3 Freshmen GERMed After Intense GPB Initiation Ritual
DPS still wants to question this man who was hired to entertain at the initiation party
HENLE— The newly initiated freshmen members of the Georgetown Program Board leadership are in stable condition today at Georgetown University Hospital after having too much wholesome fun at a club initiation party Saturday night.
GERMS, the student EMS service, responded to the scene at 11:32 P.M. after receiving several panicked calls from the party.
“Primarily, we have a situation where students who are usually not allowed to have sugar were forced to chug vast quantities of non-alcoholic jungle juice, also called Kool-Aid,” said first responder Brandon Craggiore (MSB ’11). “Add in the fact that this was the first party many of these kids ever attended and all the excitement that caused for them, it’s amazing they all made it out alive.”
The initiation ritual of the GPB, which is made up of seven or eight students who have absolute power over an annual budget of $100,000 and many of whom are legally blind due to infrequent exposure to sunlight, is said to strike fear in the heart of any teetotaler thinking about joining the club.
“GPB is a welcoming haven for people who, like us, don’t drink alcohol or have sex,” said GPB Terrible Comedy Shows Nobody Wants to See Chair George Rasmussen (MSB ’12). “But it can get pretty crazy at initiation. We stayed up until 11:30 this time, a full three hours after bedtime for most of us.”
A DPS report of the incident provides the frightening details. Upon coming to the party, initiates were immediately forced to name 10 of the 20 worst-reviewed movies of the year, the traditional measure of whether GPB should pay to screen the movie. The intiate who was slowest was made to do a keg stand for a full minute. But the keg was O’Doul’s and nobody at the party knew how to tap the keg, so instead the initiate had to stand on top of the keg for a full minute while sipping a cup of water.
Next, initiates were forced to strip down to their undershirts and the basketball shorts they wore under their jeans and run back and forth in front of the Leavey Center but run slowly enough to make sure they didn’t get in anybody’s way or trip. One initiate refused to remove any of his four layers of clothes and was forced to do a “keg stand.”
$50,000 of GPB’s budget was spent getting Fountains of Wayne to perform a song at this point, but once they were finished, they were quickly forced to leave as GPB members felt a non-Christian rock band might be a bad influence.
At about 10 PM, the Kool-Aid chugging began. Initiates did what they thought was a “power hour” but what was really a competition to see who could drink the most Kool-Aid in the time period. But with the rush of sugar, things went terribly wrong, and nobody at the event could remember what happened next.
One former GPB officer, Mary Ferris (COL ’06), said the initiation ritual often gets this intense. “I have some horror stories. My freshman year, I drank a bunch of Mountain Dew and got completely out of control. I must have square-danced with five guys that night, but it was so many, I lost count. I felt so dirty.”
“I took a pregnancy test the next morning to make sure,” she added, “but apparently you can’t get pregnant from just square dances.”
Vice President for Student Affairs Todd Olson was ecstatic with the news that GPB officers were in the hospital, and his What’s After Dark program released a number of press releases today bragging about the initiation.
“Who says you have to have alcohol to get crazy? This just shows how students never need to attend parties with alcohol because the parties we fund are so much more cowabunga,” Olson said. “But on a serious note, if we continue to have trouble with sugar overdoses, we’re going to have to ban this substance on campus.”
