Serenades at SJSU
Hi there!
At San Jose State University serenades are a very big part of our social calendar! We hold 2-4 Serenades a semester with differing fraternity houses, and we hold these on Monday nights after our chapter meetings. We use it as a way to introduce our New Members to the other houses, and to meet their pledges! The way it works at our house is that the pledges and new members both line up outside of our house, with their actives behind them. The initiates are usually on the porch with the NMs in front of them lined up on the walkway. The boys stand on the oposite side of the lawn, on the sidewalk with the pledges lined up in front of the initiates. When anyone talks, they walk in between, so all present can see and hear them clearly! see diagram--->
|DZ House|
initiates
new members lined up
[space in between, usually lawn]
pledges lined up
fraternity initiates
-------street--------
First we take turns singing songs back and forth at each other (in between each song the other house yells "song song song song!" Some of the songs we sing: take your man around the corner, Delta Zetas never drink, There are no Delta Zetas down in hell, Drink beer ). Then the New Members each take turns standing out and saying "Hi, my name is ____," the fraternity all says "hi ____," and then she tells a pick-up line, sometimes related to her major or things she likes to do. After all of the girls have gone, the boys do the same thing, but after each line they give one of the new members a rose (or their house's flower, but usually a rose as far as I have seen in all the houses).
After all of the New Members/Pledges are introduced, then we have exchanges. This is for the members that have bigs or littles in the other house they are doing a serenade with, so they do their letter/paddle exchange in front of both of their houses. They turn back to back and hold up what they are giving the other, and then rotate so everyone else can see it(girls go awwwww for pretty much everything, of course!), while still hiding it from their big/lil. They then turn around and show their stuff! It is very exciting!
At this point, if any of the girls in our house have a boyfriend in the other, he presents her with flowers. We don't really do lavaliering at our school, so this is a very looked forward to event! Some of the houses sing and dance with the girlfriends/new members as well, but it varies form fraternity to fraternity.
Afterwords the boys all get invited in to our house to mingle! Composites or turtle statues or our flag have a tendency to disapear at this point, but it's all in good fun! Serenades are one of the New Members favorite parts of the semester, and it is a really great way to get to know the pledges of other houses! It is a wonderful tradition and I hope you are able to bring it back to your campus!
|
Hybrid Mode
