molly mary o'brien

syracuse university

At the football game there was a blonde baton twirler in a sparkly outfit.  She barely did any twirling until the halftime performance, and her inactivity prompted my sister to wonder if the twirler had a stomachache or some other ailment.  The guy three rows in front of us wore a homemade t-shirt and drank approximately fifteen beers.  The announcer said something positive about wide receiver Dorian Graham; I heard his name as “Dorian Gray.”

The sorority house was beautiful.  Buckets of Halloween candy on every flat surface.  Framed pictures of girls from the past years, each frame a yearbook-style compilation of headshots; in the Sixties the sisters had bouffants or neatly clipped bobs, in the Eighties there were perms, from 2000 on the hair was long and straight.  Like the montages of past NYT Styles Section trends in Bill Cunningham New York (baggy pants, schoolboy blazers, et cetera), the coifs in the pictures induced cultural nostalgia.

Oh, and the sorority house bathroom smelled divine.