Yale parties: you can't handle the truth

Whether they're getting down at Gecko or smoking a stogie at Casino Night, Yalies do more than just study.

The party scene at Yale. For some people, just being away from home and having free reign to come and go as you please without the little angels of curfew, designated drivers, and cops floating around your head from midnight to dawn will be enough to satisfy all of your social desires. For others, it takes more than a beer in your hand every night to make a weekend a success. But despite what you may expect, amid the nooks and crannies of New Haven's finest cookie-cutter Gothic university, kids do indeed find plenty of time to rage until the sun comes up. You may not find the social scene you crave during your first semester, but give it time, and you'll be able to cultivate almost any kind of scene you desire.

HIRO SUZUKI/YH Mmm...Icehouse!

Yale is a very self-directed place, and students carve their lives out of whatever the University has to offer—classes, extracurriculars, sports, clubs—often leaving little room for a healthy, integrated social life. This penchant for overextension also commonly leaves freshmen with a binge-and-purge party mentality: work 'til you rupture your cerebral cortex and then party 'til your eyeballs bleed. If you want to go out every night, you can, but no one's gonna hold your hand while you do it. During freshman year especially, it can be tough to find the kind of itinerant social satiation most of you were used to in high school; the institutional party scene is a bit weaker at Yale than at your average state school, or even at some of the other Ivies (don't worry, Harvard is not among them). Herewith, the 411 on what the University and city can offer you...

Dances and College Events

Okay, so dances sound high school, but there are a few campus-wide shindigs that just should not be missed. The Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender Cooperative (The Co-op) holds several dances a year (for both straight and gay students) that draw not only a tremendous Yale crowd but also attracts people from other universities and the local New Haven area. If you can stand the obligatory "YMCA" and "I Will Survive" (I have never been to a Co-op Dance where these two haven't been blasted at some point during the evening), then grab a group of friends, get decked in the craziest clothes you can get your hands on, and prepare to cut a rug. The music is great, the energy is high, the floor is packed, and even if you don't like to dance, just sitting and watching can be entertainment enough. Other dances to mark on your calendar are the annual Pierson Inferno, a Halloween dance that is always well-attended and well-costumed, and the Safety Dance, the annual '80s dance that threatens to knock down the walls of Commons. Advice for the Safety Dance: get there early. You don't want to be stuck outside wishing you were one of the first lucky thousands inside raging to Men Without Hats. Pierson College is also the home of Tuesday Night Club (TNC), a room in the college devoted to providing a keg every Tuesday night of the year for Piersonites and any other interested parties. Some nights TNC rages; other nights it's you and two or three lonely students nursing a few warm cups of Icehouse.

Other annual events not to be missed include Timothy Dwight's Exotic Erotic, held at the beginning of the semester. Remember: the more risqué, the less you pay. And once a year, Morse and Stiles transform their adjoining dining halls into a black-tie, Roaring '20s fantasy land for Casino Night, an event Rolling Stone once named one of the top 10 campus parties in America. Other quality dances and parties can be found at the Afro-American Cultural Center on Park Street and the Graduate and Professional Student Center at Yale (GPSCY) next door—the mixes are solid and the dancing goes late into the night.

Organizations Devoted to Partying

Yalies have an uncanny predilection for organizing, and sometimes it seems as though kids here can't do anything without first creating an organization to sponsor it. A prime example of this is the B & K society (some say it stands for Benevolence and Knowledge, some say it stands for Bong and Keg—you decide), an organization devoted to providing an off-campus party every Thursday night. The members of the society all live off-campus, so the location of the party rotates between their houses and apartments. Lately, there's been a little more K than B at these illustrious
on-the-D.L. functions, but back in the day, B & K was written up in Rolling Stone as the hub of the Yale drug scene. That's probably just a rumor—nevertheless, these parties get crazy and crowded pretty quickly, and they are definitely a safe bet for a fun Thursday night if you can find out where they are from week to week. Another organization recently created for the propagation of a good time is the Society Electronica, founded this year in an attempt to bring electronic music and culture to Yale. So far, the Society has held two highly successful raves in the GPSCY, and it plans to keep the beat alive and well next year.

And while we're talking about organizations devoted to partying, how can we forget fraternities? Frats don't make up a significant part of the social scene here, but you'll definitely find yourself at a frat party or two during your Yale career—most likely during the first week of your freshman year. Frats are cool because there's always tons of alcohol and you can always hook up, a prospect that only grows bleaker as the lonely nights drone on. Perhaps the two most notable frat-sponsored events are Feb Club and Tang, both organized by DeltaKE. Feb Club is DeltaKE's answer to the February doldrums—every night of that horrendous month, DeltaKE provides a keg in someone's room or apartment to drown the winter malaise. And at Tang, which takes place during Spring Fling weekend, teams from each residential college are pitted against each other in an all-out drinking contest that takes no prisoners and shows no mercy. Participate if you dare.

Painting the Town Red

I don't need to tell you that New Haven is no match for New York, Boston, or even Philadelphia in terms of a flourishing bar and club scene, but the city does offer several decent hangouts for those who feel circumscribed by the boundaries of campus nightlife. Although Yale boasts no college bar, Naples is the unofficial campus hangout for students in search of a pitcher and a pie, and up until this year, it was consistently packed on Thursday nights for the weekend party rush. But there's a new competitor in town: Gecko, a huge dance club/sports bar/cigar bar that opened this past fall on the corner of College and Crown. Gecko has proved stiff competition for the sweaty, cattle-car, weekend atmosphere everyone has come to expect from Naples. Gecko's massive dance floor and unparalleled student discounts have turned it into the hottest new weekend spot—that is, if hip-hop and Jaëger shots are your thing. It's a good place to get drunk and get down, but if you're looking for a chiller off-campus scene, there are a variety of local bars that will undoubtedly suit your fancy. Rudy's on Elm Street is a favorite off-campus bar, boasting live jazz every Tuesday and slices from Sally's Famous Pizzeria on Friday afternoons. BAR, located near Gecko on Crown Street, is a great place for the bearer of an ID—it offers live music, live performances, and delicious pizza. Kavanagh's on Chapel Street and the Anchor Bar on College Street are also mainstay watering-holes for those who just want to chill with a drink when classes are done. If you feel like seeing a show, there's the Tune Inn, which targets ska and hardcore fans, and Toad's, which caters to washed-up '80s rock bands, as far as I can tell, but produces the occasional dynamite show.

Just Hanging Out

So maybe none of these scenes will suit your fancy freshman year—you'll find yourself at a few frat parties, a few annual college events, a few Co-op dances, a few TNCs—and you might be disappointed. But the great thing about Yale is the people; you don't need a raging party to have a good time. Some of your best nights freshman year will probably just be spent hanging out in someone's room, maybe renting a video or drinking forties or arguing over which is the best sitcom to come out of the '80s. This lifestyle, really, is what college is all about, and it's something you'll have to try hard not to find at Yale. And the great thing about Yale is that it gets better every year—academically, extracurricularly, and, yes, socially. So even if you feel like you're trawling on a sea of unrequited social aspirations while you're a freshman, don't worry. It gets a hell of a lot better.

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