The Wake

Hey Lonely. Tired of drinking yourself to sleep, alone in your studio apartment? Buck up already and ask that girl out from your psych lecture. Oh, I get it - you don’t have a car and can’t take her anywhere. Well, I’m here to save your ass with some ammo for your arsenal of love: obscure facts about the University! For practical purposes, let’s refer to the date as “her” because, let’s face it - most girls have better things to do than memorize worthless tidbits about campus. Unless they’re tour guides or something.

Here’s the plan: take her on a quiet stroll around campus, blind her with a fog of wisdom and ride off arm-in-arm into the sunset (or pluggin’ her digits into your phone under ‘Sweetheart’).

Say you start on the East Bank. Before you mention Eddy Hall, the oldest building on campus, you might want to note the University’s actual first structure “Old Main,” a large building near St. Anthony Falls. Students who went to classes in 1858 called Old Main home until the ‘U’ shut down for a while in the 1860s. What’d they do with Old Main in the meantime? Used it as a barn, what else? When students came back to class in 1867, they just might’ve found hoof prints on the walls and straw in the desks.

As you move across the East Bank, don’t forget Morrill Hall, President Robert Bruininks’s home base. Last year, busy with cutting budgets and raising tuition, Bruininks found enough time to throw a $103,000 inauguration for himself. Tell your date she can send the prez a thank-you note - just address it to his house, Eastcliff Mansion, the East River Road luxury estate the ‘U’ provides for its bigwigs.

The East Bank’s nice enough but kind of stale and impersonal. Take some time on your best date ever and cross the Washington Avenue Bridge to see the bastard son of the University - the West Bank! Stop on the southwest end of the bridge and check out the infamous “shoe tree.” Thousands of passersby have tried to guess exactly how many shoes hang from the branches just off the bridge but none have succeeded. One day, casual estimates ranged from 75 to 239. You can impress your date with the official number: 132. Although, rumor has it a local 6 year old recently put the number closer to “a zillion.”

Look just past the bridge to the Elmer L. Anderson Library, where two giant, underground caverns house more than 1.5 million archived books and other items. A dungeon-like door built in the river bluffs lets trucks and service vehicles into the temperature-controlled storage chambers but students aren’t allowed. (They might accidentally see Goldy Gopher’s world-domination headquarters, located right next to the books).

Your date is going pretty smooth when you pass through the romantic West Bank Arts Quarter. She’s obviously speechless, astounded by your wisdom. You might notice the “No Guns Allowed” sign on the door to the new Regis Center for Art. Nobody’s certain about the last time an actual Republican came within 500 feet of the art building, let alone a gun-toting maniac, but the new sign reportedly keeps them away for good.

While the sun sets as you and your date walk across the 10th Avenue Bridge, tell her about the University’s famous alum, Bob Dylan. According to a biography, Dylan only went to the ‘U’ for one school year, 1959-1960. Different rumors place his apartment above the Loring Pasta Bar, behind the gas station on the 10th Avenue Bridge and some say he squatted in a tree near West River Road for a while, where he penned his famous unreleased tune, “Tree Livin’.” That’s a pretty shady rumor, though. Might want to save it for the second date.

If it’s a Friday afternoon or night, you might see a casually dressed ‘U’ staffer strolling around campus. Don’t worry - he or she is probably just observing the University’s “Maroon and Gold Casual Friday” which has encouraged employees and students to go wild with school spirit each Friday since 1994. And while she’s busy absorbing that tidbit, take her by the Delta Gamma sorority house on 5th Street SE their official flower is the cream-colored rose.

As you can see, it doesn’t take a lot of money or a fancy automobile to have a nice evening when you’re at the University. Think simple, then liberally apply the charm and Boy Scout know-how girls go for. As the date winds up, let her know that bourbon is the official spirit of the United States, by act of Congress, or that in the 1600s, thermometers were filled with brandy instead of mercury. That should change the mood a little