PicoBlog

In 1995, I put pen to paper (literally, this was pre-Common App) and applied to two colleges: The University of Wisconsin in Madison and Marquette University in Milwaukee. I applied to UW because my boyfriend was a freshman there and I was convinced we were endgame. (I’ve written about him on here before; he was the Chicago Tribune’s Teen Movie Critic which to 17 year-old Brook Busey was just about the hottest, sweatiest, horniest thing imaginable. I was something beyond an odd duck.)

I’d visited him on campus several times, driving north across the Wisconsin border— the Cheddar Curtain, as Illinoisans call it— with a baggie in my lap filled with loose change for the tollway. Road trips back then required dedication, an atlas, commitment to fiddling with the radio knob as a preacher’s paean to JAY-sus phased in and out of Matchbox 20’s latest hit. If you got lost or broke down, you might find yourself on a country road, waving your arms like a Sim as a Jeepers Creepers-ass truck (your only hope for aid) rattled ominously toward you. I was always relieved to reach Madison, a brochure-beautiful college town. I was charmed by the rowers in their shells on sparkling Lake Mendota, the hippie shops on State Street that sold Guatemalan sweaters and cones of patchouli incense, and of course, Fraternity Row, where my boyfriend lived in a brown brick house with keg lines built into the walls. Madison was the place for me, I’d decided. It was time for me to reinvent myself as the kind of person who got into a good college.

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