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Dinner at a frat house? I didn't expect much, least of all when I was told the "entertainment" would involve presentations of "things the Brothers are working on." I imagined lab reports, summaries of problems sets, maybe a quick lesson in Japanese or Russian. The first surprise was that the food was more than palatable – "London broil" that wasn't Maison Robert but wasn't Wendy's, either. Then we moved into the "living room" for the show.
Out of pure ego I had brought along some of "what I was working on," which happened to be a manuscript of a book of poems. I just hoped it wouldn't put the Brothers to sleep. But imagine my surprise when the members started presenting their wares. First up was a fellow doing quite a creditable job on a scene from Henry IV, Part I. He was far too young and far too lean for Falstaff, but as Hal he was about right physically. His "vocal equipment" wasn't Old Vic, but then again he spoke clearly and with feeling. He was followed by a fellow reciting – no text before him, as a prompt, mind you – an extended passage from On the Road. Then poetry – Dickinson, some of those surprising, near-Elizabethan love poems of cummings's, and one of Shakespeare's sonnets. The first "original" piece was a song – which to be frank owed a lot to Dylan, but good, gritty Dylan: there are surely worse indebtednesses. Another fellow finally brought us into the cyberworld, by way of a part of a novel all of whose characters are in software at Microsoft. But we recovered, if not sanity, then at least something like it, with zen meditations, and "the wisdom of baseball."
I have, in my time, been in attendance at gatherings of some of Harvard's most self-consciously (not to say self-importantly) "literary" enterprises. But, to my astonishment, this was the equal of those affairs. And the location of the fraternity? MIT, of course. You know all about MIT fraternities, don't you? They drink too much, throw beer cans at police cars, ply underage Wellesley coeds with booze, and just generally model their behavior on Animal House. Well, guess what? Not all of them, and not all the time.
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