This may bore you to death, but since I don't have as much detail for the actual parties (like what we ate and drank, what they wore), I'll set the stage a little bit. I guess it would be important to know that I was a Greek novice to be sure. I wasn't sure if I knew more than one person who had been in a sorority at the time that I enrolled (and she was an alumna from a different school.) I had no connections that I was aware of either. I did have good grades and went to an extremely competitive private high school where I was very active in clubs, played a varsity sport, and sang in a variety of shows over the years. I was an over-achiever, but I was not a partier and wasn't extremely popular, but my friends were (if that makes sense.) So, I didn't consider myself a typical sorority girl, but I wanted to start with a clean slate in college and start being the new me! (In retrospect, not a good mindset!)
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Lace up your pink and white princess Reeboks and let's go back to late fall, 1986...
During my senior year of high school, my mom and I go down to Champaign to take a campus tour. We are placed in a dorm room (sharing a room that small with my mom – wow) and have several scheduled events, including a guided campus tour. As we are doing the tour with several other potential students and families, the guide, who is a very cute, articulate U of I student, mentions that Greek life is very important and historic at U of I and that as many as 50% of students are Greek. (A statistic that I now know was probably inaccurate.) As the tour continues, we pass house after house with Greek letters. I can’t tell which houses are for fraternities and which are for sororities. I love it when the houses have the words spelled out since I don’t know all of the Greek letters (except the ones we used in math.) Someone asks the guide if she is in a sorority and she says that she is. I don’t remember which one she says she is in, but I remember thinking that she is awesome and maybe I would like sorority life. At one point we pass the
Limerick house. My mom tells me that her late sister received a bid to
Limerick at the University of Tulsa back in the 1950s but didn’t accept it. In my mom’s mind this means that
Limerick is the way to go, since she idolized her sister.
The tour ends at Memorial Stadium where Illinois is playing the University of Iowa. The big game atmosphere, the huge school, the beautiful campus, and the crisp fall air…I can’t wait until I am a part of this!
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