Well, you know the Symposium traditions. I assume they were in your day much as they were in mine. Kline, btw, was away for that seminar and his sidekick, a first year tutor (who was not invited back) was in charge. If he had been bright enough to recognize that certain students were in no condition to participate that evening things might have been fine. But he was eager to show in the absence of the master how well he could get every student to participate. So he started the seminar by saying that we would go around the table with each person telling what love meant to them.
We had a student visitor sitting in, a cute young woman from New York, as I recall. Perhaps not the best idea to have prospective students attend the Symposium seminar, one might think, but if she hadn't been there, there wouldn't be a story to enliven our aged years.
Things went okay for the first six or eight students. Then we came to one of our good old southern boy students (whose name I have mercifully forgotten) who had been quaffing the symposium brew, let us say, freely. He smiled gently, took a deep breath, then said in his southern drawl those memorable words that became something of a mantra for our class from then on: "Ah speek for Lust." (You must imagine the word Lust said with the clear capital letter and stretched out at some length.) He then went on somewhat extensively to detail exactly what his conception of lust in the context of the Symposium was. It was surprisingly lucid given that he was astonishingly not lucid otherwise.
At the end of the seminar we wandered over to the Randall basements for the partying. The cute young prospect came along. The rest is hearsay since I was in another room at the time, but at some point she apparently had imbibed enough of the Symposium spirit (pun intended) that she said to him, in some words or other, "prove it." Unfortunately he was still erect. So he took her at her word and headed over to his room in Humphries, which was at that time a boys dorm (where I also lived) but I think I heard somewhere was later turned into a girls dorm. Anyhow, by the time the authorities recognized a problem and responded four young gentlemen had passed into and out of the room, a fifth was in flagrente delecti (sp), and the line outside the door was down the hall and into the stairwell.
That was it for the fab five. The prospective student was reportedly disappointed that she had not had the chance to prove her total devotion to the spirit of Symposium lust and complete the task of taking on all comers, but whether by her choice or the school's did not show up the next year. And our class had a story to tell that I think none of us will ever forget and that I am surprised a class only ten years after us does not still celebrate as a standing legend of Symposium night. |
