ROAD TRIP TO RICKI
PAW's online columnist, also a resident adviser, escorts his freshmen into TV-land
BY DAVE ITZKOFF '98
With the coming of Ricki Lake began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. Before that, I'd often dreamed of going north to see the city, always vaguely planning and never taking off. Then I saw a three-line classified advertisment on the back page of the Village Voice, tucked between ads for heroin detoxification and Lee's Transvestite Boutique, calling to me with a beautiful, siren-like wail: "Ricki Lake Needs Groups for Studio Audience." I thought to myself, "I'm a resident adviser. I'm responsible for providing my group with cultural programming. Taking them to New York City to see Ricki Lake is cultural. Well, taking them to New York City, anyway . . . " And this was really the way that my whole road experience began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic not to tell.
Our standard-issue Ford rental van was equipped with an FM radio, which serenaded us with all manner of Alanis Morrisette songs as we took in the breathtaking panorama of oil refineries that line the New Jersey Turnpike. Though a van wasn't the most maneuverable vehicle in which to navigate Manhattan streets, I discovered that it's capable of sustaining a lot of damage. When I jumped the curb inside the Lincoln Tunnel, the tunnel walls gently nudged our van back onto the road. Only a few passengers said they were afraid for their lives.
For an extra 20 dollars, a Fifth Avenue garage that had adamantly refused to park our van suddenly became rather courteous. New York's vaunted hospitality didn't end there. Upon our arrival at the studio, we learned that we had been chosen as that episode's VIP guests, for reasons that were never fully explained (although dropping the name "Princeton University" 12 or 13 times over the telephone certainly didn't hurt).
Our VIP status couldn't save us from the ignominy of being passed through metal detectors and literally locked in a refurbished convention hall with the other peasants who would comprise the day's studio audience. The room was utterly featureless except for the chairs we were sitting in and a few vending machines that dispensed sugar-coated snacks and fruit drinks. The next stop was the set of the Ricki Lake show, a replica of a New York City streetscape that made a couch resting on a sidewalk curb look like the most natural thing in the world. Our distinguished party was seated first, and my lifelong predilection for aisle seats was finally rewarded when we learned that the aisles were most frequently shown on camera.
We held our breath in nervous anticipation as the producers announced the day's subject of discussion. Would it be the ever-popular "Your Perfect Makeover"? An inspirational "Tribute to New York's Top Volunteer Workers"? No, it was trash we had come for, and trash we would receive: the focus of this episode was to be "Your Pot Habit is Tearing Up Our Family."
We rejoiced quickly and quietly, for no sooner was the topic announced than the house lights dimmed, the familiar synthesized-flute theme kicked in over the public-address system, and Ricki herself came bounding onstage. Though as a home viewer I have always been impressed with Ricki's seemingly limitless energy, nothing could prepare me for seeing her in person. Despite being barely five feet tall and four months pregnant at the time, America's second-favorite talk-show hostess tore up the studio for the next hour like she had just chased two bottles of No-Doz with a fresh thermos of Juan Valdez's finest house blend. "Dump him!" "You're a loser!" "Take your kids and get out of the house!" "Are you speaking English?"
When Ricki wasn't barking her quick-fix solutions at the assembled panel of chronic pot smokers and the spouses who loved them, she was encouraging us (during the commercial breaks) to openly flaunt the accepted rules of human communication. Make faces at the guests. Boo. Boo louder. Don't wait to get called upon, just shout out your responses. Don't stop to think about what you're going to say -- you might change your mind. It was a far cry from what we had come to expect in precept.
A fortunate few were chosen from our group to ask questions of the day's distinguished guests and share the screen with Ricki -- although how much screen we couldn't tell. (The absence of monitors in the studio forced us to actually pay attention to what the panel members were saying.) But by the halfway point of the show, our hostess was conspicuously avoiding us -- our questions were too articulate, too sensible. All those years of formal education had backfired on us.
At the end of the show, the producers promised to invite us back another time and there was just the slightest hint of desperation in their voices. Those poor slobs have to confront the Ricki Lake-version of American life every day of the week, twice a day. We could just hop back in our rental van and return to our ivory tower.
