Retro Recruitment: 1985

[Alias85]

Hi everyone! Longtime poster here posting under a pseudonym. I guess you could say Alias85 is a benign sock puppet

I'd held off on writing a retro recruitment thread for a long time because the ones I've read have been so well written and full of detail and I didn't think I could manage that. Then I figured, what the hell, I'll give it a try.

So, here's my story...

WHO: Alias85
WHAT: Totally Awesome Retro Rush Story
WHEN: Fall of 1985
WHERE: A big school in the east
WHY: Why not?

DISCLAIMER: Since this took place 29 years ago, I am going by the following: pictures taken before and during the events, casual conversations with people who were there and the mostly illegible scribblings in the little rush notebooks we were allowed to carry.
My rush started on a humid Sunday afternoon in late August the day after I moved into my dorm. The yearly event called the Watermelon Picnic was the opportunity for the fraternities and sororities to set up booths and mingle with the potential rushees (there will be no usage of words like PNM and Rho Gamma in this story. I’m old school) and with each other and, well, eat watermelon.
Rush at Big School in the East isn’t like down South with the town by town voting blocks, outpouring of recs and Lily-clad young ladies groomed for sorority life from birth (not that there’s anything wrong with that). If it were, I assure you that I would not be writing this because I’d be a GDI.

Anyway, my roommate and I, along with a group of girls from our floor, all ventured down to the Watermelon Picnic. I don’t remember much about it, but photographic proof says that I was wearing what I can only describe as a pair of overalls in a pattern most often associated with train engineers and an oversized red t shirt. My feet are (thankfully?) not visible in this picture but if they were I fear that if they were you would see black Chuck Taylors with the tops jauntily folded down.

We ate watermelon, flirted with the cute fraternity boys and mingled with the sorority sisters. I remember being happy to see a few familiar faces in the crowd that I knew from the fraternity parties I’d been attending for the past couple of years (What? You weren’t running around fraternity house parties when you were 16? Well, okay, that’s understandable) and by the end of the day, I'd paid my $15.00 and was signed up to participate in Rush. We all got pink t shirts with a picture of the Pink Panther on them that said “Think Greek”, but it had sigmas where the E’s were supposed to be so I guess it was more like “Think Grssk”. I still don’t get why they did that.

So, back in those days at my school, there were twelve sororities. The easiest way to name them is, I think, to assign them each an astrological sign:
Aries
Taurus
Gemini
Cancer
Leo
Virgo
Libra
Scorpio
Sagittarius
Capricorn
Aquarius
Pisces

The schedule was as follows:
12 Parties
8 Parties
4 Parties
Preference Parties

...