OXFORD - Chelsea needs to loosen up

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CHELSEA'S 'FRESHER' REFRESHER

By HELEN RUMBELOW

LONDON - This morning Chelsea Clinton might be experiencing Oxford's most honorable tradition: the hangover after the freshers' "bop" in University College's 17th-century beer cellar.

The thumping disco music, the lager at a pound a pint and the sweat that rains from the ceiling once everyone starts dancing - and snogging - was a chance for newly enrolled Chelsea to let her hair down.

And those who have spotted the former first daughter walking around the college's Main Quad since she arrived last week - Chelsea has been wearing high heels and tailored outfits amid a sea of jeans and stained T-shirts - already have begun to whisper that it's time for the 22-year-old fresher (or freshman) to loosen up.

That might sound strange, considering Chelsea has come from California to Oxford's oldest college, founded in 1249. But that's life in this quaint English university town - where her dad admitted he once experimented with marijuana.

Certainly, Chelsea will get used to seeing her name connected to the kind of tittle-tattle that might not make her parents proud.

Unlike the strict reporting ban on Chelsea at Stanford, at Oxford the student media is like a mini-version of Britain's gossip-hungry national press, although with less cash than the $150,000 ransom reportedly being offered by London tabloids for a student's kiss-and-tell story.

The two school papers, Cherwell and the Oxford Student, duke it out in their circulation war with gossip columns - and Chelsea has already become a prime target.

The Oxford Student ran a quiz to find out the "best Chelsea Clinton chat-up line." One answer was: "Care for a cigar? You won't have to inhale."

Meanwhile, Marcus Edwards, deputy editor of Cherwell, said Chelsea will be swarmed by men wanting to bed such a high-profile celebrity, and his paper will not shy from reporting the Chelsea tidbits its readers are keen to read.

"We have not had such a high-profile female at Oxford for many years," he said. "There will obviously be a certain cachet attached to seducing her."

"Univ" is Oxford's oldest college, but it is not the stuffiest.

Sure, Chelsea will already have dressed up in a special costume called "sub fusc" - black gown, mortar board, white shirt and black tie - for matriculation ceremonies.

She also has the option of dining every night in College Hall - a three-course meal in an ancient hall, where no one can eat until the master of the college bangs on the table and a scholar in a gown reads grace in Latin.

But most of her fellow graduate students will eat at the kebab van parked outside Univ's huge wooden gate before heading back down to the beer cellar.

About half of the students are from the United States and will already be planning an enormous Thanksgiving meal, exclusively for Univ's expatriate Americans.

Many students at the college boast that their first meal of the day is "tea" - cucumber sandwiches and pots of tea served at 4 p.m. in a cozy common room full of armchairs. Graduate students at Oxford have freedom over their own time - they can do what they like as long as they attend their one-hour weekly tutorial.

Chelsea is likely to be taught by Ngaire Woods, a professor described as a "babe who likes to roller-skate around the quad." She may even run into the new "bin Laden" professor of Islamic studies just arrived from the U.S., funded by money from Osama bin Laden's family.

Chelsea is protected by British police and is also likely to have a Secret Service guard, but she will be more carefully watched, as are all Oxford students, by her "scout."

This man or woman looks after 10 students each, coming into the bedroom every morning, even if Chelsea is still in bed, flinging open the curtains, emptying the trash and often exchanging gossip over a cup of tea.

By tomorrow morning Chelsea may have something to tell her scout. She may have been given Univ's unofficial initiation ceremony. This involves squeezing through the bars to get into the famous marble memorial to Percy Byshhe Shelley - the great 18th-century poet and Univ alumnus - like Chelsea's dad.

The more brazen have their photos taken lying on Shelley's "naked body." For this, Chelsea may even have to kick off her high-heeled shoes.

-- Anonymous, October 07, 2001


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