COLUMN: Penn's dirty little secrets

From Ariel Horn's, "Candy from a Stranger," Fall '00 From Ariel Horn's, "Candy from a Stranger," Fall '00At Penn, there are no safety problems whatsoever. There's no wind tunnel in Superblock. The food is really delicious California-style gourmet in all the dining halls. And buxom Swedish blondes deliver breakfast in bed daily to all freshmen men. They always wear leather miniskirts and stiletto heels. First, people actually do get mugged at Penn. Second, the wind tunnel in Superblock can rip contact lenses off of eyeballs. Third, the food at the dining halls consists of fries, pizza and wraps. And fourth, those Swedish girls aren't Swedish. Hell, they're not even girls. They're Wharton guys who live in Hill House and want to make some extra cash by bringing eggs to a couple of kids too lazy to get their own Cap'n Crunch in the morning. And chances are, these Wharton guys never wear leather miniskirts or stilettos. As doe-eyed pre-frosh, we visit Penn and other colleges on sunny April days and see students lounging on the Green (or Green-equivalent) in bikinis, playing the guitar and enjoying the weather. We receive catalogs about how Fill-in-the-Blank University is superior to all other schools. Pictures of multi-racial groups of friends from exotic international locales cavort around a pile of Nietzsche books in the library early on Sunday mornings. Professors casually sit on stoops of impressive-looking historic buildings, chuckling with students about politics. In the idyllic world of catalogs, it is always a sunny, happy day in a multicultural world where the biggest problem is that there's "not enough time in the day." There are no rainy days, no bad grades, no ethnically homogenous groups of friends. After all, we are the world. Reading brochures like these makes me want to wretch. With three older siblings, I had seen more than my share of crowd-pleaser college brochures before I ever filled out my first application. All I wanted was for someone to tell it like it is. Having been rejected as a tour guide -- not once, but twice -- I realized I would never have my chance to be that beacon of light. This idea of "the real guide to Penn" seemed only like an elusive dream to me -- until the day that I was selected to be one of the Penn students on the new video brochure Penn sends to potential applicants. Suddenly, I had the doe-eyed freshmen looking at me, begging me to tell them all that I could about Penn, imploring me to bestow them with my love and knowledge of Penn. I laughed a long, loud, sinister Montgomery Burns laugh and began to scheme. I envisioned a video montage in which I tell pre-frosh about living in "Ghetto Quad," seeing mice scurry across the floor on a daily basis in the cellar of the Fine Arts Library and my brief, but dramatic, stint with food poisoning from the dining hall. My eyes lit up with anticipation like broken emergency blue-light phones twinkling on Locust Walk. My chance at a "real guide to Penn" had arrived; I had been delivered. But as I began to speak with the company responsible for the video, I found myself lying. Or perhaps not lying so much as concealing the truth. Or worse yet, not concealing the truth, but realizing that "the way it is" is more positive than it is negative. For a cynic like myself, it was a harsh, harsh blow. My plans of brochure destruction were foiled. The world would have to live with the optimistic reality. Suddenly, the little rats in the library cellar who had hoped to achieve fame and fortune of Stuart Little proportions through their cameos in the video scurried out of my brain. I began talking, nay, ranting, about all the wonderful things about Penn as if I were a paid admissions officer. About how students have a border-line maniacal obsession with the school itself. About how students cheer for Penn at athletic events and really mean it. About how the first time you sing "The Red and Blue" -- with the complementary fascist arm motions -- you become entranced and proud all at once to be a member of such a bizarre cult. About how Penn isn't just another university -- it's a school with such a proud sense of identity that it's hard not to become involved. After my discussion with the video company, a sick thought entered my head. Maybe these brochures weren't lies at all; maybe they were genuine reflections on the community, if amplified and edited so as to look more appealing. So what if there are mice on campus and the school might have a little Bubonic plague outbreak here or there? So what if you can in fact eat uncooked meat on occasion at a dining hall? As soon as the Wharton guys start wearing miniskirts as they deliver breakfast in bed, this place will be damn near perfect.