Some Notes on Student Life

STUDENT LIFE INTERHOUSE DANCE It comes but once a year which is probably just as well It's only a one-night stand, but it takes more like a thousand and one nights' work to get ready for the annual Interhouse Dance as witness a few of the feverish preparations pictured on this page. 22 IF THE SIZE OF the crowd was any indication, the annual Interhouse Dance in the student houses and Throop Club last month was a resounding success. usual, the decorations remained the outstanding attraction during the earlier part of the evening. Blacker managed to cram the pirate ship from Peter Pan into its court. With the lines of a modern garbage scow, the primeval pirate vessel took three weeks to build, but performed disappointingly during the festivities when the deck-intended as an extra dance floor— collapsed into the lagoon with 75 people on it. For-tunately, not a toe was dampened, but Blackerites were disgusted with the Los Angeles company that rented them the scaffolding which was supposed to hold up the deck. Characters from Walt Disney's Peter Pan, surrounded with greenery, decorated the lounge. At Dabney's Desert Oasis couples dodged hanging "tents" while negotiating the dance floor. In the mummy's crypt a bloody-looking punch flowed out of a dune-ridden desert with large quantities of sand- which is still being ground into the wooden floors in the houses. Captain Hook's pirate ship, moored in an artificial lagoon in the Blacker House patio, was fitted out with rum kegs, a live cannon, a telephone-pole mast, and--until it collapsed early in the evening-a dance floor. "But that's what I keep trying to make you understand -that the pi-meson disintegrates into a mu-meson and a neutrino." Fleming's Tropical Paradise was accessible only through narrow tunnels of particularly scratchy palm leaves, which impeded the flow of two-way traffic. Brilliant stars flashed in the ceiling all evening, reflected in the false wall of mirrors at the north end of the lounge. The mirrors, of course, appeared to make the room much larger, and as a result everyone tried to crowd in. The Cheshire Cat grinned evilly from his perch in the Ricketts lounge, and, although the Mad Hatter and the rest of Lewis Carroll's friends were present, Alice was not to be seen. The Jabberwocky flapped around grotesquely in a cavern. Over in Throop Club the stony silence of Egypt's pyramids was broken by the Eddie Charles band. Most Techmen and their dates filed silently by the mummies and skulls in the side crypts, or dropped in exhaustion into the chairs to be found in this macabre setting. The hangover from the dance has been obvious to all recent visitors to Tech. Piles of leaves, wood, sand; stones, telephone poles, chicken wire, cardboard and miscellaneous trash decorated the campus far into November. -Jim Grosby '53 23