Pledged (29 page)

“But you already approved these,” Sabrina argued when she tried to wear them again on skit night.

“They saw you in those pants last night,” Elaine said.

“No one cares.”

“We want to make a good impression,” Elaine said. She had even gone so far as to vacuum every bedroom in the house and hang teal and jade streamers above Sabrina’s bed because Sabrina didn’t display the Alpha Rho colors.

Sabrina didn’t have the time or the patience for rush this year. On top of her usual waitressing schedule and course load, she had to deal with the constant complaints of her new bed neighbor, who had been forced upstairs to the Penthouse when Charlotte took her double room, and she was also busy struggling to keep Mike interested in their relationship. She had seen him once before rush started (there was no time once rush began), but the date hadn’t gone well. As they watched a movie, she had asked him why he was so quiet.

“I feel like a dirty old man,” he said.

“Is that why you seem so distant?”

“Yes. I feel more like your big brother than your boyfriend.”

“Mike, I know we’re at two different points in our lives, but it won’t always be that way,” Sabrina reassured him.

After the skit parties, the Alpha Rhos gathered in the basement for the most important vote of the week. The recruits who made it through this round of cuts would be invited to Preference Night. One by one, Elaine would put up a photo of each recruit on a slide projector screen, call out the recruit’s name, give the sisterhood the chance to discuss her, if necessary, and then call for the Alpha Rhos to vote by holding up either a green card or a red card. After they had gone through the entire list, each sister would rank each of the girls who had accumulated more greens than reds.

Sabrina knew it was going to be a long night when sisters requested 2-2-1s for each of the first five recruits. The rush adviser had suggested that the girls make up their minds based on how the recruits would contribute to Alpha Rho. But the sisters grew weary and frustrated as one 2-2-1 after another was called, and the adviser spent the meeting yelling at the sisters for talking out of turn and having side conversations (they were supposed to remain quiet so as not to influence other people’s decisions). The older sisters, meanwhile, were chiding the younger ones for not giving specific details about their conversations.

“I really hated this girl. I hope she doesn’t come back,” one sophomore said.

“I went to high school with that one. I don’t want to be her sister,” said another.

“Really, I had a great conversation with her,” another offered. “She’s from Highland Park.”

Elaine practically exploded. “You need to tell me how she will contribute,” she shouted. “It doesn’t mean anything if she’s from Highland Park, because she could live in the maid’s quarters and not have the money for dues. You need to tell me more.”

Sabrina bristled. It wasn’t easy to get financial details out of recruits in the first place, but Sabrina didn’t think they should be basing their decisions on financial considerations at all. “That sounds Big Brother. Why do you care? That’s not what the process is all about,” she said. “How would you find out that kind of specific financial information, anyway?”

“You can ask if the parents are financially supportive,” Elaine said.

“But the parents could be doctors and still not want to pay for dues,” Sabrina said.

During the next 2-2-1, the sisters tried to get more specific.

“She was wearing a Gucci sweater.”

“She had white trash friends.”

“She had a Kate Spade bag.”

Sabrina remained quiet for the rest of the meeting. She, Caitlin, and Amy had already gone over how they were going to vote. If one of the trio hadn’t met a recruit, she simply trusted the others’ judgment and followed their lead. The meeting lasted until four in the morning.

Preference Night

JANUARY 16

AMY’S IM AWAY MESSAGE

recruiting some fabulous new Alpha Rhos!

ON THURSDAY MORNING, ELAINE CIRCULATED A SIGN-UP
sheet with the
remaining candidates’ names. She instructed the sisters to write their names next to up to three of their rush crushes—the girls they most wanted to “pref,” or lead around on Preference Night. When she noticed that no one had signed up to pref Traci, Amy enthusiastically marked down her name. Unlike the other rush parties, during the two Pref rounds, or parties, each rushee would be assigned to a sister, one-on-one, for the entire hour and a half. But, like the other rush parties, Pref was completely choreographed before it started.

