I was sitting on my back porch the other night when I heard two sounds that told me summer was over. One was the rumble of a rented truck. The other was the whooping of the occupants of the rented truck.
The Woo people were back in town.
If you’re new to these parts, let me enlighten you. The Woo are a semi-nomadic people. From late August until early May they take up residence here at the foot of Mount Nittany to receive instruction from elders like myself. From May to August they return to the homes of their families to earn money to buy the fermented beverages they will need to dull the pain of receiving instruction from elders like myself.
The return of the Woo people was heralded by the stained and rancid sofas that sprouted curbside when their Aug. 1 leases took effect, much as the sprouting of snowdrops and crocuses more prettily heralds the arrival of spring.
If you live near the lodging houses of the Woo people you will surely hear them this weekend, for this interval before the onset of instruction is a time of reunion and rejoicing. Next weekend they will celebrate the end of the first week of instruction. The weekend after they will celebrate the first ritual combat of the 2010 season.
The Woo people are great believers in celebration. In fact, so prodigious have their celebrations become that last year they gained national recognition as the greatest revelers in the land.
Now, though, the Woo people appear to have been one-year wonders. When Princeton Review announced its new top party schools rankings earlier this month, our Nittany Lion clan of Woo people had been surpassed by the Bulldog clan at the University of Georgia and the Bobcat clan at Ohio University.
Will the Woo people redouble their efforts to reclaim the top spot this year?
Last spring, their defiant observance of a second green beer festival (State Patty’s Day) and an early Cinco de Mayo fiesta (Cinco de State) in the face of intense pressure not to add additional drinking-centered holidays to an already besotted calendar seemed to signal their determination to live up to their national reputation.
On the other hand, this year’s lower ranking could mark the beginning of a more temperate era at the foot of the sacred mountain. After all, the rankings are not some kind of independent assessment by a panel of professional party school evaluators, but a count of the number of students who voted for their own school. A smaller turnout among Penn State students is likelier to reflect some disenchantment with the party school reputation than with the party scene itself.
We will know more after this weekend. Listen for the howls – the ‘wooing’ of the Woo people – in the wee hours of the morning. Check your lawn and shrubbery for Natty Lite cans. Scan the police blotter on Monday.
If it was loud, if there was a lot of beer trash, if there were a lot of public drunkenness/pubic urination/underage drinking violations, we may be in for another year of raucous partying.
If it was calm, perhaps all the scolding, all the ugly statistics and incidents associated with binge drinking have had a sobering effect. Let us hope so.
Last spring, I drew encouragement from the looks on the faces of the women in my class as they listened to the “This American Life” program devoted to the drinking culture at Penn State. When host Ira Glass noted that female fraternity party attendees were dressed like cocktail waitresses at a strip club, the thought balloons above their heads said, “Wow, is that what we look like?” I don’t think they had ever thought about how they were perceived by others. They seemed embarrassed.
The other question before us is whether, absent an early tragedy like the drinking-related death of freshman Joey Dado last September, the university and the community will be reactive or proactive as regards the culture of drinking unto sickness.
I vote proactive. Some months back I suggested that a delegation of neighbors pay a friendly visit to each of the fraternity houses at the start of the academic year to make the following simple point: This is a neighborhood and not some sort of free zone where one can make as much noise as one likes and use the adjacent yards and streets and alleyways as latrines.
I still think such visits are a good idea because trust me, it doesn’t occur to the Woo people that they live in a neighborhood and are therefore expected to be neighborly, just as it doesn’t occur to the women who attend their parties that they look like cocktail waitresses at a strip club.
