Great Expectations

I'm old. 

Back in the way back, olden times, when we went to college - that would be the late 1960's, early 19770's - we had less-than-great, one might say exceedingly modest, expectations about what our dorm rooms would be like. We expected clean, we expected small. And that's we got at the clean, small Catholic college I went to.

Freshman year, my roommate Joyce and I were in Room 333 in St. Joseph's Hall at Emmanuel College in Boston's Fenway area. St. Joe's was the newest and largest of Emma's four dorms - it had the "nicest" main lounge (which we never used) - but that didn't have much of an impact on room size or cleanliness, which were uniform across campus. The paint on the cement block walls was a very pale orange, pretty actually, and the drapes were in a darker, still pretty, orange shade.

After moving in, we hiked over to George's Folly in Brookline, which was a wondrous emporium that sold Zig-Zag papers, incense, generally ill-fitting but colorful hippie clothing from India and Latin America, decor items, ornaments, vases, bowls, and a fabulous assortment of Indian-print and Madras bedspreads. 

For our room, we bought matching Indian print spreads: cream, brown, and orange, patterned with small elephants. Sounds awful, but they were plenty cute. I think they cost $3 each. We also got a folky ceramic pitcher/vase and a bunch of straw flowers to plunk in it. I don't remember what we had on the walls, but I think it was the Bob Dylan poster with the psychedelic hairdo. Later in the year, I found a still-wrapped poster of Paul Newman (the one where he's in the white tee-shirt) in a snowbank on Boylston Street, and that went up, too. Our room looked great. 

Sophomore year, we were still in St. Joe's, now in Room 510. The view wasn't as good (other dorms, rather than city life), but we had lucked into one of the coveted rooms with the pale grey walls and the yellow drapes. We went out and got plain yellow bedspreads - I can't remember where, probably some cheap place downtown, but they were too plain for George's Folly - and put our old vase with new straw flowers on the window sill. Then the unbelievable happened. Someone who wanted those yellow drapes broke into our room and swiped them, toppling our vase to smithereens. They actually didn't break in, as no one locked their rooms. (No one had anything worth stealing except, apparently, the yellow drapes.) We got the drapes back. I don't remember who the thieves were, or whether they paid us for the vase.

Junior year, we lotteried into Loreto Hall - a room on the fourth floor, number forgotten. Loreto was older, and the rooms were in need of a good coat of paint. We had no desire to spend the next nine months in a room with dingy paint, so we took the T to Lechmere Sales and bought a couple of paintbrushes and a gallon of pale green (with a slight bluish tinge) paint. Curiously, while we were there, we ran into Sister Ann Rachel, the Dean of Students. At any rate, we saw her heading into the paint department, of all things. We bee-lined out before she could see what we were buying. Our painting our room set off a flurry of room painting on Loreto's fourth floor. Good little Emmas that Joyce and I were, we used a color that would actually have been on the walls officially. Other girls went off the rails: purple, black. In any case, the next thing we knew, all the rooms in Loreto were getting a new coat of paint. (Why they didn't do this over the summer remains a mystery.) The painters on our floor were two Irish guys, Dominic and Vincent. I don't remember if they bothered to redo our room, as we'd done a good job and chosen a color from the dorm-approved palette. 

Our bedspreads were from George's Folly: blue and green Madras. Our room innovation: for a while, we put one of the beds (the usual campus fare: metal frame, skimpy mattress) on top of the dressers, and slid the other one between the dressers for a bunk-type arrangement. It looked great - Joyce always had a super eye (her career was in fashion, and her last position was as the lead designer ready-to-wear buyer at Neiman Marcus) - but it was too much trouble to get into the upper, so we dismantled the cool-looking but user unfriendly bunk set up. 

Senior year, we moved just off campus, paying $150 a month for a two bedroom apartment on Queensberry Street. We furnished it with family castoffs - my parents' studio couch, a table from her mother, two scratchy arm chairs from her schoolteacher aunts. My room had pale blue walls; my quilted bedspread was a cream, royal blue, and navy paisley pattern. The bed and dresser were hand-me-downs from my sister Kath, who'd upgraded to actual purchased furniture. The bed had a nifty bookcase headboard, and two side cabinet "wings". (The original setup must have had nightstand that slid under the wings.) The bed and dresser came blue, but I painted it cream. Or vice versa. 

In the living room, we splurged on a braided rug. I can still picture our turquoise and chartreuse shower curtain. Tommy - Joyce's then BF, now husband - put down fresh linoleum in the bathroom and miniature kitchen. The landlord replaced the 1920's Detroit Jewel stove and oven with a modern appliance. Before we moved in, the landlord had painted all the rooms but hadn't cleaned the bathroom or kitchen. They were filthy. Under the claw-foot bathtub, we found a couple of empty whisky bottles and a ton of dust kitties. 

I'm old.

Old enough to remember that this is how college students lived when I was a college student.

No longer.

At least in some precincts. 

Today, a wave of undergraduates — especially in the southern states — are hiring interior designers to completely makeover their dorm rooms at a cost of thousands of dollars per room.

...This year, according to the National Retail Federation, college students spent about $87 billion, a drop from the high of $94 billion last year, but significantly more than the $48 billion they spent in 2014. This equates to an average of $1,365 per student, the group reports. (Source: NY Times)

Hmmm. I know I'm old, but I'm guessing that I never spent more than twenty bucks outfitting my dorm room, which equates to about $150 to $180 in today's terms.

But students - "especially in the southern states" - have greater expectations than Joyce and I ever did. 

There are design firms dedicated to dorm room living, and the students have budgets running into the thousdands upon thousands, and can cover items like:

...custom fabrics for the curtains, monogrammed pillows, linens, a couch and coffee table, headboard and dust ruffles; handmade murals or removable wallpaper; luxury light fixtures to replace fluorescent lights; and real wood hutches, shelves and cabinets custom-made to fit the room.

One Ole Miss student took one look at her dorm room and decided that it was "'completely not doable to live-in.'" Post design, she keeps her door open with "pride and confidence."

I'm just guessing here, but I'm guessing the students (read: their parents) forking over $10K - more than Ole Miss tuition, by the way - to gussy up a dorm room will be moving into a sorority sophomore year. Naturally, sorority houses at the big state schools in the south are also getting pricey makeovers. Girls gotta Tik-Tok, girls gotta Insta...

Me, I was happy to be away from home, living the life in my cement block-walled room, with my $3 bedspread from George's Folly. 

I'm old.

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