Big Pic	January 2003:  Dinner at South One evening in May 1968, when I was a junior at Oberlin College, I brought my Instamatic camera with me to dinner.  From my seat behind the bread basket, I snapped two square photos.  Now, 3½ decades later, I've gotten around to stitching those snapshots together into the composite below. I'm not sure whose head I cut off on the left; from the shape of his chin, it might be Jeff Hanna.  Meanwhile, Lee Beckett is buttering his bread while Barbara Greer looks at me in surprise.
	The scene was the dining room of the South Hall dormitory, where we sat at round tables with ten chairs each.  The picture reminds me of such trivia as the tableware and the stainless-steel pitchers of milk and water.  But the dinner hour at Oberlin was about more than just food.  It was a time to learn how to socialize. When I was a freshman, we were required to dress for dinner.  Men wore suits and ties.  We assembled in the lobby of the dorm, and when the time came, we filed into the dining hall and stood at our places around the tables.  At the head table sat the house mother and a chaplain, who delivered announcements and an invocation before we were seated. But then the dress rules and the tablecloths went away, and the invocation devolved to a moment of silence.  The announcements now were passed around on a printed sheet, "Newscope," which also included headlines from our campus radio station.  One Newscope is in front of Barbara here, while someone at the next table is reading another. By the next year, when I was a senior, the food was served cafeteria style.  Almost all ceremony was gone.