Column:

Homecoming steeped in beer, not tradition

By Dan Friesen

Published Oct. 23, 2007

Homecoming hit campus like a Category 4 hurricane of lameness this weekend, leaving nothing but hangovers, injudicious coitus and pomped tissue paper in its wake.

Most reputable sources agree that Missouri invented the homecoming celebration in 1911. We were getting our asses handed to us on a regular basis by the Kansas Jayhawks, so MU's athletic director, Chester Brewer, decided it would give Missouri football players an added incentive to play well if alumni were to come back for the game. That added incentive was called "tradition."

Tradition is a genius concept. You can get people to do almost anything by appealing to tradition, assuming they are weak-minded and you're insistent. Tradition can compel people to write and perform atrocious skits for a talent competition or to kill Nicolas Cage with a bee helmet.

I've always been suspicious of tradition and tend to not let it affect my behavior, yet I'm also suspicious of myself. I often worry that I'm overly judgmental and iconoclastic for iconoclasticism's sake; perhaps I'm too hard on people who live the way they're expected to. Perhaps I'm the one with the problem.

I decided this year to embrace the spirit of homecoming, but doing so was slightly problematic. I haven't graduated, so I have no alma mater to which I can return.

After a good-ish amount of thought, I decided the best way for me to "homecome" was to make my long-awaited return to the place I cut my party teeth: East Campus. In the days after my dropping out of high school, I frequented East Campus. It was the ideal place for a minor to drink, especially a minor with a ravishingly full beard. There are always parties to crash, and the only thing easier than getting in is stealing beer once there.

My typical strategy was to tell people that I knew "Ethan" if I was asked who I knew at the party. That usually worked. I remember one night about four years ago, I stumbled upon a party on Bouchelle Avenue. It was a party thrown by the then-editors of The Maneater, and I wasn't exactly invited.

When I arrived, I was met with skeptical glances and cold glares. When I left, at around 6:30 a.m., the editors were begging me to write for them, a proposition at which I laughed.

"I'll never write for that piece of shit paper," I told them. That was before I knew about that sweet $10-a-week salary The Maneater's columnists enjoy.

I'm sad to report that my return to my spawning ground was not all I had hoped it would be. I went to a cowboy-themed party, but couldn't stand all the jokers in their bandanas and cowboy hats yelling, "Yee-haw!" I decided it was time to stumble down the road and find a better gathering to steal beer from.

I needn't bore you with the details of my night, as it was pretty boring. Suffice it to say that I went to four separate parties and they were all busts. Each one looked exciting from outside, but once inside, it was clear that the party was little more than six people sitting on a couch listening to 311 playing really loudly.

Then it struck me; this is really what homecoming, and tradition as a whole, is: outward displays of enthusiasm that, after any examination, are empty.

I'm all for people getting really drunk and yelling about how much they love MU, but please, cut it out with the sanctimonious bullshit about how you're upholding "traditions" and I should respect you for it. All you're doing is getting drunk at 11 a.m. and yelling M-I-Z at people who walk past your barbecue.

And I have a hangover to sleep off.

df5d2@mizzou.edu