Moneyline
THE FINANCIAL COMMITMENT A SISTER MUST MAKE TO HER sorority can be enormous. In fact, many girls cite this as one reason why candidates who wouldn’t be able to withstand the financial drain of sorority membership simply won’t be accepted to the sorority in the first place. Wealth becomes a prohibitive prerequisite. (At Syracuse, one Greek newspaper boasts that, as at many schools, “Social Greeks tend to be the wealthiest and most mobile segment of the SU student population, pledging a social life and bringing a large disposable income.”) When sororities evaluate candidates during rush, the rushees’ financial status, which sororities determine partly by assessing the rushees’ wardrobes and asking what their parents do for a living, plays a major role. If a sorority doesn’t believe that a girl will be able to pay sorority dues—which can range from a few hundred dollars to $2,500 a semester—it’s not likely to accept her as a member. (Sabrina had made clear to the sisters that she would take on enough hours waitressing to afford her dues.) Sorority dues cover the costs of sorority functions as well as fees paid to the campus Panhellenic association and the chapter’s national office.
Sorority chapters also impose fines on members who miss meetings or house events; Brooke’s Texas house fined its girls up to $50 if they let their grades slip, skipped sorority study hall, or missed activities such as decorating the Homecoming float. The emphasis on finances can partly be explained away by the reality that sororities are run like businesses. Each campus chapter is expected to contribute a certain amount of money both to the national organization and to the national organization’s philanthropic cause.
Moreover, in certain houses, there is an image to uphold. State U’s Alpha Rho was not so homogeneous that any sister who didn’t conform to certain fashion standards was necessarily shut out; Sabrina wasn’t shunned because she couldn’t afford the Louis Vuitton bags that her sisters clutched. But once as we walked from a restaurant to her house, passing a pack of designer-clad sorority girls giggling loudly, Sabrina said quietly to me, “Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one who’s not wealthy.” She wasn’t bitter about the stark line between her and her sisters, though I occasionally caught her wondering what might have been had money not played such a large role in these girls’ lives. “It’s natural that people gravitate toward people more like them, and I’m not a lot like them. I can’t buy a new Formal dress every semester,” she said. Sometimes Sabrina tried to blend in: she’d see her sisters carelessly spending money at malls and bars and convince herself that since everyone else was splurging she would, too. But she always ended up regretting her indulgence and secretly returning the items later.
Obligation
OCTOBER 11
VICKI’S IM AWAY MESSAGE
my life has officially been taken over
VICKI AND OLIVIA WERE SHOPPING IN THE CITY WHEN their Beta Pi sister Ashleigh, a sweet though oversensitive girl who tended to wear hot pink, called to warn them. Tonight was Dance Marathon—a popular nationwide fund-raiser—but many of the sisters who were supposed to represent Beta Pi had left for the weekend for a fraternity semiformal at a lakeside resort and waterpark. As a result, the Beta Pi president was calling the remaining sisters to assign times to dance throughout the night in a hotel ballroom. “If you see a strange number on your cell,” Ashleigh told Vicki, “don’t answer it. The only sister she’s excusing from Dance Marathon is Laura-Ann because she has major period cramps.”
Vicki groaned. The last thing she needed was another last-minute Beta Pi commitment. If she had been told ahead of time that the sorority needed her to dance that night, she would have done it because she knew the money raised was for a good cause: a neonatal care unit at a local hospital. But now? Forget it. Of all of the inane sorority rules Vicki was expected to follow, she couldn’t see why she should have to prioritize last-minute dancing in the middle of the night.
Vicki was afraid to go back to the house, where the sisters might see them, but the girls had to drop off their things and shower and change before going out that night. They parked a few blocks away, where Olivia’s car would not be noticed, spit-wiped Olivia’s wrists free of her telltale perfume, and sneaked inside the back door. When they heard people talking on the main staircase, Olivia quickly led Vicki up the back stairs, the girls stifling their laughter as they managed to slip unseen into their room. Once inside—relieved that Morgan and Laura-Ann, their roommates, weren’t there—they didn’t turn on the lights and play music as they usually did when they were getting ready to go out. Instead, they whispered and tiptoed back and forth between closets as they arranged their clothes for the night. “We’re, like, so shady!” Vicki murmured giddily.
