The Naked Guy Is Dead
An apparent suicide in the Santa Clara County Jail.
Who is The Naked Guy, you ask?
In the early 1990s, not long before I was an undergrad at Berkeley, a guy named Andrew Martinez decided he wanted to attend classes in the nude. Walk around campus in the nude. Eat food in the nude. And so he did, and he was quickly dubbed "The Naked Guy" by people in Berkeley.
Needless to say this caused an enormous controversy; some people didn't want to have to look at a 20-year old's wang while walking through Sproul Plaza, and some profs and students felt it was a classroom distraction. The Naked Guy eventually led to the UC administration and the City of Berkeley adopting strict no-nudity ordinances, which are flouted once a year by protestors whose age and bodies make one pine fondly for the Fremont Solstice Parade.
When I was an undergrad there, family and friends back in the OC would ask "so is The Naked Guy still there?" The answer was happily "no," although the culture of nudity survived - my first night in Berkeley, in that glorious animal house of a co-op I lived in, there were many games and feats of strength performed. Many of them were done in the nude, such as the "race from one end of the main hall to the other without spilling your beer while naked" to "how many naked people can we fit in the phone booth in the pool room?" (answer: 7) to "how many naked people can we fit in the hot tub?" (answer: 19)
So, although The Naked Guy is dead, his spirit lives on at Berkeley.
Who is The Naked Guy, you ask?
In the early 1990s, not long before I was an undergrad at Berkeley, a guy named Andrew Martinez decided he wanted to attend classes in the nude. Walk around campus in the nude. Eat food in the nude. And so he did, and he was quickly dubbed "The Naked Guy" by people in Berkeley.
Needless to say this caused an enormous controversy; some people didn't want to have to look at a 20-year old's wang while walking through Sproul Plaza, and some profs and students felt it was a classroom distraction. The Naked Guy eventually led to the UC administration and the City of Berkeley adopting strict no-nudity ordinances, which are flouted once a year by protestors whose age and bodies make one pine fondly for the Fremont Solstice Parade.
When I was an undergrad there, family and friends back in the OC would ask "so is The Naked Guy still there?" The answer was happily "no," although the culture of nudity survived - my first night in Berkeley, in that glorious animal house of a co-op I lived in, there were many games and feats of strength performed. Many of them were done in the nude, such as the "race from one end of the main hall to the other without spilling your beer while naked" to "how many naked people can we fit in the phone booth in the pool room?" (answer: 7) to "how many naked people can we fit in the hot tub?" (answer: 19)
So, although The Naked Guy is dead, his spirit lives on at Berkeley.