Four score and seven years ago...
Yesterday I finally visted Gettysburg. To be honest I don't even know why I applied there - it was such a whim, I seriously said to myself, I should apply to more than two schools and the essays for this one don't look too bad. I got in and they gave me a nice scholarship but I didn't really care because I was pretty much ready to go to Penn State - lower tuition, big exciting campus, and I have family ten minutes away. It seemed like a really good deal. But then Gettysburg kept sending me nice things - like I'd get letters that had my name and address handwritten, or they'd send me pamphlets about programs that looked really interesting, and I got a letter from just about anyone who was in charge of anything saying hello and congratulations and we hope you come here! They invited me to a breakfast the morning of their accepted students' open house and I figured well, I should probably take a look at it, at least.
So I went. I got to eat breakfast with a senior psych major who told me all kinds of cool things about their psych program and then we sat through a few welcome speeches from various authority figures until they turned the podium over to a political science major who's going to grad school at Yale next year. And I thought whooooa, that's pretty ridiculous that they want me here. But then he gets up to the mic, this very football-player-looking guy, grins and says, "I'm not a morning person. But, I can be bought. See, they told me there'd be French toast sticks here this morning. And they didn't have French toast sticks at my Get Acquainted Day, so consider yourselves lucky."
And I thought, Gettysburg is cool people.
It was a rainy and cold day, which made the campus tour somewhat miserable, but I secretly love that kind of weather. It was the weirdest thing - Gettysburg was Promenade. The random poem I pulled out of nowhere, describing the sort of place I'd really never been, when I walked around the campus on a rainy gray day, I thought to myself, this is exactly what I was imagining when I wrote that.
Lonely walks down city blocks with time and an umbrella
Muddy puddles, busy gutters, wandering Cinderella
Pitter-patter, pigeons scatter
Children run and mothers chatter
Passing time with laundry lines and weary games to play
Ticking clocks in antique shops and tired coffeehouses
Well-tread routes and high-heeled boots and faded yellow blouses
Cobbled stone, walking home
Swept away in monochrome
Drifting in a raincloud town awash in shades of gray
Coffee-stirring, engines whirring, the tower chimes high noon
Jangling keys and chilling breeze, a melancholy tune
Clicking heels, spinning wheels
Pictures blink like movie reels
Standing in the still frame of a rainy city day
And yeah. It's pretty interesting - like the college feels like it fell out of that poem. I guess it fits because I imagined this picturesque little place and when I actually found such a place I positively loved it. It felt like it could be home.
Anyway, we ended up visiting the bookstore where I bought a Gettysburg scarf - that too felt like a Sign - and being on the wrong end of campus for the Psychology presentation that was about to start. So we wandered around and ended up at their campus theatre, which was this teeny little cobblestone building that looked more like a church than anything. But we went inside and accidentally stumbled upon the presentation for theatre majors, so we sat and listened to that instead. I loved what I heard - they have productions going all the time, it seems, and they claim that the theatre majors don't necessarily get the better roles. We heard from this absolutely flamboyant freshman theatre major who was like, "Oh my God it's like one big party! Like, auditions are right away during orientation and you walk in all nervous, you know, and everyone is sitting in here talking and reading lines and you're like oh my God wait, this is supposed to be an audition! Where's the competition? But it's so much fun right away, like it's one big party! Oh, but not that kind of party. Like one big, responsible party!" And I thought aaaaaaaaah, I love these people already.
The theatre was tiny, maybe a fourth the size of our auditorium, but they did a slideshow of recent productions and they transform their stage like we never do at Holy Name. It was just awesome. And I bet with a theatre that small they don't use microphones, which would be a big relief after four years of our rather unrelieble sound system. So if I go to Gettysburg, there'll be auditions waiting for me - and that was one of the weirdest things about high school ending, that my beloved play routine wouldn't start up next fall. But now it totally could. Oh, and they do Shakespeare on a regular basis, too.
