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The plot thickens
BY ABBY McCARTNEY When I started college, I suspected that my life might secretly be the basis for Rory Gilmore, of the TV show “Gilmore Girls.”
Implausible? Sure. But there was evidence, coincidental (both of us had to have dinner with slightly overbearing grandparents once a week) and seemingly fateful (I never expected to go to Yale, but I ended up there, just like Rory). When Wikipedia told me that the TV character’s residential college was Branford, the one I had been assigned to, I was convinced. I was Rory’s alter ego. Obviously, this meant that college was going to be awesome. Rory lived in a dorm room the size of a four-bedroom apartment, with a craft table in the living room. She got good grades and edited the school newspaper while seeming to spend most of her time enjoying Connecticut’s always-beautiful weather and making plans for weekend trips. Clearly, I had it made. Plot Continuity Except, as it turns out—and I know this will come as a shock—college isn’t exactly like it looks on TV. For one thing, I’ve never seen a dorm room of any kind that has room for a craft table. And somehow fraternity and sorority houses never look quite as clean and neatly decorated as they do on screen. You know the pristine mansion with the marble staircase that Elle Woods calls home at the beginning of “Legally Blonde”? Imagine it half the size, with paint peeling on the walls and stray shoes, textbooks and empty chip bags scattered around the living room. Now that’s a sorority house. The differences don’t end with dorm room décor. Many television shows and movies seem to regard college as basically an extension of high school, just with more debauchery and fewer books. But few of us start college accompanied by our girlfriend, best friend, older brother and high-school history teacher, as Corey did on “Boy Meets World.” After all, a real college experience isn’t quite so concerned with plot continuity. It tends to come with a new cast of characters and a whole new set of conflicts, not to mention a whole new set—not just a redecorated version of the same classroom you’ve been sitting in since sixth grade. And unlike on TV, high school stereotypes no longer apply. There are athletes and cheerleaders, sure, but they don’t sit at designated tables in the dining hall. College students tend to worry about their own friends, not about moving up in the social pecking order. And while some sorority recruiting can surely make “Mean Girls” look like a tea party, most people are much more open to having friends with different backgrounds and interests in college than they were in high school, where the primary concern was fitting in. YouTube Fodder The classic college stereotype, of course, is “Animal House,” a drunken revelry that lasts four years and ends with waking up with someone’s underwear on your head. Does that really exist? I’m sure it does somewhere, but it’s not the norm, for me or for any of my friends. The real thing is at once much more mundane and much more interesting. There’s a reason that no one makes movies about the people whose idea of a crazy night is a videogame tournament with their friends: Would you pay to watch that? But at the same time, the wild and crazy parties are often the least interesting things going on during any given weekend. College students tend to have a sense of humor and a lot of unstructured time, a fantastic combination. They write plays (a recent favorite on my campus was “Animorphs: The Musical”), spell out messages with Christmas lights on the side of their dorms, dress up statues in ridiculous costumes, put on all-night Rock Band tournaments and piano concerts, and even make movies of their own. YouTube is chock-full of the fruits of their labors. In that sense, college is much more exciting, quirky, and memorable than the movies and TV shows would have you believe, even if the dorms are the size of Elle Woods’s closet. Of course, I hear that law school is exactly like “Legally Blonde.”
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