What! I Don't Need No Stinking Sorority!--An NPHC Membership Journey

[SISTERGREEK]

Inspired by tld221's thread, I wanted to post my NPHC Membership Journey (Since NPHC membership is less about recruitment and more about pursuit.) It is a long one, because the pursuit lasted many years. I hope you all will enjoy. Without further ado, I present:

"I Don't Need No Stinking Sorority!"

First, let me set the scene. I am a child of the eighties coming of age in the time of grunge, gansta rap, and the emergence of the boy band era in the early and mid-nineties. The music of the era was not the only media that was as diverse and it was descriptive; so to did the television programming of that era in many ways define certain generational boundaries.

As a youth, my tastes were hard to pin down. I loved Transformers and Thundercats, but also cartoons like Jem and Punky Brewster (along with the series) and My Little Pony Tales. By the nineties, my taste was moving more towards sitcoms (though cartoons remained some of my favorite viewing). Again, my tastes were all over the place, I enjoyed anything and everything from the Disneyesque shows like Saved By the Bell and Boy Meets World, to the bawdy humor of shows like Married with Children and The Simpsons, to the wholesome family sitcoms like The Cosby Show and A Different World. (If this list reveals anything about my personality, perhap you will have discerned that I am a bit of a tomboy, fiercely individual and independent, idealistic, occasionally raunchy, and sometimes a bit sappy. All of these qualities may or may not help you to figure out where I eventually found my home.)


In fact, those last two shows on that list actually represent my first exposure to Black Greek Life. There were some memorable pledging episodes (featuring characters that I love to this day) with Ron as both a pledge and a DP of Kappa Lambda Nu and Freddie and Kim defying and humiliating their DP Whitley as pledges of Alpha Delta Rho. Of course, at the time most of this was lost on me, seeming tangential to the romance between Dwayne and Whitley, the love quadrangle between Ron, Kim, Freddie and Shazza.

Suffice to say, I had given Greek Life very little consideration by the time that I walked onto the campus of my HBCU in the fall of 199_. (I had never even seen School Days, which many of my new friends said was a huge factor in their deciding to attend an HBCU, along with A Different World--college freshman, what can you say). And for a good while, greek life and membership was the least of my concerns as I tried to figure out the whole college thing, worked to maintain a GPA that would help me keep my scholarship, and tried to make friends in this completely new environment, where everyone else seemed to already know each other.

To be continued...