A Fashion Recruitment Story

[jenidallas]

At my school we had:

* formals (usually 1-2 per year, hosted by an individual sorority or fraternity for members/dates only).
* date parties (hosted by one or two groups, usually on a Saturday night - either sorority/sorority or fraternity/fraternity for the duos - usually themed and often the same theme annually)
* weekends (fraternities often hosted a date party one night and then a formal the next - both usually with the same date... some had week-long parties with an event every night for members/dates - Old South for KA and Paddy Murphy for SAE were like this, some were out of town for part or all of the weekend)
* mixers (1/1 or 2/2 sorority/fraternity, usually on a Friday night... we had a few 3/3 before national organizations pulled the plug on the multi-sponsor events - always themed and at the fraternity's house - closed to members only until 11 pm and then it became an open party for girls and "guest list" men)
* presentation (sororities only - fall formal dinner/dance with parents where the new member class for the year is "presented" formally)
* football blocks (arranged seating for 1-2 organizations in the stadium for a home game - usually fraternity/sorority or fraternity plus dates - often with a pre and/or post event)
* charity parties (gigantic fraternity parties on steroids where tickets were sold to the general public - at my school the often featured big name entertainers in 5,000 person venues - Pikefest was the most famous back in my day)
* pledge mixers (fraternity/sorority on a Thursday night, new members only)

A typical Friday night found us going to a mixer - usually our own first and then we'd make the rounds ending up at whatever house was our favorite at the time. (It was common for new members to show up at 9:00, actives to come at 9:45, and seniors at 10:30... Not sure why we dd that, but we did.)

A Saturday generally involved either football (and associated pre/post parties), a date party, or if it was a "big" weekend, one of the charity parties (everyone Greek pretty much went to those). If you didn't have one of those things, you went out dancing or to house parties at off-campus apartments or houses.

I now look back and realize where we got our party school reputation - we usually had more on our social calendar for a month than most chapters I see now have in an entire year.