“… But I Play One on TV”
How well do you know your (fictitious) fellow alumni? Take our quiz and find out.
March/April 2007
by Mark Alden Branch ’86
Illustrations ©Robert Grossman ’61
Mark Alden Branch ’86 is executive editor of the Yale Alumni Magazine.
They don’t come to reunions. They
never turn up in the alumni notes. They’re among the select few who’ve never
gotten mail from the Alumni Fund. And yet they trumpet their Yale affiliation—even the comics page.
They’re the fake Yalies. No, not
real people who pretend they went to Yale, but fake people who did go to Yale—in their creators’ imaginations.
We hope they hold a reunion of their
own one day. The Celotex Calhoun College built for the Gilmore Girls soundstage would be a perfect
venue. They’re a very well-connected group, so you’ll definitely want to crash
the party. We’ve put together the following quiz to help you make small talk
with your apparitional fellow alumni.
1. Yale student Rory Gilmore of TV’s Gilmore Girls achieved what coveted campus
position?
a. editor
of the Yale Daily News
b. member
of Skull and Bones
c. captain
of the women’s squash team
d. president
of the Yale College Council
2. In the recent novel Foul Lines, a street-smart statistics
genius and “Will Smith lookalike” named Jamal Kelly leaves Yale to be
a PR man for a pro basketball team. What real campus locale is mentioned in the
scenes set at Yale?
a. Calhoun
College
b. Payne
Whitney Gymnasium
c. the
Anchor Bar
d. the
Elizabethan Club
3. Which fictional Yale tycoon had to work his way through college?
a. Tom
Buchanan of The Great Gatsby
b. Adam
Carrington of Dynasty
c. C.
Montgomery Burns of The Simpsons
d. Sherman McCoy of Bonfire of the Vanities
4. In the 1961 film Splendor in the Grass, Kansas oil scion Bud Stamper
(Warren Beatty) is sent to Yale to forget his hometown girlfriend, Deanie
(Natalie Wood). With whom does he end up instead?
a. a
debutante from Smith
b. a
pizza waitress from New Haven
c. a dean’s daughter
d. a
sharp-tongued Radcliffe student who works in the library
5. Writer and producer Aaron Sorkin went to Syracuse, but his films
and TV shows are populated with Ivy Leaguers. (He once framed an episode of The
West Wing around a Whiffenpoofs performance at the White House.) Which two Sorkin
characters went to Yale?
a. President Andrew Shepherd (Michael Douglas), The American President
b. White
House official Josh Lyman (Bradley Whitford), The West Wing
c. late-night sketch comedian Simon Stiles (D. L. Hughley), Studio 60
d. sports producer Jeremy Goodwin (Joshua Malina), Sports Night
6. In the campus classic Stover at Yale by Owen Johnson, Class of 1900,
what sartorial faux pas on the part of young Dink Stover is declared
“unspeakable” by a classmate?
a. a
green shirt
b. unscuffed
oxford bucks
c. plaid
trousers
d. a
dinner jacket in lieu of tails
7. It happens all the time on TV shows with teenaged characters:
they finish high school and move on to college—but always somewhere close
enough that they can stay in the family home, or take all their high school
friends with them. Which of these characters turned down Yale’s offer of admission for someplace closer to home?
a. Zack
Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) of Saved by the Bell
b. Topanga Lawrence (Danielle Fishel) of Boy Meets World
c. Andrea
Zuckerman (Gabrielle Carteris) of Beverly Hills 90210
d. Alex
P. Keaton (Michael J. Fox) of Family Ties
8. For the 2002 Comedy Central movie Porn ’n’ Chicken, based loosely on the supposed
X-rated exploits of a Yale secret society, what contemporary Yale administrator (under a slightly
disguised name) was the model for the students’ nemesis?
a. Richard Levin (President Rick Lovin)
b. Alison Richard (Provost Alice N. Witcher)
c. Robert
F. “Master T” Thompson (Robert “Master J” Johnson)
d. Richard
Brodhead (Dean Dick Widehead)
9. The lesbian characters on Showtime’s The L Word include museum curator and Yale
graduate Bette Porter. What real-life Yale alumna plays Bette?
a. Sara
Gilbert ’97
b. Claire Danes ’03
c. Jennifer Beals ’86
d. Kellie
Martin ’01
10. In the 1954 film Sabrina, Linus Larrabee (Humphrey Bogart)
was the subject of what prediction by his Yale classmates?
a. most
likely to succeed
b. most
likely to be the target of an SEC investigation
c. most
likely to leave his alma mater fifty million dollars
d. most
likely to fall in love with his
chauffeur’s daughter
11. In what book (and film) does the following exchange take place
about an ill-fated alum?
“He was into that whole Yale thing.”
“What whole Yale thing?”
