Merry pranksters
In one of the stairways leading up to the William Rainey Harper Library at the University of Chicago, there is a niche that holds an immense bronze bust of Walt Whitman, some three or four feet high. When I was an undergraduate there, I used to go past the bust almost daily. I found it vaguely creepy on account of its sheer size, but kind of amusing nonetheless: turn the corner and oh, hi, Walt!
Once, as we were heading up the stairs, a friend of mine pointed to the bust and said "Doesn’t Whitman look kind of like Santa Claus to you? I’ve always thought it would be funny to make a giant Santa hat, sneak in at night, and leave the hat on his head."
"Whoa!" I said (or words to that effect). "We have to do that! That would be hilarious!" But somehow our Santa-hat prank never quite happened. Maybe we lacked the initiative. Maybe we got distracted by finals. At any rate, we never got around to outfitting Whitman.
Virginia, like Chicago, isn’t really a school with a reputation for wacky prankstership. So, on Monday, I did a double-take as I walked past the Aviator statue (which commemorates a UVa student who was shot down while piloting a plane in World War I; the sculptor depicted him as Icarus poised to take off) and saw that the Aviator was now wearing…
…a pair of bright yellow Joe Boxer boxer shorts, emblazoned with a smiley face.
The boxers, which proved to have been cut at the seams and then re-sewn in situ, were gone by this morning. But I am grateful to the pranksters because, thanks to them, I got to vicariously experience the youthful clothing-on-statue prank that never happened. I hope someone took a picture for posterity.
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