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[Excerpt from a story by RICHARD MORGAN / Reprinted from OCTOBER 2005 PLAYBOY]
Episode IV: A New Hope
Which brings us to Hamilton College in upstate New York. Past the now-dry SUNY Binghamton lies the tiny village of Clinton, where some kids carry the torch for an era of mindless fun that seems dead but may be only power-napping.
One day in late February Pete Holzaepfel, who graduated from Hamilton this summer, was busy hanging a banner promoting the debut of his documentary film. Nearly half the campus showed up to watch Buff & Blue, a seat-of-their-pants video made during fall break as the self-titled Hamilton College Varsity STreaking Team competed cheek-to-cheek with unsuspecting rivals. The conference tour, by the numbers: 12 colleges, five states, five days, one 30-foot RV, 18 students (men and women), three capus-security arrests and some dumbass fines that were quickly dropped. Unlike fake Michigan-style streakers, the Hamilton team went full throttle. Squawking and maintaining a V formation, it swooped down on campus lawns across New England like an Abercrombie & Fitch photo shoot gone horribly insane. The team ran naked through rugby and soccer games. Through classes. Through cafeterias. Through libraries, being sure to hush gawking bookworms. On one campus it led a naked fake orientation tour, using a bullhorn to offer typical, vague comments about what such-and-such building was used for, as the team sauntered along, casually taking in the campus as if the members were actual prospectives.
Asked what he thinks his streaking career may do for his future, or what he ever plans to do postcollege, the tall and charismatic Holzaepfel (who was also student-body president) laughs. "I'm going to be a senator," he says while hanging a banner depicting a naked masked man running from a ball of fire. "Well, I dunno, but maybe a senator."
For the first time, I felt as though I was talking to a college student. Thank God.
Something else that makes the Hamilton situation heartwarmingly bizarre is the reaction of administrators to the streakathon: They were cool with it. So cool that they allowed the streakers to use the school's world-class auditorium, then signed off on an on-campus afterparty and after-afterparty that plowed through five kegs and 30 cases of beer from nearby Utica, a brewing town. At one point the afterparty band made an open call for nudity; about a dozen men and women obliged, stripping and drinking and having fun.
Watching the party run its course, two of the team's top streakers - Adam Bedient, a 2004 grad, and Craig Moores, class of 2005 - wondered what it all meant.
"Maybe this'll fizzle out," said Moores. "So what? Who cares? We're not trying for a legacy. It's just stupid. We get naked and run around. How stupid is that?"
"We didn't want to do something to last for the ages," Bedient added. "We just wanted to have a good time for ourselves. It's hilarious that we just showed a movie about our streaking to half the campus, and tonight we're having two parties and a band paid for by T-shirts we sold about this dumb hobby. That's fun."
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