That night at Pref practice, before the rushees arrived, the sisters rehearsed the ceremony, their Pref songs, and the choreographed movements and positioning that would take them and their recruits around the house in an orderly fashion. About ten minutes before the first party, Elaine handed each girl a card that said whom she was preffing each round and the room in which she was supposed to talk to the recruit. Immediately Elaine was mobbed by irate sisters. While she had assigned some girls to pref both rounds, she had arranged it so that others wouldn’t pref at all. Elaine, like recruitment chairs at other houses, was attempting to influence the rushees by displaying the most beautiful and charming girls in the house as much as possible while hiding the less attractive girls by putting them on kitchen duty. Amy, figuring that although she was attractive, she hadn’t bothered to charm Elaine, didn’t mind that she was on kitchen and waitress duty for one of the parties, but she was furious that another sister had been assigned to pref Traci while she hadn’t been given anyone to pref.

Because the other sister was one of the best-looking girls in the house, Elaine assumed that meant she was great at preffing, and had assigned her to pref both rounds. But the sister actually hated rush because she was incredibly shy.

Amy approached the sister. “We can just switch for that round,” Amy said.

“I’d love to, but they’re not letting us,” the sister replied.

Amy went to talk to Elaine but stopped short when she saw Whitney screaming at her. “I’m a senior and this is my last Preference ceremony so I should get to pref!” Whitney was yelling. “I’m skipping my brother’s birthday party for this!”

Elaine was bawling so hard she couldn’t talk.

“There has to be one sister who will give her Pref to me. Other girls got two and I got none!” Whitney screamed. Getting no reaction from Elaine other than sobs, Whitney turned and stalked out of the house. “This is ridiculous. I’m going home!”

Amy quickly deduced that this wasn’t the best time to approach Elaine. Instead, she found the rush adviser. “I love this girl and she’s one of my closest friends. I really want to pref her and the assigned sister doesn’t. I don’t want to upset Elaine.”

“That’s fine,” the adviser said. “Go ahead and switch.”

After the first Pref ceremony, while the recruits and the sisters chatted softly in the TV and dining rooms, Amy, on waitress duty, tottered around on her Manolos every ten minutes asking girls if they wanted a drink. Her job wasn’t taxing; sisters knew they weren’t supposed to ask for a drink unless their assigned recruit asked first, and the rushees were too nervous to ask for anything. So Amy spent most of the round in the kitchen, listening to the complaints of the sisters whom Elaine had stuck in the kitchen for both rounds.

The sisters had been told they weren’t allowed to eat from any of the lavish displays of food unless they were preffing a recruit and the recruit was eating, too. Amy routinely peeked out of the kitchen to see the sushi rolls, cheese platters, berry tarts, and fudge squares sitting untouched because the rushees were too edgy to eat. Amy waited for an opportune moment, then glided by one of the tables, quickly grabbed a handful of fudge squares, and, palming her snack, circled to the guest bedroom to eat them.

A recruit on her way to the bathroom saw Amy stuffing a piece of fudge in her mouth and sniffed. “Do you know how many calories are in that?” the recruit warned. “I mean, you’re practically eating a cube of fat!” Amy made sure to remember the recruit’s name to vote against her.

When it was time for the final Pref party, Amy went outside at the prescribed time, found an excited Traci, handed her a white rose, and said, “I am especially happy to invite Traci King to be my special guest this evening at Alpha Rho.” Traci dropped her purse and her wrap in the pile in the entry hall. Rush rules forbade recruits from taking anything with them—even so much as a cookie—when they left a house so that sisters couldn’t bribe them with gifts. Rushees had to leave their purses and any outerwear in the hallway to prevent them from hiding any offerings. The rushees, many in short designer skirts and knee-high boots and carrying designer bags, quietly and reverently followed the sisters downstairs to the chapter room, where the sisters who weren’t preffing stood in a semicircle facing a large bouquet of pansies and sang until all of the recruits arrived.

Elaine stood in the middle of the semicircle, holding a candle in front of her face. (Amy, Sabrina, and Caitlin whispered to each other that Elaine’s seemingly glued-on fake smile made her look evil in the glow of the flame.) Charlotte distributed candles to every girl in the room as the Alpha Rhos sang their candle-passing song. She lit the candle held by the first sister, who used her candle to light the candle next to her, and so on around the room. Several sisters read lines from a poem about sisterhood. Then Charlotte and another senior gave emotional speeches about the meaning of Alpha Rho, as sisters around the room wept. The ceremony ended after the two sisters with the best voices in the house sang the Alpha Rho version of “Amazing Grace.” Amy watched Traci carefully.

