One Night at a Frat Party

When some tells you about their night, and how they went to a frat party, most people have an image that pops up in their heads. You might see a bunch of scantily clad girls dancing around, a group of brothers at the house watching, or maybe even a bunch of people playing drinking games. Well I’m here to tell you that you’re in fact correct in your assumptions… for the most part. This past Friday I was invited to attend a fraternity party at the Delta Sigma house on Albion College’s campus. This specific party was being held to “break in” the first semester of the New Year. The party was to be themed as a highlighter party, which means everyone wears white and they throw on the black lights. But, to be quite honest it was really just another excuse college students use to get drunk. I am actually pretty good friends with a lot of the guys who belong to the fraternity, so I was invited to come early and drink with them before the party began. Albion is roughly an hour away from Ann Arbor, so I decided to invite my friend Erica along to accompany me on the drive. We figured it would be easiest to just wear the clothes we were going to wear to party on our drive there. I dawned the standard jeans and a white t-shirt, but when I picked up Erica she was dressed in white from head-to-toe. I assumed she was just really spirited about the party and thought nothing of it. After an hour of a relatively uneventful drive, we arrived at our destination of Albion College. We decided to park off campus so that we wouldn’t be harassed by campus security for parking our car without a permit. It wasn’t too much of a hassle seeing as how the campus is only a fifteen-minute walk end to end. As we approached the fraternity we could easily tell that they had planned for something large to occur. When we walked in, the first thing that grabbed our attention was the massive DJ booth set up in front of the dance floor. It had all the equipment already set up including; two massive speakers, surround sound speakers set up around the room, and your standard laptop hooked up to a wild tangle of cords. The dance floor was actually set up in what was their family room. All of the furniture, including their massive flat-screen TV had been removed and stored for safety. They had two kegs tapped and ready to go sitting in ice buckets off to the side, as well as two large Gatorade containers filled with what I could only assume was hard liquor. They had also decided to buy some decorations for the party like a inflatable palm tree, streamers hanging from the roof, and the essential black lights plugged into where the normal lights generally where. Erica and I decided the first order of business was to meet up with our mutual friend and see what the plan was. After a bit of searching we found him upstairs in one of his friend’s room’s. After the standard greetings and introductions he brought downstairs to the basement where the pre-party was being held. The basement set up how it usually is, presumably because they didn’t expect the party to move there. There were about twenty brothers down there already and a small group of other friends. At this specific fraternity they have a very large beer pong table, which allows four games to played all at the same time. We all decided to stay there and drink until the party actually got started. At about 10 O’ clock people slow started to shuffle in the door for the party. It was mostly people who had friends in the fraternity so it wasn’t really what was expected. But at around 11:15 p.m. is when people really started to show up in throngs. The brothers realized that the party was officially starting so they shut off the regular lights and threw on the special black lights. The DJ made his way up on stage and announced to everyone there that the party had begun. I had never been to a highlighter party before, so I really had no idea what to expect. But I soon realized that everyone else was wearing a lot more white then I was, and that Erica actually looked the part. I didn’t really understand why everyone was going so overboard with the white until I saw people throwing highlighters in the air. I soon found out that the real theme of the party was that you just went up to people and wrote on them in highlighter. Since the black lights were on you could clearly see what was written, but when you stepped into normal light the writing would be gone. I was soon attacked by a large group of people writing all over me, most of the things they wrote were profane, so I won’t repeat that part. Our generation listens to genre of music that older people have never even heard off. It’s called Electronic Dance Music, and maybe you’ve heard some songs on the radio, but for the most part the type they play at parties is entirely different. It consists of really loud, fast, melodic beats that you jump around and dance too. In all honestly it really is the perfect party music, because it gets you almost into a state of trance where everybody is jumping and dancing together. It’s a far cry from the typical high school dance where most kids are just grinding up on each other. This DJ must have played a lot of parties, because he seemed to know exactly what songs to play at the right time to keep the party going. If you remember before how I mentioned that the fraternity had gotten a bunch of liquor for people to enjoy, well that was coming close to being entirely gone. People were going over to the drink area, filling up their cups, taking a few sips, then going back to the dance area and jumping around, thusly spilling the rest of their drink on the people around them. My friend noticed that they were quickly running out of alcohol and asked me if I’d like to accompany him to go grab more kegs. We slowly made our way out of the dance floor and past the crowds to the kitchen, where the kegs were being stored. I had been dancing and drinking like crazy with all my friends, and not paying attention to much else. So when I finally broke free and was able to check time I was disappointed to see that it was already 1:30 in the morning. I also noticed that even though you weren’t supposed to see the highlighter, you could easily tell that my shirt had been covered in curse words and rough sketches of male appendages. I had promised my friend that I would stay and help him clean up a bit after the party, so I went back to the dance floor until the party had died down. At around 3:30 a.m. most everybody who didn’t live in the fraternity had filled out. What was left can really only be summed up as chaos. Things had just been strewn across the room including; clothes, the previously mentioned streamers, and some things that people had obviously brought with them. The floor was made of some cheap wood look alike, which was incredibly convenient seeing as how there seemed to be a large pool of spilled booze covering every square inch of the ground. My and some the other people who offered to help clean up did the best we could, and decided to finally call it a night at 4:5o in the morning. Depending on what you had pictured when your mind when you thought about a frat party, this was either exactly what you had expected or completely foreign. Seeing as how I had never before been to something like this, I was completely taken aback. I had a wonderful time, and the next time someone talks to me about a frat party, I’ll know just what they’re talking about.