great song.[Hummingbird was my all-time favorite Seals & Crofts song. Give it a listen, although it's kind of a weird video]
I hope Alesia has a better experience in college than I did. I hope she learns a lot, and her beliefs are strengthened. I hope she makes good friends and keeps them.
But isn't that what we all wish for our children, that things be easier for them?
Food for thought, this Christmas Eve. Have a Merry one.
me at age 18, my freshman year
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