Beth, a friend of Traci’s, had confided to Amy that Traci had initially been torn between Alpha Rho and Beta Pi, where two sisters who were close friends of hers were pressuring her to join. But Traci didn’t think she was “the right image” for Beta Pi, who were mostly blond, wealthy party girls. “She thinks the Alpha Rho girls are much more down to earth,” Beth had told Amy. “She says in Beta Pi it would be too hard to stay perfect all the time.” And now, at Pref, Amy could see that Traci was smitten with Alpha Rho.

After Pref Night, the girls had to fill out a form to rank the recruits who had attended their Pref parties. As the forms were passed out, some sisters were loudly campaigning: “If Mary’s in this house, I’ll kill myself!” “We want Janine—she’ll be the coolest sister ever!”

At five-thirty on Friday, after a short ceremony during which each Rho Chi revealed her sorority, the recruits, in sundresses and heels despite the grayest weather of the year, filed into the student center to receive their bids. Meanwhile, the sisters waited outside their houses, blasting music and dancing on the lawn. They wouldn’t know which recruits had made the cut until the new girls showed up at the house. Parents and students milled around with balloons and flowers. At six-thirty, the presidents of each sorority led their new pledges from the student center to the house. As they walked down the short path, the sisters cheered loudly and chanted from their lawns. Fraternity brothers bellowed and held up signs with numbers rating the attractiveness of each new pledge who passed by.

When the pledges reached Alpha Rho, the sisters—many of them drunk—hugged them and took pictures. They gave the pledges the same Bid Day jerseys the sisters wore: pink tank tops with glittered cursive script reading “There are two kinds of women in this world: Alpha Rhos, and those who wish they were.” When they spotted her beaming in her new Alpha Rho jersey, Amy and Sabrina raced to hug Traci and told her how excited they were that she would be their sister.

After an hour of mingling, the Alpha Rhos led the pledges inside the house for a “cookie buffet”: hundreds of sugar cookies arranged in the shape of the Alpha Rho swan. As they sat around the dining room, each pledge and sister said her name and told a funny story about herself. The Alpha Rho sisters looked around at each other and smiled. They had filled their quota with girls from the top half of their bid list. Now it remained to be seen how the new sisterhood would turn out.

Membership Selection

RUSH HAS BECOME SO COMPETITIVE AND ELABORATE A
process that determined mothers have taken to hiring “rush consultants” to groom their daughters so they will be accepted by their desired sorority. These consultants, who have sprung up in private companies not affiliated or endorsed by the National Panhellenic Conference, are a cross between beauty pageant coaches and college preparatory service counselors, training a rushee on everything from attitude to outerwear.

Furthermore, some sorority alumnae have published guidebooks to help lead aspirants through the process.
Ready for Rush: The Must-Have Manual for Sorority Rushees!
, the 1999 guide, includes an informative rush calendar that suggests that six to twelve months before rush begins, a sorority hopeful should:

• List your honors, achievements, and activities. If your fact sheet or résumé is not impressive, get involved now! . . .

• Start saving money for your Rush wardrobe.

• Get in shape. Establish an exercise program so you will look and feel your best when it comes time to leave for school.

Three months before rush begins:

• Have a flattering photograph of yourself made.

• Read a good etiquette book to brush up on your manners.

• Order personal tea cards.

One month before rush:

• Go on your Rush shopping spree . . .

• See a few current movies, which can serve as great conversation topics.

• Schedule an appointment at a beauty salon for two weeks before Rush begins.

Two weeks before rush:

• Have a dress rehearsal to try on all of your outfits for each round of parties. Make sure everything is altered appropriately and that you have the right lingerie and accessories for each ensemble.

• Go on a last minute shopping spree for things you need.

• Have your hair cut and highlighted if necessary. [The authors later recommend a “blunt,” “crisp” cut and explain, “A good colorist can weave in hues of soft golds and gentle reds. If it takes the colorist three hours, it’s well worth it.”]