Page 262 - WhyAsInY
P. 262
Why (as in yaverbaum)
not sure what that meant, but I assume that the punishment stopped me from bringing dates into the house for all of fourteen days. That was no problem. Not bringing dates into the house was a skill that I had perfected long before.
The real problem for me, however, was that when I applied for admission to practice law in New York after passing the bar exam, I had to admit on the standard questionnaire that I had in fact been on proba- tion at one point in my otherwise illustrious and spotless college career, albeit that it was only “social” probation. Accordingly, when I went before the Character Committee, a condition precedent to admission, I was compelled to give a disquisition concerning the meaning of “social probation” to very much older attorneys who were kind enough to keep their faces as straight as I kept mine during the interview. And I never mentioned Joan.
Speaking of Joan—or, I guess, not speaking of Joan—in the early sixties a couple of Harvard students invented a dating tool called Oper- ation Match. Because Operation Match was developed before anyone had conceived of the Internet or owned a computer, it required you to fill out in ink a lengthy questionnaire about who you were and what your dating preferences were. For a few dollars, Operation Match guar- anteed that it would supply to you the names of five suitable young ladies who were in a school near you. I’ve got to give Operation Match (or my methods of finding dates) a certain degree of credit. When I received my list, I found that I had already dated two of the five named matches, one of whom was Joan.
Anyway, for all of the dating that I managed to do in the two last years of college, I regard only one relationship as serious. Susan Benson (Gillett House) from Beverly Hills, California, whom I first called after I spotted her at a party at Amherst, was, to me, the love of my college life. She remained part of my life through law school, wrote to me during the summers when we were apart, actually met my parents, and was my date at their twenty-fifth anniversary party, a party, incidentally, that was attended by Sylvia and Harry Rebell. I still possess a DVD of that party (made from a “Super 8” film) in which Sylvia, my mother-in-law-to-be,
• 244 •