Battle of the Fridays

If you are one who frequents the Street, you may know that Princeton has its Thirsty Thursdays and Successful (or Sloppy) Saturdays. Lately, however, there has been talk of a new day to party. Enter Princeton’s new and improved Fridays.

While Charter Fridays have long been an institution here at Princeton, Colonial Club, with its recent increase in membership, has begun a relentless onslaught of student DJs and ridiculous themes to try to dethrone Charter’s grip on Friday frivolity. While Colonial has clearly signaled its intent to wage an enormous party battle against Charter, Charter has retaliated with innovative lasers, well-executed games and merry sing-alongs to “Sweet Caroline.” Welcome to the battle for Fridays.

Although not a Friday partier myself, all the talk about Colonial and Charter piqued my interest. Eager to discover how much fun I had been missing, I recently set out to investigate the party atmosphere of both these clubs.

Throughout the night, I noticed that the Colonial dance floor, complete with disco ball, gradually filled as the night went on. Downstairs, a sizable crowd of laughing and smiling people swarmed around the few tables available for games. Colonial seemed to have some advantages, including high(er) quality beverages and great energy.

As I began to ask the Colonial partiers why they weren’t at Charter, there were two main responses.

The first I will categorize as the Desperate Friday Partier. Upon mentioning Charter, the voice of a DFP became increasingly panicked as thoughts began rushing through his or her head. Was Charter having a party he didn’t know about? Was he missing out on a better time? Was he more likely to have a dance floor makeout at Charter? After mentioning Charter, I would be immediately questioned about the status of Charter and everything I knew about what was currently happening there.

The other response, I will categorize as the Younger Sibling Response. Though tamer, the YSR involved undue amounts of sassiness and showiness — just like those times your ridiculously annoying kid brother insists on making everything a competition, even that one time when you just wanted to play Pokemon Gold alone, but he insisted on battling you, and you ended up forgetting to switch Kakuna with Victreebel, and you ended up losing, and he never lets you forget it. Yeah. It was kind of like that. These younger-sibling types insisted that there was a competition and that Charter Fridays were an antiquated social construct.

After leaving Colonial, I went to explore Charter.

Behold. Charter is gigantic and gorgeous. The dance floor was decked out with a near-epileptic assortment of laser lights, and the basement was filled with an army of tables waiting to be Ring-of-Fired. As the old-fashioned jukebox busted out classics, I asked people what they thought about Colonial Fridays. While most Charter partiers pointed out that Colonial was fun on Fridays, there was a contingent of Colonial denialists, global-warming style. These denialists refused to acknowledge that a Friday could exist without Charter and that there could be no “battle” between the clubs because mere mortals aren’t capable of touching Charter Fridays.

Sure,there were some diehards on both sides. Some Colonial people will never admit that a Charter Friday could be better than a Colonial Friday, even on the night of the famous “Charter Blackout.” Some Charter members will continue to ignore the threat of Colonial. But come on, guys, don’t you realize that you don’t have to do this? Now that Colonial is throwing good parties on Fridays, people are coming out in record numbers to both clubs. You’re both winners! Everyone’s a winner!

As long as one doesn’t mention the word Charter while in Colonial, and vice versa, I discovered that Fridays can be fun. Surprisingly fun. While I had thought that I would be investigating a merciless and thrilling Charter-Colonial death match for Fridays, I found that instead a different kind of battle was brewing. Not a battle for Fridays, but a battle for the weekend. Watch out Thursdays and Saturdays, because we, we, we so excited about gettin’ down on Friday.