Stalin, stereos and pickup lines: A room comes to life

I had always known Veronika Lipkova ’14 for her quirky dorm room and even quirkier roommates: Colleen Carroll ’14, Radha Sarkar ’14 and Cristina Anastase ’14. I figured it would be interesting to get inside the minds of these girls and see what makes their room so remarkable.

Although I’ve been to their room many times before, I was overwhelmed upon entering by a wall covered with construction paper hearts. On them, an assortment of Grade-A panty-dropping pickup lines whose themes range from eating club stereotypes to genetics. The inspiration came when Veronika lost her prox and a friend suggested, “If I were your prox, I would be in your pants all day long.” Other crowd-pleasers include “Will you be my late meal tonight?” “Support Cross-Pollination” and a map of the Street with pickup lines that seem too accurate to be officially published here under my name.

My personal favorite was an imagined conversation:

“They call me Princeton cuz my little prince weighs a ton.”

“Are you sure they don’t call it the Dinky?”

“As long as this train stops at your station, baby!”

Clearly, ridiculous innuendos abound. Radha claims that once they started “they just couldn’t stop” until they were finished at 4 a.m. one weekday.

After I had inspected the wall, we sat in the giant mass of blankets, quilts, pillows and clothes that carpets the floor. The first question went off without a hitch. I confidently transcribed that Veronika was from the Czech Republic, Radha from India, Cristina from Romania and Colleen “just from Jersey, about an hour up Route 1.” Unfortunately, the interview hit a rough patch by the second question. I asked the girls what they would be declaring as their majors this semester. “No,” they said in eerie unison. It isn’t that they won’t have majors; I’m pretty sure they’re all diligent students with absurdly intimidating engineer titles, like aerospace. Rather, they simply weren’t interested in answering such a dull question. I’m afraid I may have twitched there for a moment, dumbfounded by the fact they had so flatly rejected such a simple question. I abandoned any hope for a structured interview and just let their room do the talking.

The wall full of tongue-in-cheek advances was just the tip of their idiosyncratic iceberg. Its focal point is a hookah in the middle of the room, appreciated and enjoyed by the masses of Butler. Desks seem to serve no academic purpose here. One is covered in candies, chocolates and truffles from around the world, as well as a “fruit basket” of long-since-emptied 99 Black Cherries schnapps, banana rum cream and actual pears. Nearby, a collection of records from Madonna to Joanna Newsom gathers dust because they have no record player. Another desk is home to what can be best described as a family of blown-out stereo speakers going to the opera. They are stacked and each has a unique hat and jewelry; the daddy even has a disco-ball face. This, along with strings of flamingo-shaped bulbs and Asian lanterns, helps provide light during their dance parties, which regularly feature Brazilian jazz and African tribal rhythms. Roses, sunflowers and ferns — named Jim Morrison and Celia — grow in Coca-Cola bottles beneath a giant aluminum foil photo-negative portrait of Josef Stalin; but don’t worry, they’re not Communists.

Tales of drunken vagrants using their common room as a hostel and conflicts with Public Safety seemed like pure lore but were frequently interrupted by “a great video I just found” of some Soviet cartoon or a great new song to dance to. Every time I am in that room, the energy bubbles over, absolute strangers jump to join the cacophony and pretensions dissolve. “The room sort of soaks us in. It morphs on its own. But it will tell us when it’s had enough, too. Sometimes things just disappear if the room doesn’t want it.”

Having spoken to these girls, I realize that at Princeton we just want the SparkNotes. We would rather know a person’s major, birthplace and extracurriculars than their quirks and passions. Such is the nature of Bicker, internship interviews and first-time introductions alike. But when talking to these girls, the cold, hard facts seem to fade away. They are their quirks.

The great thing is that we’re all this quirky. Face it, if you were nerdy enough to get into Princeton, then you must be pretty weird. In the future, please try to heed that mysterious motto that greets the room’s visitors: Support Cross-Pollination.