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"FacebookPinterest\n\nFacebookPinterestMAZURRubricrev.gif\n\nI visited colleges the same time Meadow Soprano did. That episode where Tony and Meadow drive through Maine, and we see Tony be a dad, and do dad things, while also being a mobster, doing mobster things, first aired in the fall of 1999. I was a senior in high school, and my dad and I\u2014minus the violence and the liberal arts colleges in New England\u2014were about to embark on a similar journey. A baby boomer dad and his teenage child, touring one of America's best gifts to the world: college. Preferably private and preferably well-endowed. (Bill Clinton was, after all, president.)\n\nBut that was ten years ago and I've basically lost track of Meadow since the series ended. I remember she was going to become a doctor and then she was going to become a lawyer. And weren't we all? My dad likes to tell a story that after I got a C in biology freshman year I called him up and asked whether he'd be upset if I quit the pre-med track. Allegedly I then told him I'd go to law school. My dad isn't really a liar, and I did in fact head to law school one day. But let's also reiterate that in those heady days before the Bush v. Gore psychodrama, Bill Clinton was, still, president.\n\nIf the 00s began with Meadow and me, together, heading to well-endowed colleges and then to apartments in New York and then to grad school, it closed with me returning home to live with my folks, and with the cast of Glee recording an a cappella version of David Chase's swan song. During this, the Great Recession, Bill Clinton is certainly no longer president. I know: don't stop believing.\n\nTwo days ago, I made another college visit. My youngest sister Julie is now eighteen and she has decided she'd like to go to school somewhere that isn't Buffalo. Julie was only eight when I left for college, so during the formative years of her own childhood, I knew her as the voice on the other end of the phone line when I called home. \"Where's Mom?\" I'd ask. \"In the basement.\" \"And how about Dad?\" \"Next door at Aunt Jerry's.\" Julie now runs the house. When you're a third grader, being the boss means directing phone calls. When you're a senior in high school, it means directing your mom, dad and older brother, who just moved back in, to college visits three hours away.\n\nMy parents and I listened to the radio as Julie either slept or did Math homework. When we got there, we toured the school and checked out the dining hall and the dorm rooms. When the boss didn't want to meet with an admissions counselor after the tour, so she could instead head home early to chat roulette, she looked to me to leverage our parents. \"Well. What can they tell you that the Internet can't?\" I offered weakly. We headed home.\n\nThe new TV show of choice for graduates of college, well-endowed and otherwise, it seems, is Modern Family, a sitcom that follows the antics of a post-boomer clan. And why not? The paradigm of the modern family has shifted. My youngest sister Julie is no longer just a voice on the other end of the phone. She is my roommate. Then again, when I make a decision about whether she should meet a college representative to ask about internship opportunities in central New York I am also functioning, annoyingly enough, as a parent. And a smothering one, at that.\n\nWhen my dad asks me to pick up beer for him on the way back from the post office, where I am mailing a check my mom wrote me so I don't overdraw my account again, I see how ten years later and we're all modernizing. We're all accommodating. Meadow has moved onto who knows what: I thought I heard last she's now dating Turtle, either on Entourage or in real life or both. And even Bill Clinton's family is evolving. Just some months ago, maybe alone in Chappaqua, he learned his next role would be as father of the bride. Hang in there Bill.\u2014Luke Mazur__"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/home-boy-the-college-try>