I don’t know if you know this, but Lara Margie and Laura Shingles are kind of a big deal. They’re very important people. VIPs, if you will.

Let me explain.

At the intersection of Marshall Street and Walnut Avenue, Walnut Hall’s room 207 casts a shadow over all who walk past it. It’s the ‘VIP Room,’ or so the seven pieces of white printer paper that adorn its window imply.

Unlike most dormitory window dressings across campus – which often pledge an allegiance to a sports team, the university or a fraternity or sorority – this window does something different; it praises itself and the people who frolic behind it.

Of course, on the surface, room 207 is just a run-of-the-mill open double – a standard dorm room with no velvet rope.

How do I know this? Because I’m important enough to have made it inside. Well, that, and the fact that they took my picture when I went to their room and put me on their VIP Wall of Fame.

Of course, the sophomore roommates would never have you believe that they’re this uppity. It’s just a joke, they say behind innocent smiles and false stories – which have been so thoroughly practiced that you’ll almost think they’re serious about not being important people.

They’ll tell you they saw a club, The VIP Room on Walnut Avenue, while en route to Erie Boulevard one day. They’ll tell you they were sketched out by the place, but got a kick out of the lone neon sign in the club’s window that read ‘party.’ They’ll tell you they’ve never been to the club, and that they’ll never go.

‘No! Oh my god!’ Margie, a communications and rhetorical studies major, shouted when I asked if they had. ‘It’s scary!’

Then, while trying to reiterate that it’s all just a joke, they’ll quietly imply how important they are. Margie will brag of all the times she’s been asked if she lives in the VIP room. Shingles, a magazine journalism and political science major, will tell of the time one of her ice skating students from Toad Hall correctly identified it as her room.

‘I started jumping up and down,’ Shingles said of how much it pleased her.

But the sign, as big a joke as they claim it to be, remains up on their window since they put it there on Oct. 7.

‘Why would you take it down,’ Margie asks coyly.

Because it’s elitist. And if you’re as important as these girls are, though, that’s the idea.

PETE FREEDMAN IS A JUNIOR NEWSPAPER MAJOR. E-MAIL HIM AT PJFREEDM@SYR.EDU.

Published on April 6, 2005 at 12:00 pm