Spirits undaunted, we found other opportunities to find blotto-ville.

Periodically we’d make a field trip to library cubicles at Radcliffe on Friday nights and sip on Southern Comfort. If we didn’t see a streaker traipse through the book stacks, we’d wrap it up and head for Casablanca or some other watering hole in Harvard Square.

Perhaps the most telling experience was a night of munchies that descended upon the Wigglesworth suite while watching Saturday Night Live. One of the roommates mistook a candle shaped as a hamburger for something eatable. The next day we were trying to match dental records with teeth imprints on the wax hamburger while stumbling over a half dozen spent pizza boxes.

Sometimes, higher intellectual pursuits crept into the Wiggleworth suite. One night, an amorous interlude in one of the bedrooms was interrupted by a voice from outside. Jon, the aspiring creative writer, had climbed up a tree next to our Wigglesworth suite and in the midst of a full moon, three stories high, he recited lines from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Clearly, Harvard Yard had pearls of wisdom beyond the classroom.

Several of our freshmen encounters had prophetic attributes. Our roommate with creative writing aspirations decided to set his alarm at 3 a.m. everyday. When asked by his bunkmate why he was waking up at this time, he responded by saying that he wanted to record his dreams. After a few episodes of these nightly roosts and reading the creative writing, the bunkmate suggested that his roommate bag the alarm clock and forego creative writing for non-fiction. The advice was prophetic, because a Pulitzer Prize was realized many years later for non-fiction writing.

In another instance of uncanny foreboding, one of the roommates came back to Wigglesworth livid and reported that his freshman expository writing teacher slipped his final grade into an envelope with his girlfriend’s grade. Furthermore, the expos instructor asked when the two were getting married. What seemed like a preposterous question after barely completing the first semester at Harvard College turned out to be a reality seven years later.

Despite our wacky camaraderie, each of us elected to go our own way after freshman year. One took a year off while the other three either found new roommates or single suites. Too bad the Dean’s office didn’t apply that secret formula for matching classmates sophomore year. Who knows what a second year of roommate matching would have produced?