Name: Stephanie Palma

Class Year: 2020

Major: Political Science

Correlate: English, Sociology

Hometown: Manhasset, NY

Current Location: Home due to COVID, NYC office is remote

Life in the Manhasset Bubble

Manhasset is a bubble, similar to the way Vassar is a bubble. It’s a really small town, where everyone knows everything about everybody, regardless of if you’re actually friends or acquaintances with that person, which has its negatives and its positives. For example, you know everyone well enough to say hello to them when you pass them in town. But it’s a negative because everyone knows your personal business, even if they don’t really care about you. It’s also different from the Vassar bubble, because the Vassar bubble is a place where everyone is forced to be your best self and do your part to make the world a better place. In Manhasset, it’s a bubble where everyone puts an emphasis on competition athletically, academically, and in terms of material items. And the material items are to symbolize wealth, and therefore status, and therefore symbolize your importance, which was also hard growing up. 

My favorite place at home to go to is the high school, specifically the turf. I spent a lot of time out on the sports fields growing up, and I have really fond memories of the people in the bubble that, you know, you don’t really know because you aren’t really friends, but with sports you’re connected because everyone is rooting for Manhasset high school. 

The second place that I love to go to in Manhasset is my favorite pizzeria, because pizza on Long Island is really good. A penne alla vodka slice is to die for. It’s just penne alla vodka on top of pizza, with extra cheese. Not only is the food really good, but it was a place where, growing up, all you wanted to do after school was get permission from your parents to go there. It was called “walking,” and you got permission from your parents to leave school without getting picked up or being taken on a bus. This started in fifth grade, and everyone loved to do that on Fridays. Everyone would walk to the pizzeria and sit down, and guys would sit down next to girls, and it was like “oooohh” who ever had a crush on who type of deal. If you had a booth full of people, everyone wanted to be sitting in it, and we would just sit there and order a slice of pizza and a Snapple for hours. The poor pizzeria was probably like “get out”. But yeah, it’s just a fun memory.

Another perk of it being a bubble similar to Vassar, and one of the reasons why I never learned how to ride a bike, is because all of my home friends are within walking distance from my house. So growing up I could walk, and all my best friends from home still live there. It’s kind of funny nowadays. Obviously we know how to drive, but when I’m home it is still like a two minute walk to their houses. 

I think my favorite memories are summers, when we would walk and pick each friend up and then sit on the lawn at Strathmore, [a country club]. We would flip lacrosse nets over so they were on their side, and sit in them like a hammock, and we thought it was so cool. So we would do that for hours, just talking, every summer. It was literally just like a community place, and it was the cheapest country club to belong to because it didn’t have golf. There were no rules about what you could wear on the patio, or other foolish things like at some country clubs. Some make you have to have your shoulders covered, things like that. Strathmore wasn’t like that. So when I was growing up, my parents became members of Strathmore and it was mostly because both my parents worked. It’s within walking distance to my house, and all my friends were members. So my parents would wake me up making breakfast, then they would go to work and I would just walk up to Strathmore. I would swim on the swim team or play tennis, and I would just be there all day. My parents didn’t have to worry about me, because they felt like it was safe. I had a number so I could order food when I needed to. So it was kind of like my daycare. A nice day care, but that’s where I grew up and that’s where all of my friends were, and I got really close because all my friends, well, their parents work too. We started doing that in second grade. I think the supervisors of the club kind of had this known thing that there would always be this group of girls and guys, like we were all around second grade when we started just walking up unsupervised and hanging out with each other. 

Working Parents

In Manhasset, it wasn’t common for both parents to work. Growing up I would always feel really, really embarrassed about not having one of my parents pick me up from school.  I would feel so guilty taking a ride from other people who had stay-at-home moms or dads, or having to walk home. I was embarrassed that I didn’t have a parent to pick me up from school or drive me to practice and would have to either take a taxi or walk or scooter there, which is super dumb but it felt like a big deal. 

After field hockey practice or after dance practice (I was a dancer throughout elementary school and high school) everyone would congregate by the door waiting for their parents to pick them up. I knew both my parents worked and I was too embarrassed to take rides from other people. So I would lie and say, “oh my mom is just running late, she’s going to be here,” “No, no, I don’t need a ride. Thank you. My dad is coming. He is just running late”. And I would literally say no to a ride because I was embarrassed and I would wait until basically everyone left and then I would call a taxi to bring me home. We had a local taxi service, and when I was in second grade, my parents called and registered a number for my sister and me. When you’re in second grade, you don’t carry money, and you don’t even have an I.D. card or a phone for that matter. Sometimes I would walk to the taxi station and ask for a taxi before I had a phone, because Manhasset is a small town and is safe. 

I could walk there from school, from dance, from sports, and I would get a taxi near my house. I would get in a taxi and say, “can you please take me to 250 Mill Spring Road”. And they would drive, and at the end of the ride they would give me a slip. I would write down my first name and last name and I write down my code. It was 537. And then the taxi driver would call their supervisor and say my code number and their supervisor would charge the ride to that code. 

Audrey

My mom loves to work a lot and so does my dad. They hired a nanny to take care of us, but Audrey didn’t drive. She lived with us for probably 10 years. Except then she ended up moving out and we stopped having her because someone actually told the town that she was living in our house. In Manhasset you’re not allowed to have someone living in your house, unless you registered for it, and someone told on my family that we had Audrey staying with us so then she had to leave. 

I don’t know if you’ve seen “Little Fires Everywhere”. Classism, racism and sexism, all are pretty apparent in the TV show, and that’s how I feel about Manhasset. It’s a pretty judgmental place. I mean, if you don’t fit into the stereotype, you’re not really accepted. So the fact that we had someone living with us that wasn’t related to us, and honestly, the fact that Audrey was black probably was the reason. My grandmother lived with us for a while, and I guess she was related, but no one had a problem with it.

