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Show V So you live in the dorms. How's the food? Do you have reasonable hours? Aren't those rooms awfully small? What do you do up there? The general university student has an image ot the dorms only slightly more cheerful than his conception of Sing-Sing. Endless, sterile corridors, surprise room checks, bare walls and stale food. Yeah. Whereto start? Well, it's true there are corridors and blank walls, and stale food, and a rare room check too; but these aren't the dimensions of dorm life. The halls aren't sterile. In fact, they are often filled with trash and creeping vermin of many sorts. Frisbees fly down them, more than one water fight has rinsed them, and, as any dorm dweller will tell you, they are far from quiet. Those bare walls get covered as soon as they are seen - posters, pin-ups, photos, flags, rugs, dart boards, and (should we say it?) highway signs that seem to have wandered off the thorough-fares somehow. Stereos blaring everything from Hendrix to the "Messiah," bells, wrestling matches, incense, people returning from showers, screams of rage, two hundred typewriters rattling aimlessly, shouting matches, popcorn popping, the late movie on television, neighbors bumming food, card games, doors slamming-aieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Damn dull dorm--so dull, one sometimes has to go to the library to study, then come back when it closes, loaded up with No-Doz and coffee, wreathed red-eyed in a cloud of tobacco smoke, to bury himself in books only to find a clandestine poker party in the study rooms. Barred into his room, alone at last, with a towel under the door so no one will disturb him, the weary resident turns a page and looks forward to the party on Friday night. Or a celebratory beer bust tomorrow, or.... ohblasti'mgoingtobedbeforei-burnout! Living in the dorms is far from dull and stifling. It is actually overwhelming at times, so agressive that a person must get out, take a walk, escape the confines and listen to a placid traffic jam. o Q People transform sterile environ ment 243 |