The Undergraduate Chair

Contrary, perhaps, to popular belief, coming up with 1,200 words every month for this column is not at all an easy task. The job is made harder because some degree of interest must be achieved quickly, and must be maintained, else the reader's eye will wander away, the page is turned, and all is lost.

I was running these thoughts through my mind, and mouth, one night at dinner last week. A silence came to prevail as the group clammed up at my request for a new topic. This silence was broken at length by the sound of kazoos playing "As the Saints ...." Right down the middle of Thayer Dining Hall, jammed at 6 p.m., came a small group of people strutting like Philadelphia mummers. The first three were all either kazoo-ing or playing some less noisy musical instrument. The middle two were doing some sort of dance, perhaps akin to a square-dance. The last was carrying a broom and going through all the motions of sweeping something. Remarkable. What diversity Dart Coll entails, we said to ourselves. Where else could such a sight be enjoyed, indeed savored. And we sat back in our seats to watch the entertainers. Oh yes, all of them were stark naked, except for ski masks.

Streaking has come to Dartmouth. The dining hall has been struck several times, as have several large classes, the library repeatedly, Kiewit a few times. It was rumored that members of the Dartmouth Outing Club were going to streak a final exam in organic chemistry during the first week of March. And even coed streakers have made their appearance, although, it was, reportedly, more of a flash than an actual, official streak.

Of course, a coup for the AlumniMagazine would be an exclusive interview with a real live streaker, to find out what makes Sammy run, so to speak. But streakers are hard to catch. In fact, the campus police unofficially report they see no way to grab a streaker streaking by them, let alone have the gall to ask for a student ID card. (Where would he/she carry one?)

For all the great imagination going on, there must be a lot of seemingly innocent people out there who are secret streakers, which means that a lot of your friends are in on all this nudity. Over a beer at the fraternity house, one of the brothers quite calmly admitted to me that he had streaked a late-night Alfred Hitchcock movie shown at Hopkins Center. Dumbfounded, I fumbled at questions...

But wasn't it cold? "No, not really. Most people sleep in the raw anyway. I simply dashed across the stage, about four feet from the screen, yelled loud once, and dashed out the other stage door, through a few other doors, outside and into a waiting car... well, 1 was streaking no more than twenty seconds or so, no real long exposure to the cold. The uniform did bother me a little though. It was not an official Dartmouth streaking outfit like they're selling at the Co-op. Y'know, ski mask, Dartmouth tie, and green-and-white Addidas. All I had was the ski mask, but it was all sort of hurried."

"As a matter of fact," he continued, "I was at the library that night, booking. On the way out of the stacks, I saw several campus policemen. I asked a friend what was going on. 'Well,' he replied 'there's a streak rumored for tonight.' I then asked an officer, but he said he doubted it would really occur. 'l'll bet while we're here,' he said, 'someone will streak that movie tonight.' Well, I got back to the house, and some of the brothers were talking about streaking the flic. We planned it for a few minutes, and then I took off... my clothes."

This planning thing boggled me. "Oh yes," my friend said, "a lot of work goes into a good, solid streak; more than just the streaker is involved here. The doors all along the way were locked; I needed the key, someone to hold the doors open, hold my clothes, and someone to keep the car running.... I had about four people backing me up. As for those five people at Thayer the other night, they needed at least half-a-dozen people behind them the whole way, probably more."

"There's more to an expert streak than meets the eye," he explained further. "You need people you can trust, depend on not to give your move away. Your people have to believe in you too, trust you. Mutual trust and respect, that's the key. Nixon could never pull off a streak. Who could trust to hold onto his clothes and not pull out at the last minute?"

A good point. Did our streaker know anything about the history of streaking "No, not too much really," he answered as he drained his cup. "I heard it was orginally done out in California about ten years ago or so. I guess mostly it's just one of those old-time college pranks like phone-booth stuffing or goldfish swallowing. Actually," he theorized, "it's kind of a combination of that older tradition, and the 'new' so-called sexual permissiveness. Too bad there's not more coed streaking. There's a lot of that outside of Hanover. The article in Time a few weeks ago, did you see it? The pictures in there were almost as good as Playboy and Oui. It's really caught on pretty quickly here and all over. The first I heard of it was at Yale a month or so ago. Of course, those Yalies actually staged it. The real beauty is in just doing it. They were just a bunch of publicity-hounds. There's no art for the sake of art left."

What about where to streak? "The unstreaked places are getting harder and harder to find. The movie, of course, was brilliant. You really need a captive audience so people, unaware they are about to be struck, can't really turn away. They are confronted with it, and somehow they are forced to react to you, by being sick if nothing else. The ultimate streak would be streaking during an entire class. But I have a fear. The whole thing is getting too commercial. I mean when there's too much of it, then no one will get excited, and that's what's fun."

I probed a bit further - why the ski mask, the hiding of one's identity while streaking? "I suppose that's just the last vestige of safety. We're naked but unknown. Unless someone grabs us - and how are they going to do that? - it's like 2 perfect crime."

"All those pictures in Time, and their picking the best streak of the week I'm glad it's getting warmer now." How's that? "Well, a really official streak has to be in cold weather. I mean, if it's 100 degrees outside and very humid, most people are almost naked anyway. It's the complete contrast between fully clothed and nothing that does so much.

The last question I asked was "why?" He smiled a minute, poured himself another beer, took a calm, professional, streaker-type sip. "For the same reason they decided to climb Mt. Everest. Because it was cold it was there. Besides, I was broke that night, didn't have a ticket, and really wanted to see the movie."