Tag Archives: Yale

My Bus Ride to… More Bus Ride Part Four or Five: The Ride Just Won’t End!

15 Nov

from June 8, 2008

We were on the bus for the umpteenth hour and we were headed back to New York, with just one more school to see- Yale. Yale University late Saturday night after graduation was sure to be jumping, so I was looking forward to seeing the outside of yet another closed school, and a two hour ride was right up my alley.

The remaining meals, I mean kids, were subdued. We only had to yell “shut up!’ two or three times. It was rainy and dark and we were tired. Maria and Ray had fallen asleep across the aisle from each other to cleverly make it look like there was nothing between them and I put The Perfect Storm on the DVD player.

The Perfect Storm is the true story of some New England fisherman who set out in their boat to fish the dangerous Reef of Doom, home to the tastiest swordfish this side of Atlantis. You see, the captain, played by George Clooney had a streak of bad luck. Despite being George Clooney and all the charisma that entails, he had not caught a single fish all season. In fact, the closest he came to a fish was when he saw the menu at Red Lobster. (He ordered the shrimp.) Well, Clooney and his men set sail for the farthest point on their map. Had they gone even one inch further they would have sailed right off the edge of the world. (These were old-school sailors. No fancy globes for them! Copernicus be damned.  He wasn’t a fisherman.) So after taking a long and excruciating tour of  coastal colleges they finally arrived and wouldn’t you know it? Some other guys got there first and caught all the fish. “You should have been here yesterday!” So they turned around and sailed straight into not one but three storms. Perfect! Long story short, they all died.

That was the peppy and upbeat film I put on the DVD player. Just the right thing to watch on a dark and rainy day- guys dying in a storm. But at least they didn’t resort to cannibalism- there were no students on board. Come to think of it, there were no women on board either but I won’t go there, not even to make my “salty seamen” joke.

Well, my monitor went out. Clooney looked all squiggly and Mark Wahlberg developed a strange case of facial blurriness. So I moved across the aisle (to my left) and sat next to Liz.

The lights were low. Everyone around us was asleep. The driver turned around and gave me a wink. It wasn’t long at all until, finally, Liz and I…..

… watched the movie.

What? What did you expect?

The rain had let up when we arrived in New Haven Connecticut, proud home of Yale University. It was, I think, somewhere between six-thirty and one hundred o’clock. The plan was to walk around Yale and go to a burger place that Maria had heard about for dinner. Then home. “Home,” ah yes, the mythical “Home.” Seems to me that I had been home once, long before leaving on this Odyssey. And much like Odysseus of myth, I already suspected that my family had given up on me and my friends despaired of ever seeing me again. (OK, my family gave up on me years ago and my friends already figure they’ll never see me again, so this isn’t much of a stretch. But its a nice literary touch and how about the use of the phrase “despaired of ever seeing me again”? I am an English teacher.)

Many of the kids had had it already. Probably 2/3 of them decided that they didn’t give a damn about Yale and just wanted to get home instead of walking around in the rain with us kooks. They were the smart ones and they stayed in the bus and prayed they would get home someday.

Well, New Haven seems like a nice quiet college town, at least the part we saw. It is a nice and affluent town, and even the homeless in the park were a little less shabby than the New York bums. Compared to the Chicago homeless, these guys were positively angelic. (See my old Chicago blogs for more on the Chicago homeless. Shameless plug!)

Well, the driver didn’t really know where to stop. (“What do you think, baby? That the entrance over there? I’ll find a place to park over there, baby.” I swear, if he hit on Liz one more time his fly would have melted.) We ended up a couple of blocks ahead of the school and walked through the park, where we were not accosted by the polite homeless and came to a church which was not part of Yale but we had to go into anyway. Liz has to visit churches, especially old and historic ones, which I must admit is cool, so I went in too with a few of the kids.

Something was going on in the church. People were filling in and were being greeted at the door. It may have been a wedding or a confirmation of perhaps Jesus had just risen. What did I know? I’m Jewish. But I went in anyway because it was a cool looking old church and Liz had gone in and maybe I’d have to get her out if there was trouble. Maria stayed outside, partially because she was asking random passersby where to find the burger place but mainly because she might have spontaneously combust if she set foot on holy ground.

