do you know this man?

Howard Cohn, New York City, 2019

Some of you will recognize the Vassar English prof I have been friends with for a half century. I ran into him at the Apple store and he invited me for dinner the other night. We talked for seven hours, and I finally went home at three ayem or so, wondering what had happened to several of my Vassar classmates.
     I tracked down one with whom I am still a little irritated because she made me a human alarm clock to wake her up every day for breakfast for all of sophomore year. (She was later held responsible for the debacle of Time Inc.'s TV Cable Week, for which I briefly wrote before the plug was pulled after just a few issues.) But anyway, it was a shock to find her obituary.
    Coincidentally, while I was eating dinner with Howard, I got an email from a Vassar alum who is making a doc about the time 50 years ago, long before he was born, when Vassar began admitting men. I got booted out of my room after my first semester for the male transfer students. I found a boyfriend among them, now married to my best friend from college. (I will be seeing them in a couple weeks!) And later another one, now a scriptwriter in L.A. Saw him last year.
   And then I started recalling other things.
   Does the word parietals even mean anything to people any more?
   The thing literally called "The Face Book" that had pictures and addresses for every Vassar freshman. It circulated among, especially, Yale students who would then call the pretty ones and invite them and their pink suitcases for a weekend in New Haven.
    I remembered taking mescaline and giggling in the Vassar gardens.
    The time we took over the administration building to protest, I think, Dow Chemical's manufacture of napalm and the war in Vietnam/Cambodia.
    When I tried to meet some Vassar friends at Woodstock the summer after my first year but couldn't find them.
    When George wore a black tie and nothing else to a Vassar prom.
    The incident when one Vassar man dressed in drag picked up a guy at a West Point mixer, took him back to his room and freaked him the fuck out.
      Yeah, Vassar opened a can of worms when it decided not to merge with Yale, but to become co-ed instead.

Claudia Dowling, Block Island, 2018