This is my Alter-Ego Page. It’s about me, the woman who came of age (18) without ceremony in 1961. That’s not true, here’s a picture of my ceremony.
My parents are proudly dropping me off at Syracuse University. I’m behind the camera. My new housemate Gretchen, standing next to my mother, will soon trade her single room with me for my unbearable double.
100 Waverly Place (I’m not sure anymore of the address) had a live-in housemother and an evening sign-out-in sheet on the hall desk. No males allowed past the living room.
When I left SU four years later (still in loco parentis) the first co-ed dorm would be opening in the fall. I stood there with this knowledge, staring across the quad at the high-rise with its rows of glass windows. So in 1965 something big was ready to happen to, and for, women, but my childhood wrappings were too tight for me to respond, and I went straight into marriage.
I should have caught a glimmer, though, when in October 1964 my housemate Neilia said in the doorway of my room, “Come on, Robert Kennedy’s speaking on campus and we’re all going!” I said, that’s a Democrat and my parents are Republicans (who smoked Chesterfields), so “No thank you”.
Now I ask you, is there a foolish thing you said once and regretted for the rest of your life? A time you leaned with all your might against the door opening to your life?
Thus appeared my shadow side, my alter ego, the barely aware young woman who searches even now in my 70’s for a way to go with Neilia.