If there were any justice -- and a Nielsen box in every Princeton dorm room -- we would have been sitting in Charlie Rose's 500-person studio audience, and Ricki Lake would still be playing the fat teenage outcast in every John Waters movie. So in America when the sun goes down, and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land, and all that road going, I think of Ricki Lake. I even think of Montel Williams. I think the next time I want cultural programming, I'll take my RA group to a Knicks game.
In his spare time, Dave Itzkoff '98 likes to daydream about playing the bongos with Allen Ginsberg.
EENEY, MEENEY, MINEY, MOE . . .
Course selection: a senior's last hurrah gives pause for reflecting on past choices
BY JEREMY CAPLAN '97
In the dawn of our last semester at Princeton, the Class of 1997 must now decide which courses will be our last. Our eighth and final opportunity bears a new sense of urgency as we all try to squeeze in those electives we would hate to have missed, for some, a longed-for introduction to art, for others, a last-ditch effort to understand chemistry.
By now, it's clear what a difference liking our classes can make. Most students take about 35 courses during their four years at Princeton, and few of us will ever again have an opportunity to engage in learning for its own sake. Classes we love can change our view of the world; ones we find uninteresting must be endured or discarded in favor of others.
Though the stakes are high, our methods of selection are decidedly haphazard. Some go to their advisers for help with their pre-law, pre-business, or pre-med aspirations. Others head to the book store to find classes they like. Some even take a "blind-flip" approach, opening the Undergraduate Announcement (the university's compendium of courses) at random and signing up for the class that's nearest to their finger. The most common method is to choose courses by reputation.
The Undergraduate Student Government's committee on academics publishes the Student Course Guide near the start of each semester. Student writers are paid to evaluate courses they have taken on the excellence of teaching, the quality of readings, the amount of work required, and the level of understanding expected. Most reviews err on the positive side, but some are harsh. Often, critics will take a professor to task for being boring or disorganized or will assert that readings are too long or difficult.
Students also take advantage of Princeton's liberal course-selection rules by "test-driving" courses in the first two weeks of a semester, since it's often difficult to predict what a class will be like from the Student Guide and the Announcement. This is another reason students rely on their peers' advice when it comes to filling in course cards.
Several times, I changed all my courses after discovering others that better suited my interests, but a few I will always treasure. My favorite, The Renaissance, taught by Professor Alban Forcione, was offered by the comparative literature department. It bore no resemblance to what I had studied at the Woodrow Wilson School. I took the course this past spring, and scheduling quirks had shrunk the class roll to a cozy group of four.
When I came to the first session, I doubted I'd stick with this class; when I walked in for the last time, at semester's end, I wished that it could last forever. We met in East Pyne every Tuesday to pore over the poems of Petrarch and to meet Montaigne and the courtiers of Castiglione, among others. Under Forcione's active leadership, the preceptorial system lived up to its promise. Discussions with our intimate quintet (professor included) were vigorous and relaxed. In larger courses, one could easily sit silent, soaking up information but not contributing a word. In this one, everyone had to participate.
Within my department, I took a new course from professor Daniel Kahneman titled The Psychology of Decision Making and Judgment. It challenged assumptions about rational decision-making and suggested new paradigms for applying psychology to government. Rarely do psychologists and policy makers think of themselves as partners, but in Kahneman's course (cross-listed between the Wilson school and the psychology department), their interdependence was evident.
About two dozen of us met with the professor in a hybrid lecture-seminar format twice a week. The professor regularly set aside portions of his planned agenda to respond to students' questions, and sometimes our class sessions seemed to take on a shape of their own. At a larger university, a teacher like Kahneman would be speaking to hundreds of students in a large lecture hall. We are lucky to have small classes, where our questions and ideas can be discussed at length and may even affect the direction of the course.
Of the hundreds of waking hours we spend on campus each semester, a fraction are spent in classrooms. Extracurriculars and studying take up more time, but the 12 to 15 hours a week we spend in lectures and discussions, learning from our professors and fellow students, remain our primary commitment at Princeton. "When I really like a class, it makes a huge difference in the quality of my experience," said Meesun Hong '98. "The more I realize where my interests lie, the more I appreciate what this place has to offer."
Jeremy Caplan cowrote The Student Guide to Princeton and has written for the Student Course Guide.