“Well, he was probably a closet homosexual who did a lot of
cocaine. That whole Yale thing.”
a. Bright
Lights, Big City by
Jay McInerney
b. Slaves
of New York by Tama
Janowitz
c. American
Psycho by Bret
Easton Ellis
d. Frank
Merriwell at Yale by Burt L. Standish
12. Which film character is an Eli who, when asked “What do you
do?”, echoes the sentiments of many a recent graduate by replying
“I’m not sure yet, actually”?
a. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) in Lost in Translation
b. Sam
(Natalie Portman) in Garden State
c. Claire (Kirsten Dunst) in Elizabethtown
d. Samantha
(Katie Holmes) in First Daughter
13. In the first of the Blackford Oakes spy novels, by William F.
’50, what notable feat does Blackford Oakes ’51 accomplish?
a. He
engineers the coup that restores the Shah of Iran to power.
b. He
beats Harry Truman at poker.
c. He
sleeps with the Queen of England.
d. He
leads the Yale crew to victory at New London.
14. What fictional (or at least unsubstantiated) aspect of Yale
secret-society life is featured in the 2000 thriller The Skulls?
a. Dueling at a private island retreat
b. Murdering trespassers in the tomb
c. An
evil provost who chases a student across campus
d. All
of the above
15. How did the protagonist of Joe College, a Yale-centered novel by Tom Perrotta ’83, spend his vacation from New Haven?
a. feuding with mobsters in New Jersey
b. caddying
in a Westchester country club
c. selling drugs in Rhode Island
d. dealing blackjack at Foxwoods
16. In 2004, the sports-themed comic strip Gil Thorp featured two football players and
best friends who dreamed of going to Yale. But Nick, who is black, was
admitted, while Von, who is white, was wait-listed. This caused tension between
the friends as Von wondered if race was a factor. How was the situation
resolved?
a. Nick
turned down Yale, and he and Von went to Harvard together.
b. Von
was admitted from the waiting list, and the two became roommates at Yale.
c. Coach
Thorp talked the boys into settling their differences in a boxing match.
d. Von
sued Yale, becoming a conservative cause célèbre and host of a teen show on Fox
News.
17. Which Doonesbury character did not appear in Bull Tales, the original Yale Daily News strips by Garry Trudeau ’70,
’73MFA?
a. B.D.
b. President King
c. “Megaphone
Mark” Slackmeyer
d. Zonker Harris
18. In a New Republic cover story last year, Michael Crowley ’94 criticized
thriller author Michael Crichton for his arguments that global warming is a
hoax. Eight months later, Crichton published the novel Next. One of its minor characters is a
journalist named Mick Crowley. What attributes did Crichton give Mick Crowley to make it clear he’s an unsavory type?
a. He is
a “wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate.”
b. He
committed an unspeakable sexual assault on a two-year-old child.
c. He
has a small penis.
d. All
of the above.
Answers:
1: a. She took over at the News after the previous editor, her
friend Paris, fell victim to a staff mutiny.
2: c. Authors Jack McCallum and L. Jon
Wertheim must have begun and ended their research at the Anchor: Jamal and his
roommate live in something called “Prescott Hall.”
3: b. See, he was Blake and Alexis
Carrington’s son, but he was kidnapped as a baby and raised on a ranch in
Montana. It was only after his hardscrabble upbringing that he learned the
truth and returned to claim his birthright. That was just before he had his
brother’s office painted with toxic paint so that he could … oh, never mind.
4: b. He’s never heard of pizza and she’s
never heard of Kansas, but Bud seeks solace in the arms of Angelina (Zohra
Lambert), whom he marries and brings home after his family fortune is wiped out
by the 1929 stock market crash.
5: b and c. Josh Lyman went to the Law School,
Simon Stiles to the drama school. Contrary to recent real-world history,
Sorkin’s fictional President Shepherd did not go to Yale. And although Sorkin
favorite Joshua Malina was in the Yale Class of ’88, his characters have not been
identified as Elis.
6: a. Actually, it wasn’t just green, but
“the deep royal hue of a glorious emerald.”
7: a, b, and c. Michael J. Fox’s Alex P. Keaton
applied to Princeton, not Yale, but went to the fictional Leland University
after the Tigers turned him down.
8: d. The fictional Dean Widehead was
considerably less popular than Brodhead, though.
9: c. In a nod to Beals’s pre-Yale turn in
the movie Flashdance, one L Word episode includes a flashback to Bette’s New Haven days that shows her
in Flashdance-style
duds.
10: c. Interestingly, the figure was not
adjusted for inflation in the 1995 remake, which starred Harrison Ford as
Linus.
11: c. Investment banker Paul Allen
(presumably not the Microsoft billionaire) is the Yalie in question. He becomes
one of the victims of the title character, Patrick Bateman (Harvard ’84).
12: a. Charlotte, not surprisingly, was a
philosophy major.
13: c. After bedding the fictional (and
single) Queen Caroline in Buckley’s Saving the Queen, Oakes whispers, “Courtesy of
the United States, ma’am.”
14: d. Of course, screenwriter John Pogue
’87 may know something we don’t.
15: a. Set during Perrotta’s own
undergraduate years, the novel shifts between Yale and the New Jersey hometown
of the protagonist, who gets into trouble when racketeers move in on his
father’s lunch wagon business.
16: b. But the happy ending came only after
Von had his consciousness raised by a racial profiling incident involving his
friend.
17: d. Zonker did not join the strip until
it became nationally syndicated. Since the characters by then were students at
the fictional Walden College, Zonker technically can’t be counted as a Yale
alumnus.
18: d. Noting that the character had little
or nothing to do with Crichton’s plot, the real Crowley described the fictional
"not a character so much as a voodoo doll.” |