We are still really close with Audrey which I am really thankful for. She lives in Elmont and she isn’t a citizen. So finding work for her was really difficult for my parents. Jackie and I kind of grew up, and even when I was in high school, we still had Audrey coming by the house to literally just sit there and, like, look at the dog, because my parents felt bad being like “we don’t need you anymore.” Both my parents really love her too and are close with her, so we waited until my dad found her a family that could use her help. Audrey says that we are her kids – she is from Jamaica, and her first daughter was killed about five years ago – and she thinks of me and Jackie, [my sister] as her children. 

Keeping Up With the Joneses

So as I said before, in Manhasset, it was like everything was materialized. So your self-worth was materialized into materials. In Manhasset alot of people end up going into debt, because they spend money on things that they can’t really afford because materials are a symbol of wealth and status. 

It’s really suburban. It is the stereotypical Levittown, Long Island start up, where the houses are in grids and they’re right next to each other and it’s like the “keeping up with the Joneses” scenario where, you know, one person gets the refrigerator and then the rest of the block gets the refrigerator. It’s also thirty minutes from New York City, we have a train that runs every fifteen minutes to get there. Most people commute to work. 

Choices

I really wanted to play field hockey in college and I didn’t want to just play field hockey, I really wanted to dance as well. Growing up in Manhasset, everybody played lacrosse and everybody went to play college lacrosse, including my sister. I had to choose in ninth grade whether or not I wanted to do field hockey, lacrosse, or dance. The three of them were too much time and too much money. And so I had to choose two and I chose to not play lacrosse, which was really controversial. But I kind of wanted to prove to myself that it was the right choice. And that meant playing field hockey in college, which no one from Manhasset does. 

I really wanted that, but I also love dance. So I knew Division III was where I had to go. And I wanted a school that would have a dance program, and not a lot actually do, but Vassar does. So that was a draw for me. I also knew the school pretty well because my older sister graduated in 2015 from Vassar. She was one of the reasons I didn’t want to go. I did not want to do what Jackie did; I wanted to have my own life, and I wanted to do my own thing. 

I was really familiar with the school because I had visited her a lot and I knew it was a place that I could see myself loving, but I really wanted to find a place that was similar to it. I didn’t want to do what she did, I didn’t want to follow her. And even though I wouldn’t be there the same years she was, I didn’t want to be Jackie Palma’s little sister. But I couldn’t find a place that had field hockey and dance and felt so homey, and that had as good of an education as Vassar. 

Vassar, Where People are Tied to Spaces

Everybody’s favorite place is the library and it’s such a shared communal space, but I think about what I miss, and it’s the field. I really miss being at Weinberg. It felt like, at least for the fall, that the space was ours. And it felt like we were responsible for keeping it that way. I have so many good memories and so many bad memories there. I didn’t think that I would miss it so much, but Weinberg really is a special place. There’s nothing like walking onto the field, even when it’s not for field hockey, like if I was working at the women’s lacrosse game. I have nothing to do with it, I’m just walking on the field, but Weinberg still felt like it was ours, maybe because that turf was made for our team. Weinberg is one of my favorite places. 

My second favorite place at Vassar is honestly probably Joss. I think it’s also because it was a space where all of my friends became extra close. It’s a dorm and such a stereotypical dorm in the center, like everyone in Joss says hi to each other, even if you don’t know them, because you know that they live a few doors down from you. And the multipurpose room is actually used – people actually sit there and congregate as different groups. And Joss to me symbolizes college. That’s what college life should be like. 

It’s hard because Vassar is a space, but it’s also people, and I didn’t realize that people could be tied to spaces like that. With my best friends from home, I remove them from Manhasset because we kind of remove ourselves from Manhasset. The people of Vassar are so constitutive of Vassar, it’s hard for me to distinguish a place from the people. You know, like the library is a place that I love. But I think I love it so much because of the people that I sit with when I’m at the library. 

One of my favorite memories at Vassar was my freshman year, where I got to know my best friends by sitting with them past midnight in the 24 hour section of the library, getting yelled at because we were being really loud and it was past midnight. So it was time to go to bed and we’re drinking coffee and eating a Nilda’s cookie from the Bean and our hair is soaking wet because we would come back from practice, shower, eat and then all go to the library, which made no sense. And we would get there at like 10, it was too late, and we would stay until 1. That’s where there was a space that we could all hang out at. And you could leave when you want to. And it didn’t seem like it wasn’t forced at all.

My second memory was my first FlyPeople show, when I really didn’t know the people I was dancing with well, because I could hardly go to rehearsals because it was during field hockey season and I was kind of the outcast of the group. I remember the night of the show, where everyone was giddy and excited. And I was getting excited and the people were excited that I was getting excited, and our excitement kind of made us closer. I think it was also important for me to show this second part of me, because I felt like I had kind of forgotten about the dancer in me because I was so focused on field hockey. Finally, I could be the dancer, and have that part of me exposed. 

Vassar.

Vassar. Vassar is a concept that transcends the space of being at 124 Raymond Ave because of the ideals and the principles that it instills in all Vassar students. And I think that’s unlike a lot of other colleges, which makes it really special.  I think Vassar is a home because I don’t think Vassar transcends space. My friends from Vassar are home. Home is when you go on a walk, and you can’t help but smile because the things around you make you happy. It’s when you can go on a walk and even if you get kind of lost, you’re comfortable because the things around you make you feel happy and glad to be there. Vassar is special, and anyone that gets into Vassar is just so lucky.