23% of Delta Gamma’s fall 2024 pledge class in UCLA’s Royce fountain.
Three years ago, I wrote this post about my experience at UCLA Bruin Family Weekend. I have done this three times now, this year with a second Bruin daughter. It’s time for an update, ideally one helpful to future UCLA Bruin Family Weekend visitors.
First, I can be of no help to those whose child is not in the Greek system, or to those who actually signed up for formal Bruin Family Weekend events, attended lectures, breakfasts and the like. These could be amazing events. I’ll never know.
For those still with me, let me start by noting that, perhaps most critically, parking in parking structure P2 is not in fact free on Sundays or any other day, and that an assiduous parking-related UCLA employee may well leave an $81 ticket on your windshield should you assume so. The actual visitor parking fees, which I am unfamiliar with, are reported to be less than $81.
That said, this elegantly named parking structure is right across the street from the sorority houses on Hilgard Avenue, and, should you be attending the presentation ceremony for your daughter, parking there and paying the appropriate fee in advance is a good move. Should you fail to do so, you may find yourself writing a superfluous blog post to compensate for your parking ticket through a future tax deduction (legitimate).
The sorority in question was not Kappa Kappa Gamma, as was the case three years ago, but rather Delta Gamma. While certainly analogous, and well gammaed, they are entirely different organizations.
My younger daughter, who will remain nameless but may be one of four Mayas in her pledge class of about 70, pledged DG. Her sister, now a senior, was, as the rest of those who counseled on the matter, just fine with this.
During the presentation ceremony, dozens of “bigs” in black dresses introduce the 70-odd “littles” in white dresses at breakneck speed, describing them as chill and lighting up the room and the greatest and so funny and amazing, all of which is true.
A newly presennted pledge on one of the Delta Gamma rooftop decks, post presentation.
It is interesting to contrast the differences of a college senior and a college freshman. I don’t know that, any time in adulthood, a difference of 3-4 years in age is so stark. I feel rather similar to 51-year-olds, for example. The college senior has tired of Rocco’s (this a Westwood bar/club that 21-years-olds avoid because the crowd is too young) and is thinking about law school or whether to hire into the company they interned with last summer. The first years want to get their hands on more alcohol.
And having seen it twice now, I can say without qualification that the first month of school for a young woman who joins a sorority at UCLA (or, one assumes, any other house at any other university) is as profoundly consequential as any 30ish-day period of their lives. You have the launch of your academic career (no offense to high school); you have, in this case, a new, big city to call home; and you have a ton of new relationships to navigate, many of whom, unbeknownst to you and despite old people repeatedly telling you as much, will prove to be lifelong. Plus all the booze, the sleep deprivation, the lingering cough, the adaptation to living in a dorm triple roughly the size of your bedroom back home. It’s a lot.
The 21-year-old is the old hand, having done the internship, the semester abroad (Madrid), the internship in greater Boston. With a boyfriend she met not long after pledging herself (an SAE, which is emphatically not the Society of Automotive Engineers), in a massive apartment with 11 buddies also too old for Rocco’s, some of them gunning for med school, some math gurus, all looking ahead as they scheme to bequeath the lease of the place to the next cohort of to-be-lifelong friends.
Though they’re not too old for drinking games, either.
The parent, whose definition of “old” typically applies to parents now in their 80s, and in contrast with whom he feels lightning fast, can feel old himself. He learns new words constantly. “You’ve got hella lore,” I was told, after noting that I once interviewed the now clearly bananas Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose father was killed the year of my birth. The blazing pace of conversation, fueled by the superior horsepower of the young mind, impresses and occasionally intimidates. Make no mistake, you of middle age: Your mind has declined in lockstep with your body. It’s just that your experience can still, for a few years yet, mask it.
Bruin Family Weekend hotels: you can probably do the Found, the Comfort Inn, or the Days Inn in Santa Monica Boulevard for a couple hundred bucks a night. Comfort Inn is my present favorite, solid breakfast, $10-a-night parking, less than 15 min to campus, about the same to Santa Monica Pier, depending on traffic.
If you have the opportunity to ride a party bus rather than a school bus to the Rose Bowl for the obligatory Bruin Family Weekend football game, take it. Stop-and-go traffic on the 405 is entirely pleasant with blinds drawn, lights and lasers aglow, music blasting, and drinks available. (This assumes you’re not driving the party bus.)
In the party bus
Should traffic be such that this becomes a two-hour commute, a bathroom stop at Jon’s supermarket next to the Wienerschnitzel in Valley Village may be required.
The line for the Jon’s Fresh Marketplace bathroom.
You will be dropped at roughly point A and walk to roughly point B for the tailgate once at the Rose Bowl.
Here you will stay and drink more and chat until entering the stadium with roughly 11 minutes left in the second quarter. You will not quite be able to get over the fact that UCLA-Iowa is a Big 10 game. You will leave at halftime, third quarter tops. This is how UCLA football “fans” roll. Your 21-year-old may remark matter-of-factly that five sorority sisters are on the dance-with-pompoms team, that two are cheerleaders, and that the UCLA quarterback has kissed roughly two-thirds of her roommates and is “a total slut.”
The scoreboard shows the minutes and seconds of UCLA-Iowa football to be observed in person on this day.
The party bus on the way back will be worth missing UCLA’s narrow victory, should you end up in a party bus in the first place, and should UCLA play and narrowly defeat Iowa (an improbable combination, but you never know).
It all will set you back well over a grand, the parking ticket not helping in this regard. But it will most certainly have been worth it.
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