There's also a freshman seminar called The Makings of the Great American Musical, where students learn the history of musicals and the makings of musicals, analyze musicals, and put on a show of scenes from different musicals. How amazing does that sound? At the same time there was another seminar about adolescence and stress, which looked immensely interesting and is actually relevant to my major. The more I walked around, the more I realized that I just want to study everything.
So now I don't know what to do, and I have a week to decide where to go. HELP.
So I went. I got to eat breakfast with a senior psych major who told me all kinds of cool things about their psych program and then we sat through a few welcome speeches from various authority figures until they turned the podium over to a political science major who's going to grad school at Yale next year. And I thought whooooa, that's pretty ridiculous that they want me here. But then he gets up to the mic, this very football-player-looking guy, grins and says, "I'm not a morning person. But, I can be bought. See, they told me there'd be French toast sticks here this morning. And they didn't have French toast sticks at my Get Acquainted Day, so consider yourselves lucky."
And I thought, Gettysburg is cool people.
It was a rainy and cold day, which made the campus tour somewhat miserable, but I secretly love that kind of weather. It was the weirdest thing - Gettysburg was Promenade. The random poem I pulled out of nowhere, describing the sort of place I'd really never been, when I walked around the campus on a rainy gray day, I thought to myself, this is exactly what I was imagining when I wrote that.
Lonely walks down city blocks with time and an umbrella
Muddy puddles, busy gutters, wandering Cinderella
Pitter-patter, pigeons scatter
Children run and mothers chatter
Passing time with laundry lines and weary games to play
Ticking clocks in antique shops and tired coffeehouses
Well-tread routes and high-heeled boots and faded yellow blouses
Cobbled stone, walking home
Swept away in monochrome
Drifting in a raincloud town awash in shades of gray
Coffee-stirring, engines whirring, the tower chimes high noon
Jangling keys and chilling breeze, a melancholy tune
Clicking heels, spinning wheels
Pictures blink like movie reels
Standing in the still frame of a rainy city day
And yeah. It's pretty interesting - like the college feels like it fell out of that poem. I guess it fits because I imagined this picturesque little place and when I actually found such a place I positively loved it. It felt like it could be home.
Anyway, we ended up visiting the bookstore where I bought a Gettysburg scarf - that too felt like a Sign - and being on the wrong end of campus for the Psychology presentation that was about to start. So we wandered around and ended up at their campus theatre, which was this teeny little cobblestone building that looked more like a church than anything. But we went inside and accidentally stumbled upon the presentation for theatre majors, so we sat and listened to that instead. I loved what I heard - they have productions going all the time, it seems, and they claim that the theatre majors don't necessarily get the better roles. We heard from this absolutely flamboyant freshman theatre major who was like, "Oh my God it's like one big party! Like, auditions are right away during orientation and you walk in all nervous, you know, and everyone is sitting in here talking and reading lines and you're like oh my God wait, this is supposed to be an audition! Where's the competition? But it's so much fun right away, like it's one big party! Oh, but not that kind of party. Like one big, responsible party!" And I thought aaaaaaaaah, I love these people already.
The theatre was tiny, maybe a fourth the size of our auditorium, but they did a slideshow of recent productions and they transform their stage like we never do at Holy Name. It was just awesome. And I bet with a theatre that small they don't use microphones, which would be a big relief after four years of our rather unrelieble sound system. So if I go to Gettysburg, there'll be auditions waiting for me - and that was one of the weirdest things about high school ending, that my beloved play routine wouldn't start up next fall. But now it totally could. Oh, and they do Shakespeare on a regular basis, too.
There's also a freshman seminar called The Makings of the Great American Musical, where students learn the history of musicals and the makings of musicals, analyze musicals, and put on a show of scenes from different musicals. How amazing does that sound? At the same time there was another seminar about adolescence and stress, which looked immensely interesting and is actually relevant to my major. The more I walked around, the more I realized that I just want to study everything.
So now I don't know what to do, and I have a week to decide where to go. HELP.