LOLA’s

By Bilsana Bibic

Lola’s is a well-established tradition at St. John’s, Santa Fe. It is a senior-organized and senior-led party (fundraiser for our senior gift).

The name comes from a senior who attended the school around a decade ago and who really wanted a party to have her name. In order to make this happen, Lola organized a party full of card games, centering it around celebration of beauty, especially women’s beauty. For this purpose, she picked gorgeous women to be her servers, bar-tenders and dealers, calling them all Lolas.

In the years to come, the party maintained most of its original purpose – it is still filled with card games and celebrates beauty. Instead of calling all of the servers, bar-tenders and dealers Lolas, the generations to come named the party Lola’s, in the honor of Lola who started it.

Since most of our formal parties at St. John’s carry a name of one of the books or authors we read – Exodus, Symposium, Faust etc. I thought I’d share this story with you in order to show that not all traditions have a rational and program-related name. Some carry names of anonymous ex-Johnnies who just wanted to party in style.

This year, Lola’s featured our tutor’s (Mr. Kingston’s) band from town, our student-led jazz band and dance music from the Titanic era (Titanic was the theme of this year’s Lola’s). I was one of the servers and dealers during Lola’s, and from a host point of view can confidently claim that everyone had fun and lost some money for a good purpose – our senior gift.