Turns out it was a concert of some sort and we exited after a couple of uncomfortable minutes where I was sure that at any minute someone would walk up to me and explain the concept of tithing.

We crossed the street and walked down the block to find the entrance to the Yale campus. We found it, and we also found a nice old lady headed to the concert who gave us directions and also told us that Yale was where they filmed the Marshall College parts of Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of The Crystal Skull. (Yale therefore earned us two college points, bringing the total college tally to around 986 at that point.) And yes Marc, there is a new Indiana Jones movie.

YES! I WANT TO GO TO YALE WHEN I GROW UP! Remember when Indy and Mutt (still hate that name) motorcycle through the library? That was actually filmed in the dining hall. We walked right into a wide open dorm (I hope the Department of Homeland Security is reading this, and they probably are.) and saw the most magnificent architecture I ever saw in a foyer. It was better than that painting of the dogs playing poker, it was so cool. I also took the opportunity to find the Yale bathrooms, which were much nicer, bigger, and had better toilet paper than Harvard. Take that Philadelphia- I mean Harvard! For those of you keeping score, I have now taken a dump in two Ivy League schools, both in the same day. Why couldn’t we have stopped in Princeton so I could get the Northeastern Trifecta?

We then went to the dining hall, which was locked. We tried every door and they were all locked, until a kid tried the door all the way on the end and it was open. I think he may have picked the lock in hopes of currying some favor so we wouldn’t eat him. Well, in we went and there we were, right were Harrison Ford acted it up. So cool! I had just seen the movie a few days ago and the Raiders theme was still echoing in my head (it didn’t help that I had spent the past month on the bus) as I looked around and saw the kids rearranging the tables. I swear that is true! They sat down and immediately began to move around the plates and settings. I yelled at them to get up and saw Maria and some kids over at the soda machine helping themselves to drinks. I was sure we were going to get thrown out- at any time I expected someone to walk in and demand to know what we were doing there. But I was more afraid of what Liz would do to Maria if she got us banned from Yale so we got the kids out of there. And on the way out they were playing with the computers behind the register and had to be chased out of there too.

We walked around the campus in the rain and some of the smarter kids found a fountain and started splashing, like the rain wasn’t making us wet enough. They also stuck sticks and an umbrella in the fountain. Nice.

And that was Yale.

We walked to the bus in the rain, me without hat or umbrella, Maria in some kid’s sweater that she had commandeered, and Liz in a wet t-shirt. I’m a good boy. I only looked at her from the neck up. She teaches Sunday school.

We asked the kids on the bus if they were hungry and they all got nervous, but when we told then that we’d be walking to a restaurant they calmed down and a few came with us, the rest stayed on the bus. We were getting the food to go so we could eat it, yes, on the bus.

To Be Concluded in Part Last: Louie’s Lunch, gambling, and I get loopier.
CONCLUSION HERE

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My Bus Ride to… More Bus Ride Part Three: Day Five

15 Nov

from June 5, 2008

We were well into the fifth day of our overnight trip and we were all a little punchy. In fact, just for the heck of it, we ate one of the kids. I won’t say who it was, but she tasted just like Chicken. (Wing.)

We were on our way to Cambridge, which is just like Boston, in Boston, but is not Boston, to see Harvard University. I had high hopes for this stop. A few months back, we had driven by Boston College (twice) and if we actually slowed down and simply stepped on the curb, we’d be ahead of the game.

Due to a stinky bathroom which I may or may not have mentioned before we were a little crowded in the front by kids who, the nerve of them, didn’t want to sit next to a stinky bathroom. Glad we ate one of them.

We had been watching movies on the bus. There were overhead televisions and I was lucky enough to get the one that went staticy whenever I got interested in the movie. On the way up we watched about half of Sunshine. A group of hip and trendy astronauts travel to the sun, just to drop a nuclear bomb on it. Clearly, they were Americans. Along the way some of them died and then some others died, and then the ship died, and then one of them turned out not to be dead but some sort of alien and tried to stop the nuke. (Environmentalist hippie! What’s his problem? Get a job, hippie!)

