I pledged to the only fraternity at my school when I was a freshman. We pledges did something that made headlines in Boston newspapers, but I can’t tell you that story. Here are two funny stories to get the ball rolling…
The brothers ordered us to drive around Boston and paint the frat letters on rock outcroppings off of a few highways. So one Friday night off we drove and began painting rocks and bridges like Picasso’s gone wild. At the last stop we walked through the woods and painted and then headed back to the cars. When we got to them one of us thought they saw a police car (he was a little paranoid if you know what I mean) so we all piled in our cars and took off. But nobody did a head count and we soon realized that we had left two pledges back in the woods on a Friday night. We laughed about it and left them there. Some of us painted our letters on an historic monument which wasn’t too funny to us the next day.
We also went on a scavenger hunt with some sorority sisters. Each car was given a list of about 15 items to hunt for and off we sped in a race to get all of them before the other teams. We started on a Saturday morning. Several hours later, after buying a bottle of Ripple back in Boston (one of the items), we noticed that we hadn’t found a lobster trap yet. So up the North Shore we drove in a hunt for a trap. Panic set in as one by one every town failed to yield a single trap. We finally came to a village with several busy restaurants and diners eating outside on the decks. It didn’t like a place to stop, but someone spotted a few lobster traps down by the water.
We pulled over and two of us quietly sneaked down and stole a lobster trap. They brought it back to the car as dozens of hungry diners watched the robbery in progress. Naturally the trap couldn’t fit in the back seat with us so we tried putting it in the trunk. After a few minutes of pushing and squeezing we managed to break the trunk. If we had done this in our modern cell phone era and 911 alerts, I’m sure we would have all been arrested by now. So we found some rope and tied the trap to the trunk and took off like thieves in the night while people finished their seafood dinners. We lost the race by a few hours.
Hmmm, some of those details don’t seem too amusing, TonyK!
I lived in an MIT fraternity one summer. My roommate’s hamster died, and that evening we gave it elaborate rites culminating in a Viking funeral on the Charles.
One architecture student built a remarkably accurate cardboard Viking ship featuring q-tips as oars. We held a wake, at which we all consumed substances both legal and illegal in the 70s, naturally, and talked about what a good hamster he’d been. One brother, attired only in cut-offs, a black suit jacket and a white cardboard collar, presided. We then former a procession with him in the lead, followed by two people serving as pall bearers (the coffin was about 4x2x2), my roommate and I attired in long black dresses, ritually wailing and waving peacock feathers, followed by everyone else two by two, ending with the creator carrying the Viking ship followed by a brother tolling the pledge bell. I think there were probably about 25 of us.
We processed down Beacon Street, through part of the Fens–passing a few derelicts who must have wondered if this was their terminal delusion–and somehow managed to cross Storrow Drive without being hit. We then placed the coffin in the ship, set it on fire, and launched it into the Charles, where it promptly turned over and sank. (Not enough ballast, I would venture to guess.)
Sorry, Tony, but tagging nature, public property, and monuments does not seem funny to me at all – whether it is done by gangs or fraternities. Nor does ditching friends in the woods. Stealing the means of someone’s livelihood is not funny either. Call me a killjoy, but there’s nothing about those stories that is amusing to me. Sorry. I’m definitely looking forward to hearing whether other people consider these to be hilarious pranks.
@consolation – Are you familiar with the artist Jeffrey Vallance? It sounds like the funeral that he threw and documented for a frozen chicken he named Binky. My favorite part was the reliquaries me made for Binky’s supposed bones (but it was clear that the bones were not actually Binky’s, since his body was intact in the coffin).
Our funeral took place in the summer of 1975, and was planned and executed in a single day. It still amazes me. We should have filmed it and called ourselves artists. Then we could have monetized it. B-)
I’m with nottelling. I think the stories about leaving people in the woods and stealing lobster traps - how honest people make a living - are not funny at all. And it’s spectacularly bad judgment given the reputation of the Greek system to broadcast them, much less with a “was it it so funny” story. Certainly there are other fun anecdotes that didn’t involve destroying property or putting others in danger.
Sorry, my one term of pledging for a sorority was a pretty bleak time that ended in me quiting/depledging before having to appear before a kangaroo court during finals week. Was barely able to salvage a “B” in Calculus. That was my lowest grade in college and worst term.
Agree that “pranks” that are dangerous or involve vandalism or destruction of others’ property aren’t “funny” or humorous to me.
I don’t like dangerous/ destructive pranks, either, but on a lighter note, I’ll share this story…Not Greek myself, but my college had a big Greek system. This happened sophomore year during “hell week” for fraternity pledges. Since I’d already observed these shenanigans freshman year, I wasn’t surprised to see the (mostly silly, harmless) pranks going on. As I was walking home from class, I saw a guy with an ice cream cone standing at the main crossroads in the middle of the quad. He repeatedly offered the ice cream to any girl passing by, who all turned away in disgust. As I got closer I could hear what he said to each girl: “Would you like to lick my (ice)cream?” So, I was thinking, “This is one of those frat pranks…the poor guy has to keep it up until someone says yes…I’ll put him out of his misery.” So I accepted his offer. He made some comment about how embarrassed he was, thanked me, we laughed, etc. Then I started to walk away and he said, “Wait a minute!–What’s the CLUE?!” I had no clue, and was absolutely mortified when it dawned on me that “the real girl with the clue” and a couple frat brothers were surely watching from the bushes nearby, wondering who in the heck I was as I walked away with their ice cream cone. Baskin Robbins. Can’t recall the flavor.
Here’s something I still think is funny, not because it was clever, but because of what it implied.
People were sitting around circa midnight, dialing 7-letter words on the telephone. Word after word failed. Then someone dialed a well-known insult beginning with A. The phone rang! A woman, no doubt awakened from a sound sleep, picked it up and said hello. The dialer, excited, said “Hey lady, do you know that your phone number spells…” “I KNOW” she interrupted, before he got the word out, and hung up on him.
doG knows how many times the poor woman had experienced this! =))
My roommate and I were both pledges and living in the dorm. We had heard that our sorority had a “dry run” before activation week, where they sent everyone home. When we were summoned, we didn’t bother to pack our suitcases and just showed up with empty suitcases. Unfortunately someone noticed we were swinging our suitcases a little too easily. When the real activation week began a couple weeks later, we were made to put on every article of clothing in our suitcase and wear them to the first meeting.
My mother was a sorority pledge in the 1950s at her small Midwestern college. The grandkids have always been entertained by her story of grandma and her sorority sisters cleaning the front porch of the sorority house with toothbrushes. And all her stories of how the sisters covered for each other when they broke curfew so as not to get in trouble with the housemother…
Not really a story - but the thread title brought this remembrance to mind:
Christian evangelists liked to preach on Library Mall at UW-Madison near Langdon Street (where the Greek houses are located) in the early 1980s to the delight of hecklers on campus.
Sister Cindy, under the tutelage of Brother Jed related her personal salvation story in a sing-songy southern voice of disco dancing an ever-increasing number of nights a week before suddenly finding Jesus in the parking lot of a Burger King. She also offered guidance on how to become a born-again virgin.
What really got the upturned - collar Izod polo wearing crowd going was when Sister Cindy vehemently condemned the fraternities and sororities as “Hotbeds of Foooorrrrnication”.