ROSE HALL—Family Weekend is traditionally characterized as an opportunity for parents to learn about their children’s lives at Cornell, for students to hide their stashes of illicit substances, and for dining hall workers to clean up unusually messy tables. However, for Katherine Booker ‘27 and her recently divorced father Mark Booker, this family weekend was anything but traditional.
Katherine pinned the blame on her roommate, Linda Hollis ‘27. “My father showed up and suddenly she pulled out a costume, and claimed she’s a ‘young woman who was really into recently divorced dads,’ while looking straight into my father’s eyes. I’ve never been more uncomfortable in my life, until two seconds later when my father started flirting with her.”
Mark Booker defended himself, claiming, “I was just making small talk, it was a great costume. I was a big fan of the whole ‘willing to go on plan B’ schtick that… Linden? I think that was her name, had. After two decades of raising Katherine, I’d rather not go through that again.”
“The real trick is the character that I play,” Hollis explained. “I needed traits that were particularly appealing to aging men in the middle of a mid-life crisis, like ‘hand stuff,’ ‘looking vaguely similar to your wife twenty years ago when your marriage was happier,’ and ‘not complaining about problems with the bank.’’’ The physical aspect of the costume is just a push-up bra and some more cleavage than usual.”
Hollis hopes that with some slight alterations, like ‘pretending to care about academia,’ the costume would be a fan favorite among her professors too.
Like This!
