Word: groupness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...chemistry fanatic who went to bed at 10 p.m. and got up at 6 a.m. (I never go to bed before 3 a.m. and I never get up before 10 a.m.), loved Celtic harp music and Gregorian chants, and belonged to the Spartacus Youth League, a group of rhetoric-spouting Trotskyites who have done much to discredit leftist politics. "Chemistry is a communist plot," she grinned. "It's had free radicals for years." Then she turned and cackled to herself--a trait that would persist throughout the year--and I got the hell out of there...
BACK AT THE ROOM, things went from bad to worse. Ellen had grown increasingly resentful of my large group of old cronies and had developed a habit of throwing the telephone at me and snarling, "It's for you." I wasn't getting any sleep because she plodded around so early in the morning. When I came in late, she would wake up and make me feel guilty. Ellen best expressed her hostility at the one and only party I threw, when, dressed in the orange pajamas, she sat outside our door glaring at everyone who entered...
After that, I stayed out of the room. I auditioned in vain for plays, trying to regain the cameraderie of my old theater group. But I got rejected again and again, and I finally took refuge in libraries, trying to study my way out of my depression and loneliness. In this morass, I clung to the one human and intellectual contact of that first semester: a freshman seminar on China taught by a man who honestly cared not only about our intellectual development, but also about our personal adjustments to Harvard...
None of these insights came quickly or easily, but I did make an important decision--to find a place for myself at Harvard, an activity or group that would rekindle my enthusiasm. In quick succession, I got into a play and found a boyfriend. The former was unquestionably the worst play I have ever seen or acted in, a pitiful attempt to set Antigone in a Latin American dictatorship. The bumbling, pretentious director and the egomaniacal cast ensured the failure of the production. The boyfriend was even worse, a deceptively suave manipulator who enjoyed hurting people and watching them squirm...
...prejudices. Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese could be wonderfully readable ("I don't deal in direct quotations," explained Talese, "I'm into what people think"). Meanwhile, Esquire's black-humor covers became intentionally outrageous, such as posing a benign Lieut. William Calley with a group of Asian children. The magazine's basic outlook, said Harold Hayes, one of its best editors, was to be "smart...