I heard recently through the grape-vine that this year’s Epicuria was a great success, replete with music, costumes and cheesepuffs. Thinking about that party—which I helped to throw more than a couple times—brings back great memories. It is part of what makes Bowdoin special—it’s the one time of year that the whole campus descends on a social house and it’s the only consistent party thrown by an athletic team.
It is a courageous act on the part of the rugby team, which puts its reputation and social well-being on the line for the sake of kicking the non-academic side of things off right for the whole school. It’s early enough in the year that everyone is energetic, the team’s seniors and juniors pull in a great group of upperclassmen, while underclassmen are generally eager to see what Bowdoin’s social life is all about. Everyone costumes up, which is great. Add in a DJ, a band and some cheese puffs, and you have a recipe for some plain and simple fun.
Bowdoin is a great school that is long on history but short on memory. This is one of the consequences of the disbanding of the fraternities in the early 2000s. As necessary as that event was for the school, it accidentally cut off Bowdoin’s de-facto source of social history—that is to say, the hazy memories of fraternity members.
Bowdoin has many traditions and rituals, but the history of many of them seems to have faded into legend or obscurity. I hope you enjoy the amateur account I have managed to dig up on this particular annual event.
Toga parties are of course an obligatory part of the College’s experience, thanks to the movie “Animal House,” although we can’t entirely credit John Belushi with this rite-of-passage. At least a couple of toga parties were existant in the show “Spartacus,” (which is a source we can trust for the purposes of this article) which demonstrates that folks have been donning togas and libating for thousands of years.
Toga parties were a commonplace occurrence at Bowdoin College in the late 20th century, serving as a sort of default theme; after all, frat houses are rarely hotbeds of creativity. Allegedly, Chi Psi (now Reed House), threw the quintessential one. Interestingly, an annual rite at this event involved a small group flooding the basement at the end of the party to do some body surfing. Interestingly, each year this group narrowly survived electrocution by having the foresight to tape shut the electrical outlets. More interesting: students of this era actually thought that taping shut electrical outlets is what spared them electrocution.
After the “Dissolution,” an enterprising group of rugby players, headed by Whit Schrader ’05, decided it would be a capital idea to take over the toga party, and the first ever Epicuria was born.
Since then, each August or early September, the men’s rugby team has engaged in an annual exercise to plan and execute the event, which involves frantic trips to Walmart to clean the store out of plastic ivy and grapes, a rush of excitement at discovering that the store stocks faux columns and a witch hunt for the best artist on the team to make a banner.
More than one of these planning sessions has occurred in panic in a car on the way back from a rugby match, realizing that Epicuria is “tonight, no wait, next Saturday. No, wait, it’s tonight! Did anyone get cheesepuffs?” The supplies and refreshments are mostly done at personal expense, although recently Ladd House and the Inter-House Council have helped to buy the snacks and entertainment.
A few experiments have yielded subprime results. Leopard print togas are always attempted and rarely deliver.
In a fit of remarkable self-control, the team did not publish a series of advertisements involving a keg, a rugby ball and a toga-less teammate in 2009. The October Epicuria of 2008 proved too cold for togas and lacked upperclassmen, who were “beyond” social house events by that point of the year. The College Houses thereafter graciously allowed the first or second Saturday of the school year for the event, which is prime calendar real estate and a remarkable courtesy.
Through trial and error, it has become a fixture of the school’s social calendar, and generally is well run. This is no small feat given the organization abilities of the average rugby team. Epicuria is never thrown on a Friday. Although the party was founded in 2002, this year’s was the 29 iteration. The best way to make a toga is not to use a bedsheet but to buy three yards of fabric. This realization typically takes three years and three wasted sets of linens to occur.
Aaron “Kelsey” Cole is a member of the class of 2011