A most unlikely celebration of 'diversity'

I threw a party this last Saturday evening. Nothing particularly earth-shattering. It wasn't a five-keg rager you might expect out of my brothers and sisters in the Greek system, nor were there any "mind-expanding" chemicals floating around, much to the chagrin of those among the School of Natural Resources ranks that attended. But it was a party nonetheless, just a little something to celebrate our beloved Wolverines dropping some annual whoop-ass on those AIDS Awareness studyin' Rhodes Scholars from Ohio.

My roommate and I came up with the idea about a week ago. With Mother Nature finally pulling her head out of her ass and remembering that November in Michigan is not supposed to be 55 degrees and humid, the weather has evolved from cold, cloudy and unpleasant to that oh-so-familiar level of colder, cloudier and just plain shitty that characterizes winter up here in lovely Ann Arbor. Well, the two of us put our heads together and pooled all 105 of our collective IQ points in search of something that would make things a little more bearable. You know -the kind of atmosphere that puts you in mind of beaches, palm trees, lazy sunsets and Corona bottles.

 

Branden Sanz Dropping the Hammer

Four half-gallon bottles of Cuervo Gold, 50 pounds of ice and a plethora of mix later, Margarita Night was born! Following time-tested party guidelines, we invited exactly three times the number of people we expected to attend, keeping the ratio of invitees 4:1 female to male. (Because, let's face it: You tell guys there's free booze and they are there; girls are harder to persuade.)

Now, I've thrown parties before and I attend quite a few as well, so I figure I had a pretty good idea of what to expect. Boy, was I wrong.

The first arrivals showed up right around ten o'clock and we began quaffing that delectable nectar of the agave plant while watching the tail-end of the Florida-Florida St. game. What was interesting was the make-up of these first arrivals, which included several grad students and a history professor, whom I promptly engaged in discussion about the Civil War and the merits of Sherman's March to the Sea.

Soon after, the game ended, Bubba Bowden's boys laying another beat-down on Steve (I'm-smarter-than-you-are) Spurrier's Gators, and the floodgates opened. But it wasn't the sheer number of people that impressed me - after all, I do live in a two bedroom apartment and don't need another noise violation - but rather the diverse make-up of the people in attendance.

I'm not talking simply about differences in color or religion, but real diversity. Friends of mine from school showed up and mingled with my roommate's friends from school - and as he's an engineer we tend to run in entirely different circles on campus. There were people from my work; many of whom attend the University, many who go to Eastern or Washtenaw, and some who are full-time musicians just picking up extra cash on the weekends. There were Greeks, non-Greeks, athletes, aesthetes and even some people from the Daily. My buddy Phil even managed to convince two girls he was waiting on that night to show up.

The music blaring over the speakers was a microcosm of the evening, as we went from frat-house favorites Dave Matthews and Counting Crows to Tupac to Def Leppard (exactly what is it you women love so much about those ripped jeans?) to Garth Brooks. No request was denied. Somewhere around 1:30 a.m. the night hit a high point when, after several adult beverages, yours truly got up on a table and started rockin' out with my patented "One-arm swingin' goofy white guy dance," to the sweet sounds of Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days." (Of course, my upstairs neighbor objected most vociferously, but someone should have told the silly bitch that when you live in downtown Ann Arbor, the Saturday night of UM-OSU is generally not a good night to go to bed early.)

In a scene that I suppose has been played out countless times on campus, different people with different stories and different backgrounds came together with only one goal: To have fun. Perhaps just for one night, no one cared who was going to win the election or what the person next to them thought about the situation in Palestine.

To me this was the ultimate in what college has to offer. I can read a book on anything from Chaos Theory to the history of the Modern Middle-East in my own time. But how many times after I graduate am I - are any of us - going to be able to discuss Ayn Rand with a philosophy major or dissect Citizen Kane with a film major, just for the sake of passing the time and polite conversation?

It struck me as an epiphany.

I bitch about this place all the time, bemoaning everything from BAMN-type activists/fanatics to apathetic professors to uppity New Yorkers to a general lack of common sense. But right around 4:30 that morning, in a rare moment of seriousness, I wondered how many times in the future I would ever have the opportunity to watch a University engineering senior and an aspiring rock guitarist with no college education debate the merits of both Hobbes' Leviathan and the zone-blitz.

That, my friends, is diversity.

- Branden Sanz can be reached via e-mail at hamrhead@umich.edu.