Young and Beautiful and Full of Life

Tonight I again had the privilege of playing the piano for the Preference Night parties at the Pi Beta Phi house.

These darling Pi Phis, all dressed in white and filled with excitement, wearing their arrow badges and filled with excitement for meeting more beautiful and smart young women who would become their new sorority sisters. And the rushees (I believe they're now called 'recruits'), wearing darling dresses and high high heels and perfect makeup and having polished their personalities before leaving their dorm rooms.

I wanted to tell them to enjoy life. They have no wrinkles. They have sex drives and have never experienced a hot flash. Lots of cleavage was displayed and none of it was crepey. Their breasts were all firm and located at the proper altitude. Gravity was still their friend.

I paused for a few moments and remembered the excitement of pledging Tyes, the only sorority at Florida Technological University. We were smart and powerful and talented and had the world on a string. Now we're aging, closing in on 60. We're still smart and powerful and talented. It's just slightly more scarey when we display our cleavage.

I hope that 35 years from now these darling dressed up and polished young ladies will remember how happy they were tonight. Their dreams may have changed, and life may not have turned out anything like they thought it would, but they'll still be darling.

Tonight's anecdote: Pi Phis are known as angels. For Preference Night, the house is set up with lots of white Christmas tree lights and fresh flowers. One room is the Secret Garden and then they move to the room set up as Pi Phi Heaven.

In past years the living room was set up as heaven. Because of the number of women going through rush, they needed to move the secret garden (bar tables and sparkling grape juice in champagne glasses) to the living room and "heaven" to the normal dining room. But they couldn't move the baby grand piano. So I just played soft background music on the grand in the living room. Then when they moved to "heaven" for the brief program, I used a keyboard that one of the girls had brought down from her room to accompany four young ladies singing "Angels Among Us."

This was an experience unlike anything in my life. This keyboard had some sort of short such that if I played the wrong combination of keys or played too loud or whatever, it would just turn itself off for a moment then spontaneously come back on. So my challenge, during the three times I played this piece, was to not play any triads or any thirds, to play keys as far away from each other as possible, in broken triads and arpeggios. I was able to get through each iteration with the keyboard only turning itself off two or three times.

I felt victorious. I had beaten the system!