Vicki and Olivia peeked out of the room to see if anyone was around and, when the hall was empty, sprinted in their towels and shower shoes to the bathroom. While showering, they kept their towels with them inside the stalls so other sisters couldn’t identify them. As they crept back to their room they heard voices complaining downstairs. “There are girls hiding in their rooms upstairs so they don’t have to dance, and that’s not fair.” Vicki and Olivia looked at each other wide-eyed and, muffling their laughter, shimmied back into their room. While Olivia applied her usual thick coat of eyeliner, the two were plotting how to escape the house unnoticed when Olivia’s cell phone rang—its distinctive tune, to Pink’s “Get the Party Started,” easily recognizable to the sisters down the hall. With a sigh, Olivia picked up to hear the Beta Pi president asking her to come downstairs. The sisters who had been in the house that afternoon while Olivia and Vicki were shopping had grabbed the most convenient dance shifts: 5–7 p.m. or 7–10 p.m. The only ones left for Vicki and Olivia, the president told them, were 2–5 a.m. or 5–9 a.m.
“Oh. My. God. Just because we weren’t here doesn’t mean we should get stuck with the worst shift,” Olivia fumed. Vicki slouched quietly by her side.
“There’s nothing we can do about it,” the president said.
“It’s not our fault the fund-raising chair didn’t do her job.” The president relented and allowed Olivia and Vicki to split the 5–9 a.m. shift.
After joining Olivia at a bar to drown their frustration in Amaretto Sours, Vicki managed about an hour of sleep that night before she had to get to the ballroom. Although each sorority was required to have girls dancing at all times, sisters could get away with standing and making mild gestures, if necessary. Vicki spent her shift folded in a corner for two hours, hiding behind her wavy blond bangs and grumbling to herself about the pointlessness of being there as she waited for Olivia to relieve her. She couldn’t even spend the time talking to her friends back home because they didn’t stay up that late. That night the sororities that participated in Dance Marathon raised tens of thousands of dollars.
Pancake Philanthropy
DANCE MARATHON, A COMMON GREEK FUND-RAISER, underscores a sentiment I observed in many sorority houses: community service, widely publicized as a cornerstone of sorority life, often revolves more around donations than actual service. The level of commitment to community service varies widely by the chapter. Some chapters do nothing. Only on occasion did I come across a sorority that in fact exhibited a regular commitment to service rather than philanthropy, such as the groups that signed up for “Adopt-a-Grandmother” at a local senior center, cleaned up trash around a riverbed, tutored, or visited a children’s hospital to give young female patients manicures and accessories to make each feel like a “Queen for a Day.” Many chapters, however, merely profess a commitment to community service, spending no more than an hour a semester making and distributing arts and crafts or holding an annual party and donating the proceeds.
Because what I’ll call “event philanthropy”—a once-a-semester or yearly function for charity, like Dance Marathon—is so popular, I spent an October evening with a West Coast university Tri-Delt house to observe the annual traditional fund-raiser of many Tri-Delt chapters: a middle-of-the-night, all-you-can-eat pancake buffet party.
It was 12:30 and the Tri-Delt house was packed. After paying the $10 cover and getting the Tri-Delt triangle drawn on my hand in permanent marker to prove I had paid, I wove my way through the students, around the all-male a cappella group serenading a pack of swooning sisters wearing identical T-shirts designed for the party, and past a table heaped high with small pancakes, slices of coffee cake, and Krispy Kremes. Many of the Tri-Delt sisters were taking shifts in a satellite house, where they were frantically flipping pancakes and rushing them back to the Tri-Delt house.
