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PRELUDE: The summer before we started college.
Our mother had never gone to college, so when we told her that we'd made the decision to attend the same school, she was ecstatic. She told everybody- friends, friends of friends, church friends, neighbors, waitresses at local restaurants when we went out to eat, the grocery store checker- everybody. She told them we were going to room together in the dorms (although she left out completely that the reason was because it was cheaper than if we roomed separately and had different roommates, but we shut up and let her have her moments). So if was no wonder that finally, a friend of one of mother's friends asked, "So, are the twins going through rush?"
....what?
Mother had never gone to college, and although her father and our father and their fathers (you get the idea) had all gone to college, none of them knew anything about sorority rush. We had friends from high school who had joined sororities in college, and we knew that, but it had never occurred to us to ask them how to actually do that.
The friend of mother's friend invited mother and us to lunch, where she gave us a crash course in sororities and rush. She'd been a Hunter Green Metallic at a public university in another state. She proudly told us that rush was very competitive at her school, so we figured she knew what she was talking about. We were in awe during lunch.
By the time she was done, I, being the social butterfly, was hooked. I wanted to go through rush and give sorority life a try. 65Mustang, almost as social as me but more bookish, said she wanted to do it too, although she was more subdued about it. Forget that, I was excited!
The friend made arrangements for us to meet several women she knew who were in sororities so they could help her write recommendations for us, which they all told us would help. When we mailed in our signups for rush, we had recs to: Hunter Green Metallic, Royal Blue, Bright Orange, and Silver Streak. We knew there was a chapter of Silver Streak at our school and wondered if having the rec would help.
We only lived about 30 miles from school, so we didn't move into the dorm until the day before classes and rush started. We went to the informational meeting that evening in the student center, where we met our Rho Chis and learned that we would be in separate rush groups. We were kind of happy about that, because even though we're fraternal and not identical twins, usually the only way people who didn't know us well could tell us apart was because 65Mustang wore her glasses and I rarely did. We figured we would probably stand out as "the twins" but we were hopeful that people would get to know us as individual people.
We went back to the dorm to unpack and talk about things. The Rho Chis had encouraged us to give all the groups fair shots and to be open-minded so we had the best chances of finding our homes, so we decided we would not tell each other which groups we were selecting as the week went on. We didn't know if we would be able to stick to that, but we decided to try it.
Pit stop time! The next post will be about that first night of rush!
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