Well folks, it’s that time of year again. Time for the Harvard-Yale game. Oops, Freudian slip, rather, the Yale-Harvard Game (We’re better. No really, even the Princeton Review and the USA Today College Guide say so. Who are we kidding? We’re totally the Michelle Kwan to Harvard’s Sarah Hughes — but she chose to go to Yale instead!)
With all this talk of The Game (is this some kind of PC, post-modern gender non-specific pronoun equivalent?), one must step back and look at the reasons why The Game is so pivotal.
Professors in the English Department would most likely say The Game draws from Homerian poetry and Judeo-Christian philosophy. The Game is no longer just a game. It transcends time and space, launching itself into a moral plateau of good versus evil.
Sure, either that or some B.S. about “phallic symbols” and “violent sexual imagery.” You can save that one for your next section.
But we all know the real reason why The Game is so important. Knock. Knock. Who’s there? It’s me, that shitty wine with the orange kangaroo on the bottle. Enough said.
You’re a “rock star” (a.k.a. alcoholic) and the game means free alcohol! Sadly, Harvard has decided to put our livers on LOCKDOWN. But before you let that ruin your spirits, let me tell you an uplifting, inspirational tale about my first Harvard-Yale game:
It was a crisp autumn afternoon. The brisk west wind whipped through the dry maple leaves as the sun set in a fiery orange blaze. The Game had officially ended and Yale had officially lost. As I was exiting Harvard Stadium, amidst a throng of several thousand people, my ethnic counselor fell to the ground with a thud in front of me, a fitting finale to her drunken cha-cha-slide.
Ever the southern gentleman, I proceeded to walk her to where she was staying (about 15 minutes away on the other side of the Charles River). As we were crossing the picturesque bridge spanning the Charles, the wind tussling her shiny mahogany locks, she looked me straight in the face.
“Thanqks fur bein’ such a gennelman. Wait, hold on, whoa — you’re gay! I knew it, I know it, you’ve got the gay,” she said.
That’s how I officially came out. Forget the Windex; my glass closet had just shattered.
At that same moment, she started to vomit — ewwwwww! Then my senior mentor passed out on a couch with her head in a plastic bag. Think of that horror story when you’re slumming it at the Faneuil Hall Pub Crawl.
In addition to resident winos, there are the folks who value The Game for the potential sketchy hookup opportunities. I heard a rumor that the facebook stalkers anonymous will be having an organizational meeting at corner of skank and ho in Cambridge. Maybe you’re a member and don’t even know it! If you’ve found that special someone on thefacebook.com, copied their AIM screen name and pasted it into your buddy-list to get a better idea of their “personality,” you’re in the stalker.net club.
If you’ve found their dorm address and cell phone number in their profile and plan on running into said crush in their entryway to spark up a conversation about how much you love “Fast Food Nation” and “Family Guy” (which you saw in their facebook profile), you’re a VIP member. Watch out Cantabs, you’ve been rendered vulnerable by your own — I bet the Harvard students who came up with thefacebook.com were banking on this sketchy-stalker factor, tsk, tsk, tsk.
Others choose to take a more sociological approach to The Game. Peter Cook ’05 likes to looks at the experience with Fitzgerald-esque perspective.
“The Harvard-Yale game is always a highlight of the year — when else does the privileged Yale student catch a glimpse of how the other half lives?” observed the astute Cook.
I think Yalies can agree with Mr. Cook. We must approach Harvard like a complex anthropological study of indigenous peoples circa the “white man’s burden” epoch. Yalies will not only prove our intellectual, cultural and social superiority, we will win! (If we screw up and lose, at least you can say you saw the bistro table where Matt Damon does chemistry problem sets with Minnie Driver in “Good Will Hunting”).
Will Cornwell will be enjoying The Game from the corner of “skank” and “ho” in Cambridge while drinking “Yellow Tail” chardonnay (the wine with an orange kangaroo on the label.)