It's spring and love is in the air. The birds and the bees are making merry and you're in the prime of your life. You try to keep your mind on classes, but sure enough it shifts to thoughts of romance and the opposite sex.
If you're at Dartmouth and it's before 1972, you're out of luck. Unless you have an affinity for other men or the young women in the nearby high school, all the romantic energy pulsing through your veins will have to be taken out on the keg in a local frat's basement.
But wait, there is hope. Green Key Weekend!
Take a Friday off and invite a host of Smith and Holyoke women up to Hanover. Hell, bus them in. Party and have a good time all weekend long. Lie to them, telling them it's only 11:30 p.m. and they don't have to leave the basement yet. Try to get an address or a phone number or something before Sunday rolls around and you're stuck with the keg again.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the genesis of Green Key Weekend, for better or worse.
Strategically placed during the beautiful Hanover spring, it completes the Homecoming-Winter Carnival-Green Key trilogy, enabling students at women's colleges to be bused up once a term so that the men of Dartmouth don't go insane or die of sclerosis of the liver.
Dartmouth changed and suddenly the need to bus in women disappeared. Yet the trilogy remains. Still, Green Key is perhaps the most enjoyable and worthy of the College's traditions.
The weather is beautiful and the event is just after mid terms. During Winter Carnival the whole school is penned up in muddy, sweaty basements -- where, for those of us who wear glasses, it is also foggy -- drinking cheap beer and gazing at ice sculptures that decrease in quality every year.
Green Key, however, is one of the few times when students can try to relax and take the time to enjoy a Dartmouth spring that they will get to see fully only four times in their life.
In a sense, the character of Green Key Weekend is one of relaxation that isn't matched by other college events. In the fall, Homecoming is staged for the benefit of watching freshmen try to touch fire. The winter is dismal and the carnival is an attempt to escape that. Green Key is different in that it gives us the chance to enjoy what the College has to offer naturally. You don't need to ski to appreciate it, nor do you have to like to abuse freshmen and get riled up about football. You just have to know how to take a few days off and relax.
So, if you're thinking about locking yourself up in your room and studying for the better part of the weekend, think again. Profound people and hard workers only get ulcers and either die early or kill themselves. Besides, many a student has been scholastically delinquent all Green Key Weekend and still gone on to be successful and happy.
Instead, get out there. Check out some of the bands. Have a barbecue. Dodge the campus po' as you have a few beers on a lawn. Loaf. It's okay. Nobody will tell, your parents won't find out and you'll only get to do it here in Hanover a few more times in your life.
Besides, maybe if you're lucky, you'll find that special person and they won't have to take the bus to see you.
committment to broad service.
