On the last day of classes at Forest Hills High, Ernest Acherbaum is finally ready. A group of students from his senior class plans to travel to Rockaway Beach as soon as the last bell rings, where they will play volleyball and coo over their yearbooks and smoke into the night.

So apparently they’re making a TV show about Whitman College, the new four-year residential college projected to open in 2006.

1. Always substitute the uncomfortable wooden chair at your table for one of the more comfortable computer chairs.

Two test panels, perhaps six feet tall by four feet wide, one of argillite, one of Wissahickon schist, stare blankly over the rubble of the torn up tennis courts just south of Dillon Gym. They prefigure the coming radical transformation of this open space, which, before it was covered with tennis clay, was landscaped as football and then baseball fields, but which has never before been built upon.

Frank O’Hara writes a poem
about why he’s not a painter, and in it
he writes a poem called “Oranges”
with no orange.
So I’ll write a self portrait
without myself.
I’ll write instead about what I like:
the opera, “Surfer Girl,”?walking right after it ...

So it is cozy. You might say small. Or even absurdly tiny.
And it is busy. Teeming, if you prefer. Perhaps you stand a greater chance of being struck by lightning while clutching a winning lottery ticket and barebacking flying swine than eyeing an open elliptical machine during peak hours.

I walked into the University chapel with a group of white-haired men in blue suits. I paused in front of an usher who wore a nametag with an orange and black ribbon pinned to it: Somers K. Steelman ’54. I extended my hand for a program. He looked at my unbrushed hair, sweatshirt, jeans, and flip flops.