This was it, the day I officially became a college student. You can check into all the dorms you want, get as much financial aid as you can get your hands on, die of alcohol poisoning at an open frat party, but until you attend your first class, you simply are not a college student.
I got up at 6am on Wednesday, 08/25/82, took a shower and went to the cafeteria at 6:30am to have breakfast. The cafeteria was just a walk across the parking lot to the Campus Union Building.
My first class started at 9am. It was Speech I, one of my general education requirements. It was in the Liberal Arts building. Several of us got there early, but there was another class going on at that time, so we had to wait in the hall. After they came out, we went in. Someone I had met a few days prior was also in the class.
Then the professor came in. He was the absolute stereotype of a college professor. He was very tall, had graying hair and a Van Dyke beard. (I found an old photo of him and found out that the reason he had the beard was because he had a weak chin.) He outlined what we were going to do in the class.
My second class at 10am was English Composition I. This professor was old, tall and skinny, but only had a mustache. There were a couple of people I had met in that class. During the presentation, I saw a note on the bulletin board for used books for sale. One of the ones listed happened to be one needed for the class. I wrote down the number.
For my third class at 11am, I had to walk over to the Education building, which was next door to the Liberal Arts building. This was my Interpersonal Communications class, which was also a general education requirement. (However, I didn't realize that I wasn't supposed to take both Speech I and Interpersonal Communications. It was supposed to be one or the other. I was able to count the Speech class toward my Communications major and the Interpersonal Communications for my general education.) It was actually the workshop part of the Interpersonal Communications lecture, which was held every Monday at 12pm. All the students went to the lecture on Monday and attended the workshops the remainder of the week at various times. My teacher was a graduate student. Her husband was also teaching the workshop. This wasn't an issue until we had to write a research paper and she had him grade her students while she graded his.
I then went to the cafeteria and ate lunch. I had some time to kill before my 2pm class, so I called the number for the used book. The guy showed up at my dorm room in about a half hour and I gave him the cash. I never saw that guy again.
I walked over to the Theatre for my final class of the day: Beginning Acting. On my way toward the building, I ran into Dr. R, the chairman of the Theatre Department. I had met him on several occasions before and was looking forward to working with him. He asked me something, but I don't really remember what. I went inside the auditorium and sat down close to the stage and waited for Dr. R to come to the class. There was this person sitting in the row in front of me. His name was Chud. I didn't realize it at the time, but he would become the most important part of my college experience. We started talking, and then the class started. This woman called us all up to be on the stage and had us stand in a circle. She introduced herself as Ms. C. She was a graduate student and was going to be teaching the class. This threw me for a loop. I thought Dr. R was teaching the class. Afterward, I went back to my room and looked at the schedule of classes. Beginning Acting had two different classes. Dr. R was listed for the 9am class, but the 2pm class identified the instructor as "TBA." When I scheduled the class, I didn't realize that meant that Dr. R wasn't going to be teaching it. As I will go into detail on a later post, this misjudgment severely affected my standing in the Theatre Department for the next four years.
I also met another student in my acting class named Kird. He would also prove to be an intermittent lifelong friend. I will also be writing more about him later on.
That was all my Monday, Wednesday and Friday classes. However, I had signed up for the Broadcast Workshop. This wasn't a regular class, but it was something you could take every semester to be a part of the various media programs they had in the Radio/TV department. A general meeting was held at 5pm the first day of school. I showed up at the student studio at the TV station with more than 60 other students from every class level. We were told about how the workshop operated and what programs we could take part in. The meeting lasted almost two hours.
The Theatre department was holding auditions for its first production of the season, "How the Other Half Loves," that night. I rushed from the TV studio over to the theatre and came in the back way. The director of the production, Dr. W, was addressing the auditioning students in the auditorium. I was about 10 minutes late. I didn't realize until a few minutes later that I was supposed to check in at the lobby of the auditorium, so I had to find the people with the sign up sheet and add my name.
Dr. W selected a few people by random to go up and read this one particular scene. He called up four different sets of people. I studied the other actors doing the scene and figured out a good approach to how I would interpret the material. Then, my name was called. I went up on stage. Dr. W announced that we were going to do a different scene. DANG IT!
Chud and Kird were among those auditioning, along with the guy I knew from my Speech class. But one thing that struck me as unusual and really left a pretty serious initial impression on me was that all the black Theatre students had congregated together. I really felt a "He'd better cast one of us" vibe coming from them. At one point, Dr. W told us to find a partner to read the next scene with. I saw some of the black students walking down the aisle and recognized one of them as the student host we had at the Drama Festival from my senior year of high school. I decided to do something brave, cross the racial divide and ask her to be my partner. She did not say a word, but took me by the hand and walked me down to the front of the auditorium. I don't know if she recognized me, but it didn't really seem to matter.
Eventually, I determined that the black Theatre students were not the militant types. As I got to know them more, it appeared to be more of an anomoly that they had grouped together that evening. They were all interested in pursuing diverse friendships, and many of them even dated outside their race. But it still took me a couple of months to come to that realization. My "brave" act of reaching out to one of them proved to be nothing of the sort.
After the audition, I realized I hadn't eaten any dinner. The dinner hours at the cafeteria are from 4:30pm to 6:00pm Monday through Friday. I was three hours beyond that at this point. I went back to the dorm and bought some snacks and soda out of the vending machine. My first day of college had come to a close and I was worn out. I knew I would be able to keep up the hectic pace, but hoped that I would be able to find the time to eat in the future.
Somehow, I managed to keep from starving at college. That would not always be true after I got into the "real world."
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