Friday Night Ague

MARK RAABE is gun-shy. Not of the real thing, mind you, but gun-shy of reporters armed with pads and pencils, reporters ready to quote out of context, reporters like myself for that matter. That's why he keeps glancing nervously toward me as I write.

It all began routinely enough - with a film review Raabe, a senior, wrote for TheDartmouth. The problem was that his subject, National Lampoon's Animal House, was anything but routine.

Written in part by Chris Miller '63, the movie is a broad-stroke parody of 1960s fraternity life — a sort of American Graffiti, four years older and four rungs lower. The good guys are the brothers of the swamp-like Delta Tau Chi fraternity at the small Pennsylvania college of Eberhard Faber. (Remember No. 2 pencils?) The bad guys are the neo-Nazi brethren of allAmerican Omega Theta Pi, plus a psychotic dean and his stormtrooping ROTC. Irreverent spontaneity vs. pompous decorum.

Much of the material evolved, or perhaps mutated, from Miller's experiences here at the Alpha Delta house. Many of the characters' behavioral aberrations bear more than a passing resemblance to time-honored Dartmouth "traditions" such as road trips, food fights, and toga parties.

By the time school opened this fall, Animal House had become the latest cult hit on campuses across the country. As enthusiasm spread for this celebration of bacchanalian revelry, so did student emulation of its more peculiar points. For instance, Jello-slurping hit a new peak of popularity, thanks to John Belushi's startling performance as Bluto, the quintessential animal.

All of this Raabe included in his article, besides offering his critical estimation of the "slapstick farce." In part, he was trying to set a context for the comedy, to show it as a funny movie that should nevertheless not be confused with the way school really was in 1962 or how it is today. In part, he succeeded, but mostly he failed.

Raabe's troubles began with a typographical error: "The College should be a copy of Animal House ..." reads rather differently than with the proper verb "should buy."

A few days later, Raabe received a call from a Boston stringer for Newsweek magazine. Apparently, the reporter had been calling around Dartmouth and other schools investigating the latest manifestation of Animal House fever - the toga party "craze." Someone had suggested he talk with the "guy who wrote the review."

"I explained to him," recalls Raabe, "that Dartmouth was probably the toga prototype. One of the alums from my fraternity (Sigma Theta Epsilon) said we'd had toga parties for 44 years. Supposedly, they began as charity fund-raisers."

Raabe and the reporter dug further into the psychology of togaism, the former attempting to give a balanced view of the phenomenon, neither too enthusiastic nor too critical. A sort of journalist-to- journalist lowdown on the situation, with Raabe as the detached observer. The putcome made him sound something less than detached.

"I started to worry a few days later when I called back to add some information," Raabe says. "The guy thanked me for the way I had really cut through all the garbage he had been handed and got to the real issue. 'What did I say?' I kept thinking."

The October 2 issue of Newsweek contains a piece entitled "To-ga! To-ga! Tog-a!" Within is the following quote: " 'The idea is that people are going to debauch, not so much sexually but by getting drunk,' explains Dartmouth junior Mark Raabe. 'Pretty much everyone is out of commission by 10 o'clock.' "

One's initial impression of Raabe's character would have been bad enough just reading those lines, but it gets worse when they are juxtaposed with quotes from other students: "Now I spend evenings looking for girls who wear togas without underwear."

Taken out of context, Raabe's description plunged him from journalistic aloofness to decadent involvement. "I really needed a drunken fool image," he moans.

It is difficult, of course, to hide an embarassment if it's distributed nationwide. The following week, his grandmother wrote that it's not everyone who gets quoted in Newsweek. She had left a copy displayed on the coffee table for all her friends to see.

The clincher came in a letter from his father, a Lutheran minister in Wichita Falls, Texas. "My dad's a pretty liberal guy," says Raabe, "but not everyone else is." It seems members of the congregation approached their shepherd questioning the propriety of a minister's son promulgating such disreputable notions in a national forum. Out of context or not, the words of the minister's son temporarily placed the minister on a hot-spot.

This comedy of misunderstanding was more than just a blow to Mark's dignity. Beyond that, he felt a deeper concern over how Newsweek chose to portray the modern student: " ... the film's wild glance back at the carefree days before the protests set in has captured their imagination and fueled their frivolity." A University of Alabama student, complaining about "how things have really calmed down on campus," decides to "raise a bit more hell." And Chris Miller adds, "Today's kids have no real era of their own. ... I think they have an inferiority complex about it, and that's why they're seizing on ours."

In effect, the article declares how wonderful it is that the silly students are getting back to those good old days before anyone raised a fuss over bothersome topics like Vietnam and equality. It elevates apathy and insensitivity to the level of "cute" virtues.

"They're selling students short," asserts Raabe. "Drinking and looking under togas is not my main concern, and I don't think it is of many others. Newsweek must think it's comforting to the adult world to know we're back to our frivolous ways."

Flipping through his notes, Mark reads a passage from an irate letter he never sent to the magazine: "Students today aren't more carefree or frivolous, we're just more venal."

Now don't get us wrong. Animal House is funny. Toga parties are funny. Even articles about temporary campus crazes are funny. What's not funny are journalists who confuse reality with what they see on a screen, or at least pretend they do for the sake of good copy. The Friday night perversions of a few hundred students do not characterize an era.