I was very hard at work on my identity at the time. I wore lots of dark eye makeup, long dangly earrings, and olive green and black clothes to school every day (until my mother cut up my favorite olive green items with a scissor—her way of encouraging me to more fully explore the color palette). But the look on the faces of my parents' friends when they heard where I was going to college indicated that I had hit pay dirt. Being a student at Berkeley back in the '60s readily identified me as a certain type. That was all I wanted in this big world. To be a certain type.

Which is why, when I had to pick a major, I selected art. It tarred me with an identity brush even further. I liked the way it conferred upon me the potential to produce a slate of masterpieces. That was a very nice addition.

The atmosphere of the Berkeley campus was instantly to my liking. I loved that the classes were more than just killing time, like they'd been in high school. But there was one problem. The dorm in which my parents enrolled me was called Stern Hall. It was the oldest dorm on campus, all women, and referred to by its fans as "a sorority compromise dorm." Part of its charm was that it came with a dorm mother, who would have been repeatedly cast as the wife of W. C. Fields had she been an actress. She was a square-shaped dowager with big white hair; a type that I wouldn't have expected to find surviving in the wilds of Berkeley any more than I would have expected to find a ring-tailed lemur. But there she was, presiding over mandatory dorm meetings. This was not what I had in mind for my Berkeley experience.

I was finished with being coerced into a genial group identity. There was a war in Vietnam. There were campus protests daily on every imaginable topic. It was a time to be smart and obscene and messy and enraged.

The one dorm meeting I attended started off on the wrong foot for me when Mrs. W. C. Fields remarked, apropos of who knows what, that "the women of Stern Hall spend hours on their hairdos, and it's the pride and glory of the dorm." I know this to be an exact quote because I found it recorded in my diary.

What I liked even less was that these gloriously coiffed women of Stern Hall were expected to wear a dress to dinner. I was an art student. I prided myself on my face full of charcoal smudges. I not only wore pants to all my classes, I was very busy covering them with a patina of multicolored paint drips. I only brought one dress with me to school, in case of emergencies. This dinner rule set off a loud, wailing siren in my head. I had to get out of there.

Of course, I got no sympathy from my parents. So my backup strategy was to request a box lunch, then eat it for dinner. But sometimes I would eat it for lunch, and then there I’d be, starving at dinnertime, staring at my dress. And I haven't even mentioned the predinner ritual where the women of Stern Hall gathered at the head of a spiral staircase until W. C. Fields’s wife led us, Gone with the Wind style, to the dining room.

Quickly, I located the two other rebellious dorm residents, and the three of us stumbled upon a brilliant solution. What if we wore our dinner dresses over whatever we'd worn to classes. No rules broken, identity intact, dinner for all.

We did this for a few weeks. I don't recall it creating much of a stir. Until we all received notes that Mrs. Fields wanted a word with us.

After that, all it took was a mere forgery of my mother's signature on a release form, and we were free to rent an apartment on College Avenue. At last I was in Berkeley the way I wanted to be: on a mattress on the fl oor of a dining room.

And I lived happily ever after.

Merrill Markoe, whose third novel will be published in August, can be seen in The Aristocrats, doing a filthy homage to the art world. For a complete bio go to www.psychoexgame.com.