God and woman at Yale

BY COLLEEN KINDER

My first Halloween at Yale, I wore my Catholic school uniform with pride, outraged at anyone who asked if I was supposed to be The Impostor, more commonly known as Britney Spears. I was a Holy Angels girl through and through, and I had the pleated, inconspicuously hemmed grey skirt to prove it. Four years of small community, single-sex education had made me confident, fearless, and ready to meet the world. But there were some things that Sisters Jean O'Shaugnessy and Karen Marie just hadn't prepared me for.

Like Yale. I quickly saw that Catholic mottos like, "You only owe your date the pleasure of your company" and "Holy Angels girls always take the high road" didn't quite apply here. I didn't meet a single Shannon, Mary, or Kevin, but bumped into Raju's, Phillipe's, and Ezra's every time I turned around. I'll never forget the shock when I flipped to the back of the face book and saw that there was only one listing under the name Colleen—me! I immediately called my best friend from home, Colleen McCarthy, to get some reassurance of my normalcy.

In a similar panic, I called my mom one afternoon to ask if saying "God bless you" when someone sneezed was something only Catholic people did. Educated in Irish Catholic girls' schools from kindergarten through college, my mom was almost as clueless as I was as to how things operated in the politically correct non-Catholic world. We deliberated for some time and finally agreed that if I abbreviated the phrase to "bless you," I would be okay at Yale.

The classroom was even more of a shock. There were boys there! I think it took me a few months before I could contribute to class discussion without blushing. I was quite distressed when I realized that the scruffy, I-haven't-combed-my-hair-all-week-bun wasn't going to fly in coed academia.

Likewise, the mainstream social scene at Yale took some adjusting to. While the hometown folk just drank themselves silly, Yalies enjoyed nudity (I had to cover my eyes during the Pundits' CCL stroll), drugs other than pot, and premarital sex. Remember the mandatory sex meeting in the beginning of freshman year, in which they kindly demonstrate how to use various forms of contraception and toss dental dams at you? Let's just say that Catholic school girls should be excused from this until sophomore year: it's just a tad scarring when you've still got Father Tony's graduation homily ringing in your ears. Yale dances and parties were sexual free-for-alls, worlds apart from the dances monitored by vigilant nuns that would slide a balloon in between you and the affectionate stud from Saint Joe's faster than you could say "confession."

By some miracle, one of my suitemates happened to be a Catholic school girl too. While the rest of America found heroines in Madonna and Princess Diana, she, like me, grew up wanting to be the Virgin Mary. She was the only one who had a collection of rosaries as extensive as mine. And she too had spent four years evading the "two-fingers-above-the-knee" skirt rule. When life at Yale was just altogether too shocking, we found respite in each other, put "Only the Good Die Young" on repeat, and chuckled away the bizarre world that we had left behind.

After the first alarming months, I started to see that Yale was a dream come true. If I was a fish out of water in August, I was a little kid in a candy shop by October, wide-eyed and hungry for what college had to offer. I took in the diversity as rapaciously as an old neighbor would have taken in a Guinness following a bad homily. I became a regular at Slifka every Wednesday after discovering I had a thing for pizza bagels. I learned there were nun-less private schools called Exeter and Andover that people seemed to be impressed by. And after 18 years of uniform heterosexuality, I finally had gay friends.

Being part of a diverse group of individuals not only brought understanding and awareness, but also a new sense of self. While I quickly shrugged off some elements and lessons of my upbringing, others became defining parts of my identity. Amidst this self-discovery, I realized that I had my own snippet of diversity to bring to the Yale melting pot. My high school experience was in many ways incredible, and I could apply it to college life in my own novel way.

In trading naïveté for understanding and homogeneity for diversity, I found individuality for the first time in my life. But unlike Britney Spears, I am that innocent—it may take a few more years as a Yalie to completely corrupt this Catholic school girl.

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