Saint Mary's and Notre Dame - Drink To The Lasses

"The vast, looming bulk of Notre Dame, swaggering in its heavy cloak of myth and history, tends to unfairly overshadow Saint Mary's--a school that, with its small classes and tight student-professor bonds, actually embodies the old Notre Dame ideal better than today's Notre Dame does; and that ranked higher in its category in the U.S. News & World Report survey... that Notre Dame did it in its. Notre Dame students--men and women alike, as susceptible to SAT snobbery and brand-name cruelty as an other adolescents--have an ugly habit of looking down at their Saint Mary's peers: Saint Mary's women, the crude stereotype goes, wear skirts and seek husbands; Notre Dame women wear sweats and seek careers; and Notre Dame men are torn between the two." -Domers, Kevin Coyne

I wrote about Notre Dame quite a bit while a columnist with The Observer. These columns, often the very same column, tended to spark one of two responses:

1. If you love Notre Dame so much, you pathetic wannabe, just go there.

2. Why do you hate Notre Dame, you horrid ungrateful thing?

You see now why, after five years of this, I find it necessary need to lick all my food before I eat it. As Coyne alludes, Saint Mary's and Notre Dame muck along in an anciently muddy brother-sister dynamic: We grew up together, share one another's toys, anchor to the same Church, and often date and marry each other. It is at this point, I must add, the sibling analogy falls horrifyingly apart.

Perhaps the SMC-as-slut stereotype was born of the fact that while several Saint Mary's and Notre Dame students take co-exchange classes, for the most part the student bodies make the most contact (awesome, that sounded all dirty and stuff) on weekends, after the Ladies of the Belle Tower have had a few. Notre Dame beholds its own women on a twenty-four-hour basis, whereas for many Domers, the only time they will meet a Saint Mary's student is in a social situation, by which I mean "spewing madly as Nickleback blares from speakers nailed to the ceiling."

Much as I dearly, deeply love my brother school, I find chalking up the entire almost-festering aspect of the relationship solely to a battle over The Men as overly simplistic, perhaps even a little bit sexist. It wasn't like I headed across the street for my Marion theology class dressed like this:

Often I showed WAY more cleavage.

Oh, grow up, I'm kidding. Thirty grand a year is an awfully steep price for an MRS degree, is all I'm saying.

Some have this assumption of Saint Mary's as The People Who Couldn't Get Into Notre Dame School For Girls, which... just...no. You don't beat your brains out to get into Notre Dame, fail, and then simply rebound across the street. A womens' college is an all-or-nothing proposition, not a fallback position. Belles are a bit like Marines: You are one or you're not. You don't just kinda sorta do it.

I tend to think of the two schools as two very distinct halves of one campus, and refer to them collectively as The Womb at BlondeChampagne as such. One has a big football stadium and the other has sun-dappled little concrete benches to read on during spring afternoons. One has a Burger King in the student center, the other has... cubed ice, somewhere. And yet both are chambers of the same heart; they pump as one. There's a wall between the two, but it's built of the same DNA.

"But," I was often told, "you can't have it both ways."

Feh. When I was a sophomore, I found myself displaced at a Notre Dame pep rally, where ND students sit by dorm. I went to the SMC student council and suggested a Saint Mary's student section, and was turned away with lovely smiles and the gentle suggestion that perhaps I try attending the sporting events of my own school first rather than organizing ways to cheer for Notre Dame, which seemed to be doing quite well on its own in that department, thank you. I pointed out that, agreed, we had a right jolly track team, but seating Saint Mary's students as a block at the rallies, seeing as most of us were going anyway, would have the positive effect of presenting us as one school, instead defaulting to the SMC diaspora we tend to become within the Notre Dame social scene. The doorknob then proceeded to hit me very firmly in the buttocks.

But just after I graduated, Saint Mary's co-hosted a Notre Dame pep rally. All the Belles sat together. Everybody wore the same T-shirt. Nobody, to my knowledge, died. There was a lot of screaming together, and then one & all went and jumped up and down together to Nickleback in a very tiny and sweaty dorm room.

As it should be.

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