In the Wild

Observing the young of the species in their natural habitat

It’s been a while since I saw anyone wearing cowboy boots with short-shorts, but I’m attending Parents Weekend at Tulane, where my son is a junior, and I’ve gotten an eyeful of that particular outfit. The final flourish is a crop top, impossibly tight, and there you have the Tulane Female Student Uniform, circa 2024. The girls all look adorable, like giraffe calves—they’re all at least six feet tall—and they’ve perfected a sloppy, clunky cowboy-boot walk, something close to a stomp, which still manages not to jostle the tequila-and-Sprite they grasp in their right hand. I love observing a subculture in the wild.

The boys aren’t nearly as uniform in their uniforms, although on the day of the homecoming football game, it looked like almost all of them were wearing some Tulane merch—branded tee-shirts and often a Tulane hat, and, in a few bold cases, a pair of Cat-in-the-Hat-adjacent striped overalls in green and baby blue, the Tulane color scheme. My son, an iconoclast, was proudly wearing a “TULANE DAD” tee-shirt, because he likes to fuck with people’s heads. Either that, or he was signaling something that would be disconcerting at his tender age of nineteen; please, no.