Homecoming 2004: You can't understand where you're going until you know where you've been

It’s finding a new dress for a dance. Meeting an old friend at a picnic. A chance to make memories – or to relive them. Homecoming sentiments seem to come in more flavors than Baskin-Robbins, judging what by what current students and alumni recall of their experiences.

Like the 31 flavors of frozen treats, recollections can be sweet. Or they can bring back the momentary blinding “ouch!” of an ice cream headache.

Sophomore Elizabeth Allen arrived at Virginia Wesleyan in 2003 with a freshman’s anticipation of her first college homecoming. She wanted to do it all. She even joined friends who entered the 2003 Air Band competition.

“We did theme songs from old TV shows, ‘Cheers’ and ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,’ ” she said.

That didn’t bring a prize. But the dress Allen got for the homecoming dance was a sure winner. Formal. Pink. Not cotton candy pink. Slinky pink. $127. And worth every penny.

“You have this dream of what the night will be like,” Allen said.

She smiled a little ruefully, remembering a date who had promised dinner at a nice place. It turned out he didn’t have a reservation.

“We ended up at the Norfolk Marriott, where the dance was held,” Allen said. “There I was in a formal dress, sipping Coke and eating chicken wings at the sports bar.”

Not a good start. But there was still the dance.

“From the minute we walked in the door, he kind of ditched me,” Allen said.

First chicken wings, then a disappearing date.

But the night was still young.

“There was a band I wanted to hear playing at a pizza place, so I left, came back to meet my friends when the dance was over, and we went to a party in the hotel,” Allen said. “We partied all night.”

Allen caught a little shuteye toward dawn.

“I slept in the pink dress,” she said. “My mother would’ve killed me for that.”



But she woke with a more philosophical attitude toward the evening.

“I can laugh about it now,” said Allen. “If you have good friends around you, nothing turns out to be that big a deal. I actually had a good time.”

Homecoming dances in hotels with decorations, themes and fancy eats all reflect a tradition that has blossomed over recent years.

SGA community coordinator junior Angie Hunt says that this year’s dance at the Sheraton Oceanfront hotel in Virginia Beach will have exotic touches in décor and menu, reflecting an “East Meets Wesleyan” theme.

“There’ll be fortune cookies, spring rolls and other hors d’oeuvres with an Eastern flavor,” Hunt said.

Some couples, Hunt and her date among them, will enhance the experience by going to a pre-dance dinner at P.F. Chang’s in Virginia Beach for oriental cuisine.

With 23 years at Wesleyan, Dean of Students David Buckingham can remember homecoming dances that were somewhat more, well, homely.

“The dances were in the gym,” he said. “We’d decorate and then we’d throw a basket of potato chips on every table.” Even so, alumni from the ‘60s and ‘70s have fond recollections of those times.

Jesse Fanshaw, Associate Director of Planned Giving, came here as a student in 1968 and graduated in 1972.

“In the early years, it was a family thing,” Fanshaw said. “There were tailgating parties where we brought our own food. We ate and drank with our kids running all over the place.”

Fanshaw remembers how often he had to fish his then 3-year-old son, Dave, out of the creek. That 3-year-old is now a senior at Virginia Wesleyan.

“Our children grew up here,” Fanshaw said. “It wasn’t unusual to bring your youngsters to a homecoming and have a favorite professor know each child by name.”

“Homecoming is about all kinds of relationships,” said Ann Shappell, a member of the first graduating class of 1970. On staff at Wesleyan since 1980, Shappell is now the Director of Church Relations.

“It’s a time for ties to develop and deepen among students, alumni and faculty,” said Shappell. “Homecoming can even be about a relationship to a particular building here on campus, a hall where you studied or a dorm room that’s full of memories.”

For Shappell, the family aspect of homecoming has always been strong. She met her husband, John, at Wesleyan, and they brought their three preschool-age children to early gatherings.

“There were only 75 in that first class,” she said. “You got to know everybody.”

At home on the grounds of Wesleyan since childhood, the Shappell daughter Jennifer followed her parents’ lead, graduating in 1997. Now Jennifer’s daughter Emily, 20 months old, will come to this year’s festivities with her grandmother, taking family homecoming traditions into a new generation.

Homecoming 2004 and its weekend of festivities will come and go. But for some alumni, the bonding with old friends goes on all the time, in less formal, more frequent and spontaneous ways.

Bob Dwyer graduated in 1995. He came to homecoming festivities pretty regularly the first few years.

“There was an alumni-student lacrosse game I’d always go to because some buddies in my fraternity were playing,” he said.

Last October, Dwyer got married, in a celebration to which he invited numerous old friends from Wesleyan: “We go to each other’s weddings. That makes for its own special kind of homecoming,” he said.

Dwyer welcomes the occasions at which he and Wesleyan pals get together locally, often in a restaurant or sports bar. He smiled at memories of friends’ nicknames that have stuck, even a decade later.

“There was Joker. There was Bodyguard. And I was Bawb,” he said, giving his name the salty, Boston twang of his hometown. “Guys on my hall told me my accent was sometimes so thick that nobody could understand anything I said.”

For Dwyer, the friendships have stayed thick, though his accent has been tempered by years of living in Hampton Roads, which makes him part of another group for whom “homecoming” has additional meaning.

Rebecca Desjardins, Publications Manager in the college communications office, pointed out that approximately half of all Wesleyan alumni actually live in Hampton Roads. What’s unusual about the statistic is the fact that many of them came to Wesleyan from other states and never left.

A 2002 graduate and a native of Connecticut, Desjardins is among them.

“I have friends I went to Virginia Wesleyan with who came from Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and other states,” she said. “They graduated and stayed on here to work.”

This is exactly what former “Marlin Chronicle” editor in chief Desjardins has done.

From this weekend’s festivities, to the spontaneous get-togethers that keep old friends connected, to the growing numbers of alumni who came from other places and now live here, it’s all homecoming – just different flavors.