6. Ted O’Neill’s eyebrows. . . Jerry Sadock’s voice. . . Janet Rowley’s 22nd chromosome. . . combine the distinctive features of the University’s luminaries to create the ultimate faculty member. Your Frankenprof may include no more than one real faculty member and should stun any tenure committee. [Viersehn points]
97. If he hadn’t taken a chance on you, you wouldn’t even be at this school. But did you know Ted is from Canada? Show the Dean of Love that we all will miss him via the most appropriate means: a singing telegram at the admissions oce, dressed up as lumberjacks and sundry Canadian fauna. [14 points, 2 bonus points if a goose claps.]
When Ted O’Neill checked his e-mail Thursday morning, one of the first messages was a warning…about his eyebrows.
“One student told me to be careful,” the dean of admissions said. “Who knows what might happen during Scav?”
This year, O’Neill, a self-acknowledged “frequent” subject of Scav clues, is the star of two items, though one might have a hidden message.
Item 97, which refers to O’Neill as a Canadian, is dead wrong, he said. “It’s completely wrong, unless there’s a subtlety I don’t understand,” the South Side native said.
Vice President of College Admissions Michael Behnke was excited at the prospects of the “faulty” clue. “Are some of the clues misleading?” he asked. “That’s good. Nothing should be simple.”
Admissions officers have been the target of many Scav clues in the past. “I was chided for dressing badly one year,” O’Neill said. “So one of the clues was to dress me up. I went with one house downtown and they taped me looking at clothes and paying for them. They even got the cashier in on the joke.”
Behnke is no Scav slouch either. “I think it seven years ago, I wish I could remember when, there were so many. They had to take a picture of me in my office. Some found me, but not everybody,” he said. “It must have been low points.”
But back to business. O’Neill said that when he is serenaded, he has a particular tune in mind: “I’d like some kind of mock-Buddhist chant, a western-secular version of a hare krisha chant, to the tune of “A Day in the Life” [by Neil Young].”
