As I have indicated before in these stories, I worked for many years as a professor of English at a small but respected New England college. After I retired a few years ago, I didn't have a lot to do, so I decided to write my memoirs regarding some of my relationships with the students. In all cases, I have changed the names of course to protect the guilty. This is another one of those memoirs.
As with all colleges and universities, our little college was home to a few sororities and fraternities. There were three fraternities and three sororities. Also, as with other colleges and universities, the sororities and fraternities engaged in a hazing and initiation of incoming members. The initiations usually involved some form of humiliation and in the case of the fraternities, some heavy drinking. The college finally put a stop to the heavy drinking when one 18-year-old male student died from alcohol poisoning after being required to drink a fifth of vodka in one night.
The sorority initiations invariably involved some form of public nudity as a part of their humiliation, and this is what I would like to write about.
I have to admit out the outset that I was not an actual witness to this event, but I was able to see it via videotape, so that is what I will try to describe to you.
One of the original initiations apparently required by a sorority we'll call Gamma Gamma Hutcha was that the prospective member—in this case a pretty blonde girl from Waller, Kansas—had to go with her boyfriend to the McMahon Furniture Store on Main Street in our small town of 8.500 and ask to see a bed, since she and her boyfriend had been "just recently married." Fortunately, the beds and mattresses were kept on the second floor.
The couple would be accompanied by another girl from the sorority to verify the initiation and a boy from Upsilon fraternity to document the activity via video camera.
After viewing the bed and mattress, the girl would ask the salesperson if she and her "husband" and their friends could have a little time and privacy so that they could discuss the purchase. The salesperson was expected to go downstairs so they could be alone.
Then the girl and her male friend would have to undress and have sex on the bed. The sex would be recorded on the video camera, and it would have to be "complete." How all three of them got out of the store without being arrested was up to them.
The understanding was that the videotape was only to prove the initiation and that it would be shown once only to the other sorority sisters and then destroyed. It was destroyed all right, but not until it had been copied by the man who took it and shown to the rest of his fraternity on "movie night."
This young man was one of my best and brightest students, and I often joined him for a coffee and conversation at the Student Union after class. And since I was his favorite professor, he told me about the tape and asked if I would like to see it. I told him I would love to see it—as long as he didn't tell anyone else he had lent it to me. He agreed. I thought if I liked the tape well enough, I would make a copy for myself. I had a library of videotapes I had collected over the years with some interesting student activities on them.
I recognized the young lady as soon as I started the videotape. It was Courtney Carter, a beautiful blonde 18-year-old freshman, about five seven and maybe 110 pounds. She was in my English 101.The setting was the second floor of McMahon's Furniture Store, and Courtney was dressed in the usual college garb of jeans and a sweatshirt. She was accompanied by her boyfriend "husband", Gary, a girlfriend from the sorority, and that girl's boyfriend—who carried a video camera. All of them were standing at the side of a four-poster mahogany bed with a blue quilted bedspread.
