al I washed dishes at Commons. Another fellow and I held the record for washing the dinner dishes faster than anyone else, including soaking all the creamers. Reed had its own china, with its seal on it. Unfortunately, when they converted the Commons to the theatre building for a while, when the Ford Foundation gave us a matching gift, which would probably be '55-'60, they packed all of the dishes away. They were in barrels in one of the mezzanine room floors and somewhere, somehow, they vanished. And I've never found any student that took them. I think that the drama man, who was an eccentric person, suddenly saw them and said, 'What the hell are they doing here'? And he dumped them. I made quite a search for the china. Couldn't find it anywhere. We didn't have enough to use for a dining hall. And they were just packed away and vanished. Which was too bad, because it was really pretty elegant stuff. Another thing that was interesting was that the woman who ran the Commons [Ann Richmond Brownlie, '23, Director of Dormitories and Commons, 1930-1948] had to teach some of the students that artichokes were good to eat, and how you ate them. And she stood up in the Commons once and said, 'Now, pay attention. And you take a leaf like this and you bite down on it. Scrape it off.' She was the subject of a song the students sang, too. I won't sing it, but it says: 'Miss Brownlie is the Commons' boss/ A wily lass is she/ She puts out food to keep our chastity/ Every night we dose ourselves with aphrodisiac/ And hie ourselves to Anna Mann for nightly bivouac.' 2007-05-23T00:00:00-07:00 alumni@reed.edu false Carleton memories-of-commons 11074 Whitehead pu 2009-05-06T16:43:14-07:00