We saw a movie starring Mathew Lillard, whose claim to stardom is that he has a face that makes you feel more uncomfortable the more you look at it. You may have seen him before, if you watch bad movies. In this film, his roommates decide to take advantage of a loophole in their college charter. You see, if your roommate dies, you get an automatic 4.0 and a date with a supermodel. Why couldn’t my college be like that? (Oh, because it was bound by the rules of reality.) Well, and here’s the VERY IRONIC PART, the kid wanted a 4.0 to get into Harvard. Where were going at that moment? HARVARD! Cosmic harmony- achieved!

When that ended we put in a movie that was highly inappropriate. It contained no nudity but did contain Joey Lawrence. We took it right out.

The weather was actually raining, off and on. Maria’s powers had clearly waned. She had done all she could- crystal ball gazing, tea-leaf reading, human sacrifice, but she had held up the rain as long as she could and the strain took its toll on her. She (and I’m being very true now) was dizzy and pale and didn’t look good. Liz told her to suck it up and get moving. Ray wondered if he would ever “do the bookrooms” with her again.

I left something out in Part One. OK, I simply forgot. Ever see the old episodes of M*A*S*H, the ones where you really believed that Hawkeye was screwing the nurses? (As opposed to the later ones where all Alan Alda did was go with them to E.R.A. rallies.) In one of them, Trapper got a letter from his wife accusing him of being sent to Korea as a part of a plot to cheat on her. (His response? “How did she find out?”) Well, Maria was in the same boat. Bus. Boat/bus. Whatever. Her boyfriend wanted her to bring back evidence that she really was in Boston. As proof, she bought him a Boston T-shirt. I have to admit that, before we got off the bus for the last time, I swiped the shirt and put in a pair of old boxer shorts instead. When I visit Maria in the hospital this weekend I will apologize.

We arrived at Harvard, the bus stopped, we got out. And the shocks don’t end there- we went in! Harvard is a nice campus. We saw a square and a building that may have been a library. Or a cathedral. Harvard had just performed its graduation and you could still smell the blue blood in the air. The chairs were still set up and the amphitheatre was set too so we assembled the kids for a picture. I hate to use a stereotype, but make up your mind. Liz and I were each taking a shot of them, when suddenly, Biblical flood-like, every kid handed us three or four cameras. They got up on the stage, rearranged the tables, and stood there for up to thirty minutes while we used almost 180 cameras to get nearly 200 shots. Did I mention there were only 34 kids? (33 not counting the entrée.)

While this was going on Maria was entertaining Ray with the Top Ten Reasons why she thinks President Bush is an Idiot. If Ray already didn’t want to drink, he did now.

We walked across the campus and paused in front of a statue of a turtle that looked suspiciously like a dragon and had a sort of wall on its back. The kids loved it and almost got us thrown out of Harvard by climbing all over it. I did not want to get thrown out- we would have to get back on the bus.

After crossing a strangely curved street (How do cross the street when there are no corners? How do I know? I’m not Harvard educated. I crossed like a New Yorker- I jay-walked.) we came to the Harvard store, which is actually three stores loosely connected by the power of pure thought (this is Harvard) and of course the four of us made straight for the bathrooms.

Harvard may be an Ivy League school, but they have Special Ed bathrooms. While the school may have a capacity of 10,000, the bathrooms had a capacity of one. The men’s and women’s rooms were strictly one at a time and each had a line. And when you got inside, even Harvard’s toilet paper sucked. Instead of rolls, Harvard has that lousy paper that comes out, folded, one sheet at a time. But I am proud to say that I accomplished one of my life-long dreams by taking a dump on Harvard University.

Harvard U and Lafayette HS have the same colors, maroon and white. One of them better change or there is bound to be confusion. Just last week I found a Harvard underclassman in stairway 8 being suspended by Dean 5.

Maria and Ray were in some way affected by the big book room they were in, so Liz and I went off and bought Harvard swag- mugs and lanyards. The mugs were for all the drinking this trip was driving us to, and the lanyards were to hang ourselves if the trip never ended and it truly was the end of the world. Maria might have been on to something.

So after seeing the Harvard chairs and the Harvard store, and the façade of what may have been the Harvard library, we schlepped back to the bus (again) for the long ride to New Haven Connecticut. Yale, here we come!

END OF PART THREE (YAY!)
PART FOUR HERE

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