Tag: Philadelphia

Your Mom’s Guide to the Hippie(ish) Colleges of the Northeast — Part 2 (Days 3 and 4)

To paraphrase Dickens — It was the best of times.  It was the time that you were reminded that you are traveling with a teenager.

Day 3 (Sunday) was spent again in Philadelphia on a walking tour — this time of colonial era sites.  Boo tends to get very up in arms when someone’s version of American history does not completely jibe with the version she learned from the Socialist British hippie who taught her U.S. History class.  (Yes, she learned about the Revolution from someone who came from the losing side.  Reminds me of how it’s done in Texas — only with less outright denial of facts.)  Fortunately, Boo had few complaints about our guide to colonial Philadelphia.  He’s probably a socialist and secretly British too.

At the end of our tour, we hopped into the car, drove up the New Jersey turnpike, waved at the skyline of Manhattan, and landed in Wallingford, CT where we had a father-free celebration of fathers’ day. We went out to dinner, followed by watching my ankles swell into cankles while the Warriors lost.  I probably should have just watched my ankles swell.  It would have been less painful.

We got up bright and early for a visit to Wesleyan University.  I was absolutely positive that Boo was going to love Wesleyan.  It’s hippie.  It’s artsy.  It has no required classes.  It has a super-impressive list of alumni.  (Joss Wheedon, Matthew Weiner, D.B. Weiss of Game of Thrones, Lemony Snicket, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail from Hamilton, and of course there’s my college roommate’s husband, Seth.  Hi Seth!  Bill Belichick went there too — proving that no place is perfect. )  There are 10-20 theater productions per semester! How could Boo not love this place?

Well, I’ll tell you how.  She was tired and in a bad mood.  Her interviewer asked her a bunch of pre-programmed questions.  (Q: “What’s your greatest academic achievement?”  A: “Um, I go to a hippie school.  We don’t think that way.  I didn’t even know that my ACT score could affect my college prospects until after I took the test.  Next question.”) The information session was not the most riveting (although far from the worst we’ve seen), and worst of all, I hadn’t heard Boo say something that led to some confusion and got her pissed at me.  That’s how she could not love it.

After that, we decided to skip our “might as well since we’re in the neighborhood” visit to Yale.  (She’s not going to go there anyway.)  Over lunch, after she had eaten and her irritation with me had subsided, she conceded that Wesleyan actually does have pretty much everything she wants and that she knows not to judge a school based on her mood and an interviewer mismatch.  (I HATED my Brown alumni interviewer.  He was a pompous, sexist jerk.)  So I think that Wesleyan will stay on the list — just not as high up the list as I think it should be.  But I’m not the one going to college, so it’s her call.

Even though mother knows best.

Next up — Day 5

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Your Mom’s Guide to the Hippie(ish) Colleges of the Northeast — Part 2 (Day 2)

Today, Boo and I took the day off from visiting Hippie Colleges to see some of the sites in the City of Brotherly Love.  We took a walking tour of “The Real Philadelphia” — meaning that it covered non-founding fathers sites.  (Yes, there are some of them in Philadelphia.)  Our guide was a millennial with the mandatory bushy beard that ruined an otherwise attractive face.  (What is it with kids these days?  And yes, I believe he was a cis-gendered male.  But these days, one never knows.  Also, I just discovered that WordPress autocorrects “cis” to “customer.”) Anyway, we learned a lot about graffiti, Smedley Darlington Butler and the “Business Plot” to stage a fascist coup against FDR, and Button Gwinnett (see the clip below).  And we walked.  And walked.  And walked.

And walked.

My feet may never recover.  But they have no choice.  (Not that my feet have their own independent thought processes but whatever.)  Tomorrow, we take another walking tour — this time the subject is our founding fathers.  I believe most of the founding fathers were customer-gendered, but what with the hair, anything is possible.  Then we drive to New England to prepare for a visit to one indisputably hippie college (alma mater of one of the gentlemen below) and a “might as well since we’re in the neighborhood.”

(LMM and Colbert explain Button Gwinnett.)

Next up — Days 3 and 4

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Your Mom’s Guide to the Hippie(ish) Colleges of the Northeast — Part 2 (Day 1)

You know how every picture of the founding fathers shows them with long hair?  Plus, they’re all wearing pouffy ruffled shirts?  Kind of reminds you of a bunch of hippies, doesn’t it?

Well, Philadelphia, birthplace of the American hippie, turns out to not be that hippieish these days.  We visited two Philadelphia-area colleges today with nary a mention of gender — much less gendered bathrooms.  One college had a legitimate excuse.  Bryn Mawr is a women’s college, so how bathrooms are gendered is probably less of an issue there, but Swarthmore has no excuse.  Swarthmore seemed like a good school but nothing made it stand out from the crowd except for a giant lawn chair and a spectacular rose garden.  (And in comparison to a spectacularly strange Yoko Ono sculpture that is used for seating by Sarah Lawrence students, the giant lawn chair seems pretty tame.) Bryn Mawr was a little more interesting.  It is gorgeous!  Boo and I were both buying what Bryn Mawr was selling until we found out that it doesn’t have music or theater departments. That’s a deal breaker for Boo.

So our trip to Philadelphia for college purposes was meh.  Tomorrow, we’ll give the home of the founding hippies a chance for redemption when we spend the day sightseeing.

Next up — Day 2

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Your Mom’s Guide to the Hippie(ish) Colleges of the Northeast — Part 2 (Prologue)

[Note: Your Mom’s Guide to the Hippie Colleges of America starts here with Part 1.]

Hello, my name is Page, and I am a Hippie College addict.

I’ve been in denial about my addiction for some time now, but I finally realized the seriousness of my problem when my definition of “Hippie College” started to include schools like Bryn Mawr and Barnard.

And even though I know I should not blame others for my problem, my addiction was fueled by my supplier, who appears in the guise of an innocent college counselor at Boo’s high school. She is, in reality, a Hippie College pusher. It was she who told Boo about some additional schools that she thought might be a good fit for Boo.

Then, Boo went and ended up doing better on her ACT’s than anyone had anticipated – which opened up a whole new world of colleges that Boo won’t get into — because no actual humans are admitted to those schools anymore. Only our alien overlords in human form are allowed to attend. Plus, Boo was heading to New York for the summer anyway to attend a vocal performance program at NYU.

So even though I now recognize that I have a Hippie College problem, I ended up with several extremely lame excuses for one last all-out Hippie College bender before I go cold turkey. During the trip, I’ll be attempting to wean myself off of Hippie Colleges with some days in Philadelphia and New York that will not include college visits.

But I don’t want to talk about that now because it makes me shake and feel nauseous. Time for a discussion of gender neutral bathrooms to make me feel better.

Next up — Day 1

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