Sorority rejection

The first thing that happened to me at my beloved Iowa State University was that the Greek system chewed me up and spit me out like a bit lugie. Then all the smart cute girls stepped on me on their way to the pretty cute girl dance.

I was a fairly confident high school girl. I knew (and know) I'm not gorgeous. Never was. And I've admitted freely that I don't have the girl gene. Girl tools don't work easily in my hands. Give me a curry brush for a quarter horse gelding and I'm at home. Put a mascara wand in my hand and I'm a bit shaky - even now at age 53. Mrs. Elming tried her best in 8th grade Home Ec to teach about the womanly arts of cooking, sewing and makeup. It just didn't take.

I wasn't the most popular girl at AHS, but I always had lots of friends and the smart ass thing worked for me. Keep them laughing! My mother had been a Kappa Kappa Gamma at the U of I. Cindy was a Kappa at Drake. My grandma, Momo was Pi Phi. By God I was a legacy, I was a shoe in! So I put a resume together and thought I was good to go. Little did I know....the late 70's were the height of Greekdom. Chicks were fighting to get in.

Rush week began few days before the rest of the students arrived on campus. I noticed the other frosh girls seemed kinda sophisticated! But I plugged away touring each of the some 15 sororities on campus Alpha to Zeta. (Picture me as Flounder on Animal House) Sadly I started to picture myself as a sorority girl - getting enthused about this prospect.

At the end of the process - you pick the sororities you're interested in and they pick you. But if you're not picked by anybody, you get a blank paper. And that's what I got. So I called my mother crying and she came to get me for the Labor Day weekend, while the other "picked" girls were busily doing fun Greek activities in fun pretty cool ways. Undoubtedly the girls on my dorm floor who had been selected. They knew the ugly truth - I'd not been "cool" enough to be Greek.

God was smiling down on me that next week when I got back to campus with my tail between my legs, my little spirit crushed. A nice cool girl named Vicki who didn't give two hoots about sororities walked into my dorm room and asked if I wanted to go buy a football ticket with her. The rest is history. I got over it. Sure it still hurt sometimes - especially that first year. But I got involved in my own life - in the dorm and then in an apartment with my own good friends. And I didn't need no stinkin' sorority.

How ironic years later in Creston when I Leslie Bullock Goldsmith was selected Zeta Iota "Girl of the Year" of my sorority. Who is cool now? Go Greek!