Tigers on the loose

It's time to get serious. No more kidding around, no more frivolous jokes and lighthearted Friday morning columns. There is a very serious topic at hand. I speak of alcohol. Now, I would hardly claim to be an alcoholic, but I enjoy a few drinks just as much as the next girl or two girls combined. My wrist is no stranger to salt, my black pants are not unfamiliar with 'Beast' and my forehead longs for the days when I can return home to hick country and crush a beer can against it with no fear of judgment.

So why don't we say, for the purposes of this article and to make my parents even MORE proud, I'm going to take a pro-alcohol/'Street' stance.

This past weekend the administration closed the 'Street' down, presumably because it was prospective hosting weekend. While dreams of sugar-plums — and students sitting around tables doing needlepoint and discussing the use of rhetoric in Ancient Rome — danced through their heads (they's heads? I dunno), room parties flourished. The residential colleges became the Mesopotamia of Everclear punch and "Music Now!" CDs on repeat. It was almost like being at a normal college, except for the abundance of Klimt posters on the walls, and the fact that the majority of conversation revolved around plans for formal gowns and tuxedos.

I haven't properly done my investigative reporting, but who wants to bet that there was no difference between the number of alcohol-related visits to McCosh this past Saturday and the previous Saturdays? It seems that the 'Street' is not the root of all evil. And I strongly doubt that a university with an eight-billion-dollar endowment would say that money is. So I guess that makes the students the root of all evil. Cool.

Now that we've established this, I think it's time for strategy. This past weekend pretty much proved that you can take the alcohol away from the students, but you can't take the students away from the Annex and Varsity Liquors. Remove those, and bathtub gin will make a reappearance after having spent 80 years relegated to boarding schools and Amish communities. We'll go back to the days of Mountain Dew and Skittles sugar highs if necessary. They can't stop us, so the best thing to do is probably to contain us. Instead of a thousand little roots of evil running around all over this Gothic paradise, why not put us all in a couple of buildings? When the weather gets nicer, they could fence us into courtyards or something. Maybe give us something to amuse ourselves with, like a DJ Bob or three. That way we wouldn't hurt anybody else, and we would all just indulge ourselves until our little hearts were content and we drifted off into a peaceful, deep slumber. It's almost like a fairy tale.

There are cons to this strategy, too. I mean, we could always hurt ourselves on sharp things or fall down. Plastic cups would be necessary so we wouldn't break them, and keeping some of the higher places in the buildings off-limits might be a good idea. Having a big guy around to stop any trouble would help too, along with maybe a person in charge of each building.

But if none of this works out, I guess we can just go back to our fourth floor rooms, light a few candles and maybe start up a game of darts or something. If someone had a car, everyone could drive someplace where there was something going on. Cars are much safer than the 'Street' late on a Saturday night.

This is all just an idea, of course. Just something to play around with. So it might have been a one-sided argument. I might be slightly biased towards a certain standpoint. Welcome to the First Amendment, sweethearts — that's my opinion and I'm sticking with it. The lesser of two evils can sometimes be more fun. But I guess that's for the Class of 2005 to find out. Jen Adams is a psychology major from Ogdensburg, N.Y. She can be reached at jladams@princeton.edu.