We went to sleep. At dawn I woke up still wearing my clothes and went back over to the dorm and typed up a copy of my skit. The Chi O’s loved it of course. Our president called the president of the Sigma Chis and he agreed to lend us real Sigma Chi pledges to help put it on and even sent a sophomore to boss them around, a chubby good-natured young man named Hap Dumas. We started rehearsing every night and Hap and I became friends. He was studying sociology, a new subject for which there only seemed to be one book, The Lonely Crowd, by David Riesman. He was forever quoting from the book and trying to characterize everyone according to what kind of house they lived in. Middle class, upper middle class, lower middle class, and so forth. Of course everyone wanted to be in the upper middle class or nothing. When I described Mother’s Victorian mansion on Wheeler Street, Hap immediately decided I was upper middle and fell in love with me. It was useful in getting the skit produced but it was impossible for me to get interested in a good-natured boy who loved me. I had been cathected by a narcissist. The only men who could interest me had to be completely unavailable or even slightly mean. I could love my English teacher or my lab instructor or someone with terminal cancer, but not just someone who wanted to love and have fun with me.

“Just go to a football game with me,” Hap kept asking. “You can’t understand Bama if you don’t go to the football games.”

“I don’t like to see them knock each other down. When I was a cheerleader I never even looked out on the field.”

“You could go to one game and see if you liked it.”

“I might. When we get through with this skit maybe I will.”

We won first place in the Derby. The entire Greek community of the university turned out to stand around the outdoor stage and watch the skits. After a series of very silly farces, “The Muses Come to Tuscaloosa” came on. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. It had a story. It had allusions to the past and good costumes and I was fabulous as Mnemosyne. Afterward there was a party and Hap dragged me up onto the stage and danced with me. His big happy body had great rhythm. He was a happy man. He swung me in and out and twisted me around and made me look good. Afterward we necked on a sofa in the living room until the real housemother made him take me home. I slept that night in the guest room of the Chi O house. I was a celebrity. I had written the skit that won the Derby. I was a playwright.

I was awakened the next morning by our president.