The Jolliest Bunch by Danny Pellegrino

Author:Danny Pellegrino
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks

Parents Weekend

The leaves fall every October on the gorgeously landscaped green of Ohio University, the setting of our next unfortunately true story. It’s a quaint college town straight out of a Nancy Meyers movie. Exposed brick adorns the architecture, and local businesses line Court Street, where students descend every year to buy their schoolbooks. It’s where I spent my first two years of college and home to one of the biggest Halloween parties in the country. In such a Gilmore Girls-esque town filled with artisanal coffee shops and young adults fighting the Ohio chill with oversize sweatshirts, it’s shocking to see nearly thirty thousand partygoers dressed like Austin Powers and promiscuous nurses every October 31. The beauty of Ohio University is the yin and the yang of the town. It’s cozy and beautiful yet filled with debaucherous students drinking like fish. I’m talking the biggest boozers in the world. I’ve never seen humans drink the way they do in Athens, Ohio.

College and drinking go together like mac and cheese. Young people are finally free from the shackles of their parents and surrounded by coeds their age who are all looking to socialize. They have four-ish years to do keg stands and power hours, theme parties and ice luges. Ohio University turns the hobby of drinking into a sport, and the students are some of the best alcohol athletes in the entire world.

Not only are the Halloweens wild, but there are various other weekends that are strictly boozing holidays. Street festivals where your entire job is to black out and family weekends where relatives and loved ones come to visit, stay in the dorms, and wake up without a memory of the night before. Many of the students come from a long line of Ohio University grads, so the parents get to arrive in Athens and relive their youth on these special occasions. They drink as much as if not more than their kids, and you often see moms falling down the stairs, dads hitting on their kid’s friends, and bar tabs reaching the high heavens. My parents, Linda and Gary, visited together my sophomore year and couldn’t quite hang like some of their contemporaries.

Mom and Dad drove down on a Saturday afternoon from their Cleveland suburb. Dad had a green-and-white football jersey, and Mom brought me fall word art to hang in my dorm: a wooden sign that listed autumnal buzzwords in various fonts. Pumpkin. Football. Patch. Grateful. Apples. Autumn. Leaves. Bonfire. Harvest. Pie. Sweater. Hot Cocoa. Hayrides. And in the center? Home.

“Dan, I brought you this for your room. A little slice of home for when you miss us,” Mom said as she leaned the cheap frame against my combination microwave-refrigerator.

“So what kind of trouble are we getting into?” Dad asked.

“We missed the football game, but my roommates got a table at one of the places on Court Street, so we can meet them there and eat!”

“Should I change? What kind of restaurant is it?”

OU didn’t really have restaurants, just dive bars that served pizza and a little buggy that made burritos until 2:00 a.

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