You may be surprised to find out that I am one of two original co-founders of the Cats Club. Yes, THE Cats Club, est. 1996. You may or may not have heard of it, because it was so exclusive that none of the members even knew about their membership except me and my neighbor Hanna Ruth. (Yeah, double-barreled name. I'm from the South. She is now the mother of twin boys named Drake and Dacey. But actually).
We made up these awesome code names like Cheetah and Jaguar, and being the legitimate cat experts that we were Lynx and Ocelot. We even created an elaborate race to determine who would be the president the first person to run up the slide, climb across the top of the swing set and down the other side, run 20 feet towards the shed, touch the door, run back, jump on the swing and swing high enough to kick your shoes off. In the event of a tie, the person who kicked their shoes farther won.
I won of course, since it was my swing set and I pretty much went through that routine every day anyway while imagining I was a contestant on "Global GUTS."
We spent hours under the overgrown bushes in my backyard sitting on cement blocks, putting together our membership list and assigning people cat code names best-suited to their personalities. I even used my special cat stationery to write out the rules and used nail polish to stick it to my wallpaper (this did not go over well with my father, since my 1848 Civil War hospital house is practically a museum in his eyes). All of the coolest girls in the second and third grade were members, and the best part is we never had to offer ourselves up to their judgment by telling them about it.
Last year during my junior Winter, when I wasn't on campus, everyone suddenly started caring about secret societies. Never before had I taken any interest in them or tried to find out more information about them other than being aware of Sphinx's mysterious mausoleum, they were totally off my radar. I looked them up on Wikipedia and was intrigued by the ultra-elite sounding names like "Cobra" and "Dragon." Then I had several "top-secret" membership lists forwarded to me. Once I started finding out which of my peers was in which one and was able to match faces and personalities to society names, they lost their luster almost as immediately as they had piqued my interest.
Most people I know had the same experience soon after tapping was over, when they realized that all of the members of our secret societies are still just the same old Dartmouth students that you probably already know. That weird kid on my freshman floor is in that one I thought was cool? I must have been mistaken. What, that quiet girl got tapped and my friend in Kappa who is involved in tons of stuff on campus was overlooked? It was like the post-rush disillusionment all over again, when you realize joining a house won't automatically make you a hundred new friends.
For those students who are drawn to secret societies because they think they will be privy to important rituals or instantly become part of an inner circle of the most fun and popular people on campus, the experience after joining one will probably be a disappointment, much as the Cats Club would have become had we actually attempted to recruit members and realized we had nothing to talk about except our favorite cats.
That being said, depending on the nature of the society, I think they at least add much to one's social life and at most broaden and deepen one's perspective, which is all too easy to keep limited at this college. For instance, the wide range of experiences, values, backgrounds and passions represented in my society has renewed my thoughtful engagement in my daily life at Dartmouth.
But I must admit that the initial appeal of the society was that I felt special because I was getting tapped, just as I felt special because I was the president of a club that included the girls I most wanted to be friends with you know, the ones who had binders full of Hanson posters and wrote in that big, loopy handwriting and all played soccer on the same team and already had faux-boyfriends at age seven.
That appeal isn't real. It's perhaps a useful exercise in self-esteem boosting, but it's imaginary. Writing those girls' names down on my list did not make them my real friends any more than joining a society guarantees the respect or admiration of anyone else that you meet. No matter how they organize or align themselves with or against each other, people are just people. They don't stop being people just because they share a certain tattoo or flash the same hand gesture in their Derby pics. They are no more or less likely to be your friend because of your membership or lack thereof in a society, and if they are, then they happen to be people of the terrible variety. Steer clear.