Munching on a chocolate chip pancake, I spotted Riley, a junior who had agreed to let me shadow her for the evening of philanthropy (she told her sisters I was “a friend from home”). Riley had the 1–2 a.m. pancake-making shift, so we headed to a satellite house where Tri-Delts were carelessly flipping pancakes that were oddly shaped, blackened, and occasionally oozing. Fifteen sisters were crowded around a stove, sliding in oil spills and batter droppings while attempting to maneuver a pan on every burner. Having run out of key ingredients like milk, the girls were tossing whatever was handy into the pancake batter. A few girls carried a tray of pancakes out the fire door as they dashed to the Tri-Delt house. “These pancakes are horrendous,” Riley said. “But the people at the party will eat them anyway.”
The girls chatted loudly as they neglected the pancakes. Philanthropy didn’t enter the conversation, which revolved around boys, weddings, other sisters, and Dawson’s Creek. One sister danced in from another room wearing a teased wig. The other girls doubled over in hysterics.
“We’re going to be white trash for Halloween,” Riley explained to me.
When I returned to the party at the on-campus Tri-Delt house, most of the crowd was crammed either at the pancake table or in front of a student cover band, where partygoers bounced to the music and watched the Tri-Delt sisters dancing on the furniture. Just before 2 a.m., the Tri-Delts had sent sisters into the bars to advertise the pancake buffet. The tactic worked—the crowd was much thicker now that students from the bars and other parties had filtered in. Edging toward the door, I saw Riley arriving from the satellite house, holding a pancake tray over her head. As I shifted to make room for her, she caught my eye and grinned. “They’re all alcohol now!” she yelled over the din to me as she squeezed by. “Don’t eat the pancakes!”
By the end of the night the Tri-Delts would tally a few thousand dollars—the only philanthropic activity they would perform all year.
Going Out Greek-Style
OCTOBER 16
AMY’S IM AWAY MESSAGE
trasjhed andq goin to bedj :-P
THE DAY OF THE CRUSH PARTY, THE FIRST BIG GREEK social event of the year, Amy and Caitlin spent a few hours “doing a fashion show” for each other, trying on dozens of clothes—their own and each other’s—and, in particular, trying to figure out which bras went best with which shirts. “Man, I love living with girls,” Caitlin remarked to no one in particular, as she tightened a push-up bra she found in the midst of a pile of Amy’s lacy lingerie on the floor. “We never would have done this in the dorms.”
Crush Parties at State U were themed parties to which each Greek partygoer could invite five “crushes”; this party’s theme was “Fire and Ice.” The sororities and fraternities that sponsored the event rented out a bar or club and charged students for tickets to get in. Because it was still early in the year, Amy and Caitlin had decided to invite friends, rather than crushes, and arranged to meet them at the bar.
As Amy waited for Caitlin to get ready, she started to pre-game. Before nearly every Greek event, Alpha Rho sisters, like many sororities nationwide, would pre-game—that is, get a buzz going before the actual activity started, sometimes with their house, sometimes with a fraternity. Pre-gaming was like tailgating a party. This way they saved time, since they didn’t have to spend the first hour of an event getting drunk (having arrived already inebriated), and money, because they wouldn’t have to pay for too many additional drinks at overpriced bar costs. Tonight the pre-game beverage of choice was a jug of wine that someone had left in the kitchen.
A couple of sisters stopped by the suite when Amy was on her third glass of wine. “What are you drinking?” one asked.
“Grape wine,” Amy said cheerfully. “Y’all want some?”
“What do you mean, grape wine?”
“It’s grape!”
“You dumbass,” Caitlin said from the bathroom, “what other kind of wine is there?”
“Um,” Amy paused. “There’s red . . . there’s white . . .”
“They’re all grape. That’s where wine comes from. How much have you had, anyway?”
“But it says it on the bottle—grape wine!”
The girls investigated. The bottom of the label did indeed say, “100% grape wine.”
“Ha!” Amy laughed and the sisters couldn’t help but smile—Amy’s laugh was infectious. Amy launched brightly into an Alpha Rho fight song and proceeded to belt out Alpha Rho tunes for five minutes.
