The knot in your stomach returns.  As your red Ford Taurus, or some other fine automobile the friendly people behind the Avis desk lent you for your driving pleasure in the state of Ohio, crosses a set of train tracks you see the first buildings of what had until now been a city with the renown of Atlantis.  Liberty Street stretches before you as your mom slows down so you can take in the sights of the approaching buildings.  With the old lampposts lining the boulevard you look back and forth and ask yourself, “are we truly entering a college town?”  The majority of the buildings look like their best days are a few decades behind them. 

As you approach Beall Avenue where according to Google Maps you should turn right, you look left and praise internet directions and their infallible accuracy as Beall seems to come to an end at Liberty with the exception of a Drive-Thru liquor store which would be directly in your path if you continued straight across Liberty.  Insignificant as this building with a tunnel continuing on to the other side with a Dinosaur atop its entrance may seem more than one good man has purchased provisions for his journey in pursuit of the American Dream in this sin-city of the mid-west.  However, with more than a glance you turn left and continue up a road flanked by all manner of fast food, but still holds a classy touch due to the median and the numerous street lamps that inhabit it.  With the sensory over load that comes from your first college visit you find yourself suddenly at the admissions office were you slowly open your car door, take one more look in the mirror to permit yourself one last opportunity for positive self reinforcement and step out of the car.  Welcome to Wooster.

You enter the admissions office and the next hour and a half seem a blur as you go from your interview, to your campus tour, where the tour guide is well spoken and fairly decent looking distracting you from the somewhat cushioned co-ed lurking just beyond your gaze.  However, it is quite possible you will distinctly remember a male student remarking, quite seriously, to his buddies of the orgy last week and how “outrageous it was when that girl us eat chocolate covered strawberries from her sweet sweet pearl.”  You have just received your first insight into Woo-Vegas.  Whether this debauchery occurred or not is not my place to say.  Instead the message you should take away is that for those willing to seek it out there is a dream hidden among the magnificent trees and lush green quad of The College of Wooster. 

This dream is Woo-Vegas.  What is Woo-Vegas you ask? Is it a strip lit up by bright lights and sensory images abound complete with it own mock Eifel tower? The answer is no.  It is a state of mind that transforms the doldrums of cornfields into a brilliant spectacle of impromptu sideshows and public indecency.  Some may believe that small liberal art colleges are lacking in a certain amount of collegiate luster.