With its picturesque lake and hallowed stone halls, Wellesley College is not exactly known as a wild party school. When Wellesley students do party, they typically venture into the city on the Local Motion — or, the artist formerly known as Peter Pan — to mingle with other students at any of the dozens of Boston-area universities. But sometimes, the daring few do host parties from their Wellesley dorms. Here are their stories.
This October, 30 loved ones gathered in Olivia Holbrook’s ’20 Claflin single for a Jury Duty party. The week before, Holbrook was called to jury duty and decided that the best way to prepare for her civic duty was to practice. Acting as judge, she designated three friends to act as the jury, and invited the other partygoers to fill out a Google Form if they would like to accuse one another and have the case brought before the makeshift court. Clad in her graduation gown, miniature gavel in hand, Holbrook laid down the law with several dance breaks in between. The best memory? “When justice was served to the guilty! Especially to someone for being too wholesome and the punishment was that the whole room had to compliment them,” said Holbrook.
Last winter, Ely Willard ’20 and Camille Brunetti ’20 invited a handful of their friends to relieve some stress before final exams with a Silent Pre, a pregame for the Primal Scream. The Primal Scream, one of the louder traditions at Wellesley, takes place at midnight the final night of reading period. Students run outside of their dorms, release a cathartic scream into the cold winter night and then immediately return to their rooms to review one more chapter. Willard and Brunetti had a different idea last year as they tried to do a silent disco that was meant to be perfectly timed to coincide with the scream. Brunetti had made a playlist that started at 11:47 p.m. and ended at 12:00 a.m., but things did not go entirely to plan. “Everyone was slightly out of sync with each other, so we aggressively lip synced different words at each other,” said Willard.
Hannah Kernen ’20 invited a group of their friends to a Halloween party this past weekend. Kernen said that the favorite part of their Murder Mystery Party was when “a cowboy, a punk rocker and a drunk sailor performed a bad rendition of ‘I Will Always Love You’ to a shocked crowd. A true party classic.”
True to Wellesley style, Vita S-F ’21 hosted a two-for-one party, celebrating both her birthday and the first time she had sex. In May 2019, she and 22 friends gathered around two cakes, one that said “Birth” and the other that simply read “Sex.” “I had to ask the poor woman at Roche Bros. to write both of those on the cake, and she laughed at me,” said S-F. “I joked that she must get weird requests all the time, but she said this was one of the weirdest ones.”
Wellesley may never earn its place amongst the legends of college partying, but its students invent the most creative themed parties, bar none. Here’s hoping I get invited to one someday!