Amy had no idea what her status was with Spencer, the Mu Zeta Nu brother whom she had nearly slept with in August. She still hoped for a relationship with him, but she hadn’t seen him outside of the few times he accepted her regular invitations to cook dinner for him. She knew he wouldn’t be at the Crush Party because he had to study for an early midterm, but just in case, she had done an extra hour on the StairMaster that afternoon. Amy wondered how many other “mishaps” she would run into. Amy had made an effort to remain friendly to all of the boys with whom she had had dalliances during sophomore year, an active year for her—and even to those whom she had turned down. She endured polite small talk with a boy her sisters called “Ugly Dork,” who stalked Amy and repeatedly told her they were meant to be together. While the other Alpha Rhos mocked him, Amy would deftly deflect his overtures with her southern charm before continuing on her way.
But while the Alpha Rhos couldn’t fathom why Amy “wasted breath” on Ugly Dork, they were absolutely mystified by her refusal to be rude to the fraternity brother who had date-raped her during her sophomore year Greek Week. Two nights after she had drunkenly fooled around with Nathan, a Mu Zeta Nu brother, Nathan had spiked Amy’s drink at a party so he could sleep with her. Amy woke up the next morning, realized the ceiling didn’t look familiar, rolled over, saw Nathan lying in his bed next to her, looked back at the ceiling, looked down, saw she was naked, and yelled “Oh Lord!” before dashing out of the room, clothes in hand. Amy was devastated that she had been date-raped and withdrew to her room for days. When she told her gay friend Jake what had happened, he wanted to confront Nathan, but Amy wouldn’t let him say anything because she didn’t want to “rock the MuNu brotherhood boat.” When Amy’s close friend Greg asked her why she was missing Greek Week, she told him, crying hysterically, why she felt degraded and taken advantage of.
Greg, unlike Jake, looked perplexed. “What do you want me to do? He’s my fraternity brother.”
FINALLY, CAITLIN EMERGED, WEARING A MIDRIFF-baring halter top that matched her azure eyes, tight white pants, and one of Amy’s gold butterfly clips at the top of her ponytail. The girls then produced small Alpha Rho thermoses and filled them with Bacardi rum.
“Hey, we’re Alpha-holics,” Caitlin smirked as they slipped the thermoses into their dressy handbags. At eleven, they left the house, an hour later than they had planned. They walked a block before Amy, rummaging through her purse for breath mints, remembered she had left the Crush Party tickets on her bed. Caitlin made fun of her all the way back home, until she realized she had left her ID on her desk.
It was a breezy night in the low seventies, typical October weather for State U. As they waited for the bar to open, dozens of girls huddled in circles, divided according to sorority and, within those groups, by pledge class. Most of the girls were drunk by now (pre-gaming for an hour would have that effect). Amy and Caitlin headed straight for the Alpha Rho circle in the middle of the lawn. Squeals and hugs ensued.
A
tall, thin blonde in Amy’s pledge class lurched toward them, catching her arms around Amy’s neck as she fell. “So great to see you!” Her exaggeratedly drunken expression suddenly drooped into stern concentration. “But,” she spoke haughtily now, “we get to go in first, because we’ve been waiting so much longer than you.”
The herd of girls jostled their way toward the door of a club near campus. They spotted the two policemen checking IDs and swiftly rearranged their purses and their hair—shoving the thermoses down underneath their cosmetics and pulling their hair back to best resemble the photos of the other people on their IDs. Tonight Amy was a twenty-three-year-old from Montana and Caitlin was a twenty-one-year-old from Maine. The officer glanced at the birth date on Amy’s ID and snorted. “Ri-ight,” he said, flicking the ID back to her as he nonetheless stepped aside so she could continue into the bar. “Bring a better one next time.” Amy and Caitlin laughed and continued inside.
By eleven-thirty, the crowd was still mostly girls. The fraternities knew the sororities’ routine: pre-game, arrive, drink some more, dance—so they preferred to get to Greek events later, when the girls were at their most inebriated. Amy and Caitlin headed to the bar, where Amy paid for their drinks: a Cosmopolitan for Amy, a Jim Beam and Coke for Caitlin. After a few sips, they poured the rum from their thermoses into their cups. Amy made a face after trying her new concoction, then downed the drink.
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