by Elizabeth Martin
The early weeks for most first-year college students are tough. Students are away from home, some for the first time, and surrounded by strange new people. College tries their best during orientation to get the students to bond through various activities and events. Some students find it hard to bond during these events and just stick to the people they already know, instead of branching out and meeting new people.
A few weeks ago, on August 25, the first free Saturday of the semester, Elizabeth Martin, one of the incoming first-years at Sweet Briar College, an all-women college in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains, wanted to dye her naturally light blonde hair a teal blue color. Martin had been wanting to do this since the beginning of May, but her lifeguard job wouldn’t allow her to. Finally, she did not have the restraints of her summer job, and she had free time since coming to college, so it was time for the dyeing to begin.
This lead to Martin seated in a chair, her roommate, Rose Murphy, stood behind her, and another classmate, Iris Williams perched on the countertop in the second floor Meta Glass short T bathroom for two hours. Meta Glass is the dorm for the first-year students, and their Residential Advisors, who are there to help and guide the women on their hall. The girls sat in the bathroom, listening to Panic! At the Disco, an alternative rock band, as Murphy went strand by strand and dyed Martin’s hair a bright teal color. Even though the girls barely spoke, this core group of girls created a memory that lasted longer than Martin’s hair dye. During the two hours, people would come in, look, shrug, then go about their business. After the dye had set and Martin had rinsed it out she blow dried her hair to see the true color. Once it dried, Martin stood in front of one of the hall mirrors just messing with her hair and smiling. Then, Murphy dragged the girls down to dinner. During dinner, Martin got confronted by multiple people praising her new hair color.
After dinner when this core group got back to Meta Glass, Martin and Murphy decided to run up and down the halls of their dorm. Murphy started in normal black ankle socks and Martin in long grey sweatpants. William did not have socks on to start with so she went to her room, and got knee high white fuzzy socks with red bows on them so she could join in on the fun. This prompted Murphy to run to her room and put on thigh-high socks with dark and light grey strips with Tardises at the top. When Murphy returned she put her leg on the wall to show off her socks. Martin and Williams followed suit to show off the softness of their chosen attire. That was when Cindy Bentley, a fellow first-year, came out to see what is going on. Bentley seeing the girls with their legs on the wall put her leg on the wall, as well.
“ Well… Hello,” Bentley said.
For the rest of the night, Martin, Murphy, Williams, and Bentley would put their legs on the wall and say “Hello” when someone came down the hall. The first victims of this new trend were Mary Katherine Baker and Isabel J. Viner. This made that small core group of girls grow.
Later, Murphy and Williams slid up and down the hall. At one point they were running at each other, grabbing one another as they passed which caused the other to spin around. Williams later told a reporter “It was really fun. Almost got hurt, but definitely worth it.”
Williams yelled, “ I hear the music of our people!” , in the background, the girls heard playing “Say Amen” by Panic! At the Disco. The group goes sprinting fifteen feet to Terra Grygotis’s room. Murphy, Williams, Martin, and Bentley piled in the door singing along at the top of their lungs scarring Grygotis, and Cat Williams. The larger group sat in the hall, outside of Grygotis’s room, singing and talking. Sydney Campbell, another first-year on the hall, had been trying to sleep around 9 p.m., but could not due to the small party that was forming in the hall. When asked later by a reporter Sydney said, “ I was pissed cause they were loud. So I looked to see who it was, saw who it was. Then, decided to go and hung out, brought Leo, and made mac n cheese.” As the evening went on the group got more and more relaxed, which means they started to stretch across the hall.
A hall member, Ingrid, who showed up after field hockey practice and came out because “I did not want to sit in my room alone, so I went out into the hallway cause I heard all these people talking. I said that sounds fun I’ll join this.” Ingrid suggested that the group act as speed bumps, so whenever a person tried to pass at least one member of the group that person would yell “SPEED BUMP!” The rest of the self-proclaimed speed bumps would then lay in strange position creating an obstacle course.
The group stayed like this until about midnight that night bonding until they all dispersed into their respective rooms. That evening all started with three girls, a dorm bathroom, and a bottle of hair dye which then expanded to the natural bonding of the hall. Later Murphy called that night “ the most natural bonding experience because it wasn’t forced.”