Something about Madison changes after the freshmen get here. Everything feels a little different, which is only to be expected. But it's not really the freshmen themselves that one notices. It’s more the effect they have on the rest of the city, and how other segments of the population begin to change their behavior after September begins. Somehow everything becomes louder. People feel the need to talk quicker, to drive slightly faster, wait for less time at stop signs; the whole of central Madison becomes more frenetic, as if everyone has given up on trying to interact with the world in a civil way and is now concentrating on just being heard above the din.

Of course, the tribes of roaming underclassmen that clog the streets on weekend nights certainly add in a very tangible way to the feel of Madison during the school year. For example, one night last February, before I had experienced the beauty of Madison during the summer, I was walking down State Street with a couple of friends when we heard a noise advancing on us from down the street. I had never heard anything like it before and neither had my friends. It was indescribable, way more than simply strange or unexpected. It changed the whole atmosphere of the street. None of us had any frame of reference to figure out what it was or where it was coming from or what could possibly be making it. It was a weird, unplaceable multi-toned rhythm—one could have imagined that, somewhere on a side street not far away, ten or fifteen children were all slapping wooden blocks together in more or less the same beat, one or two sometimes falling out of rhythm but always returning within no more than 4 or 5 beats, and all of them intent on making as much noise as possible. The din grew louder as we walked on. Attempting to guess what the noise was, we hazarded several possibilities, including a new type of hand-drum percussionist banging away somewhere in a corner, a large vehicle with gut problems churning down the street, a late-night parade of some sort, or a family of hoofed mammals on the loose.

As it turned out, the last two guesses were fairly close.

We were still trying to decide what we thought the noise was right after we crossed Mifflin Street and saw, walking up the street toward us, a good dozen or so underclassmen girls, all dressed in some variation of what I believe is called the Little Black Dress, all wearing impossibly large heels. All walking in the same rhythm. All stomping the poor concrete squares of the sidewalk with their wooden footwear in the same beat, making enough noise to be heard blocks away. All walking with their makeup-laden eyes pointed straight forward, each girl wearing an expression that I would have previously associated only with drill sergeants and gym teachers, staring straight ahead with not a hint of a smile.

It was, for a small portion of a second, the scariest thing I had ever seen.

They had no idea how silly they looked. They must have noticed the attention they were drawing from other pedestrians but they seemed not to be aware of why people kept looking at them funny. They merely continued pounding their way up State Street, barely leaving enough room for people to walk past them to the group's left, and as my friends and I condensed ourselves to single-file in order to fit past them, we were unable to contain ourselves. We erupted into laughter. We didn’t want to be rude. It’s just that sometimes one’s psyche has no other response for a truly bizarre stimulus than to release itself by laughing, and this was certainly a bizarre stimulus if my psyche had ever seen one.

As we did our best to hide our faces and hold in the loudest of the guffaws the girls in black were unwittingly causing, they all continued on their earnest, clattering march, ignoring us, except one. This one, single girl turned her face from the crowd for just a second, and looked at us with the tiniest expression of quizzicality. As if she knew, sort of, that Something Was Up, but she couldn't quite grasp what it was, or what exactly it had to do with her. Then she turned her head back and they were gone, clopping their way up the street.

Of course, it’s not every night that one must contend with fifteen identically-dressed percussion instruments for sidewalk space. A lot of the time it’s just the globs of young, cell phone-equipped men who congregate outside of bars and spill out onto the street. For a good idea of what the world is really like these days, make your way through a group of these people, slowly. Listen in to their cell phone conversations. Frequently you will hear up to five people talking very loudly about the positions of their various bar-hopping buddies:

“Hey man! Hey… hey, where you at?… What? …Naw, man, we’re all at Brother’s! [short pause] …Brother’s! [another pause, broken by the lighting, with a Zippo, of a cigarette] …Yeah! We were gonna meet [Shelly, Cindy, Tiffany, etc.] over at [The Pub, Brats, etc.]… no… yeah! …What? Dude, I can’t hear you! ….What? …What?

Or, alternatively but somewhat less frequently:

“Hey, baby, where you at? …What, baby? [pause] Naw, we’re all at Brother’s. [pause] …You gonna come over to… what? …Wait, baby, I— [long pause, accompanied by pained facial expressions] No, no, I wasn’t— [even longer pause, during which the young man occasionally lifts the phone off his ear to hold it halfway down to his waist, rolls his eyes, and looks around to see who’s watching] …Listen, baby, I was just gonna— [yet another pause, the details of which are best left to the imagination].

I’ll spare you any more of that. In fact, if you were able to read all of that dialogue, which sounds like some bad screen writing but is in fact virtually verbatim, without beginning to feel dizzy, you might want to get a checkup soon, or put the brakes on, or something. I personally am only able to handle it due to extensive experience in walking down State Street at bar time.

Madison during the summer is naturally not free of such absurdities as those listed above; it’s simply that, once September rolls around, there are a lot more of them. The downtown in the summer months has the personality and easy self-confidence of a young, hip married couple, the type who might usually go to bed early but will still party with their 21-year-old cousins if asked. Madison during the summer knows that it doesn’t need to spend every Friday night being seen on the street in its new threads, but not because it’s become boring. Far from it. It just knows better ways to have a good time.

Once the underagers return to the city, however, with their passionate and confused self-consciousness, their need to be recognized by peers who are all, unbeknownst to them, just as uncomfortable and insecure as they are, and their –I’ll admit it— almost endearing affectations, Madison’s personality changes. It picks up more of the insecurity, the need to be seen, the insatiable desire to keep up with fashion and strange, momentary styles. The transient feeling returns. We dwellers of the areas east of the Square are mercifully spared the brunt of these effects, but they exist nonetheless, working at the edges of our powers of perception, subtly but very surely changing the fabric of the town we live in.

Not that I’m suggesting anyone do anything about it, of course. What would be the point? It’s a better idea by far to just sit back for the next 9 months and enjoy the show, watch the hordes of confused freshmen bounce their way from party to party until by May they wander all the way out of town. Despite the change in character that accompanies the return of the school year, Madison is still, and I think most people are with me here, an agreeable place to live. I don’t worry about getting mugged as I walk down my street at night. I’ve never been carjacked in Madison. I feel pretty safe here, all in all.

But I keep an eye peeled for squadrons of girls in little black dresses and big, wooden heels.

-Connor Wood

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