Vassar Today

What Would Old Groucho Have to Say About This?

By Daniel Steckenberg ’06

Nothing can quite prepare you for the jolt of walking into a room and finding that 300 Groucho Marx-glasses-wearing faces are staring at you, complete with 600 bushy eyebrows and 300 absurdly inflated plastic noses. But, ready or not, that’s the sight that greets you in Terrace Apartment 16, where seniors Elizabeth (Liz) Hixson, Meghan Overgaard, Kathleen Munson, and Genevieve Lidoff proudly display one of Vassar’s more idiosyncratic decorative flourishes.

 

Students in front of groucho wall of photos
Students in front of groucho wall of photos

Ronan Dunphy ’02, a member of the men’s cross-country team, started taking the pictures in his senior year with his housemates Patrick Healy, Melanie (Bea) Milligan, and Kendall Manlove (all ’02). Dunphy and company thought it would be funny to take pictures of cross-country team members wearing Groucho glasses. Since then the collection has been passed down from year to year in what has become a cross-country team responsibility. Eventually favorite professors and family members were asked to strike a pose wearing the Groucho frames, and even President Fran Fergusson and her dog have been immortalized on film. At this point the photos easily fill an entire wall and, in fact, have come to be known as simply “the Wall.”

For her part, Hixson is both bemused and respectful. “I’m honoring a tradition,” she says. “It’s kind of a way of looking at the people who have gone through Vassar.” The age of the pictures means that the faces on the Wall are “a mixture of people I might know, and people I’ve never seen before in my life. Sometimes when I’m flipping through I think I’m going to have nightmares about these people,” she jokes.

 

Selection of Groucho photos
Selection of Groucho photos

But mostly the pictures are much more funny than they are scary. They depict people in varying degrees of silliness, from the deadpan to the clearly inebriated. At its most basic level, the Wall is a game to play with your friends. The Groucho mask obscures so much of a person’s face, Overgaard observes, that “even our friends are hard to recognize—we’ve identified a few people by something that they’re wearing.” Overgaard also points out that the Wall is “a good conversation starter,” a safety net for the always potentially awkward party scene.

On the other hand, one gets the sense that this Wall represents something more to the members of the cross-country team. Hixson says that donning the glasses is “one of the first things you do on the cross-country team as a freshman.” The pictures are something that every member of the team has in common. It unifies them and stands as a record of everyone that has passed through the team over the course of five years.