Last Friday night, on Feb. 22, white canvas flapped in the winds over the S.S. O’Shea as music floated through the air. Thesis students Becca Caccavo and Myles Rodriguez and second-year Salua Rivera threw this February’s Palm Court Party (PCP) with the theme “SOS: Save our School.” As part of the decorations for this shipwreck-themed party, the sponsors solicited ‘messages in a bottle’ from New College alumnae/i. Over 30 stories were submitted, telling tales from the ‘60s to today. Subjects covered included various events, such as PCPs of past, and other stories that may be unfamiliar to some.

One short undated message read: “One time, the party went until daybreak. At that point the cops shut us down, but there were too many people still awake for us to go to bed. We headed for the pool. Someone had thrown mardi gras necklaces in there. We stripped off our clothes and dove for the beads. Everyone was naked, bedazzled and alive. Also one of the cops was ogling us. So New College.”

Caccavo solicited these stories on the NC(F) Daimon Facebook page.

“For PCP, I wanted to reach out to alumni and get some of their stories, because institutional memory, histories and tradition are integral in fostering a sense of strong community,” Caccavo explained in a Facebook message. “We can never go back to what New College once was, nor should we—but we can definitely create what we want to see our school look like, inspired by the limitless ecstatic wonder of audacious New College students of the past.”

To see the full alumnae/i stories, look at Becca Caccavo’s ‘Post-PCP Statement’ email to the Forum.