What recession?: USF fundraiser
After my morning class today, I was walking back to my dorm when I saw something quite peculiar in front of her main entrance. Smack dab in front of our main door was a giant Chinese-themed stone arch. It looked like it belonged to the entrance of Chinatown. As I walked inside and past our event rooms, I saw the a sea of ornately decorated dinner tables. They had beautiful green and gold (our school colors) table cloths and huge bouquets of exotic/tropical flowers. The hallway was lined with giant planters of bamboo trees. I thought I had accidentally walked into
P.F. Chang's . They even had a wooden, room-length model of the Golden Gate Bridge.
A couple of hours later, I left the building to go to a meeting. On my way out, I saw a team of tuxedo-clad waiters preparing trays of delicious-looking hors d'oeuvres. Several more were carting in cases of expensive champagne.
As I made my way to my meeting in Kalmanovitz Hall, I saw that someone had ordered rolls and rolls of green carpet (like a red carpet only...green) and nailed them down on our cobble stone walkway to usher guests into the reception hall. It looked like the magical road to the
Emerald City . Only instead of following the Yellow Brick Road, you had to follow the Green Astro Turf Road? Anyway, it was pretty amusing until the party coordinators standing at the entrance refused to let me through. They insisted that I take the side or back doorways to get into the building.
I guess my jeans and hoodie didn't qualify as fancy enough.
As it turns out, it was a fundraiser event for the
Center of the Pacific Rim , which is our school-affiliated program dedicated to education about, well... the Pacific Rim. I guess the guests were pretty wealthy, considering dinner cost $200 a plate.
I'm glad that the alumni donors are generous enough to keep donating money to our school, even if it's through lavish dinner parties. They're the ones who make it possible for us to get an education. So if we have to shmooze with a little booze, why not? After all, it only sucks when you're not invited to the party.