Saturday night, after most of the revelers had left College Park, a group of mildly intoxicated gentlemen stripped down to boxer shorts, spread into the parking lot and chanted unintelligible syllables to the sound of clinking liquor bottles. They did it fairly well for their inebriated state.

Two of them, however, decided that they weren't having enough fun, so they peeled off their underwear and jogged a lap around one of the townhouse complexes in the nude.

The day before, the men of Alumni Hall opted for a slightly more formal look, adding neckties to their unmentionables as they traversed campus in preparation for the annual Wake, spreading love, joy and carnations all over Our Lady's University. The more dignified Dawgs smoked large aromatic cigars; the wilder ones painted their faces green and wrote slogans on their bodies like "I am fat" and "he hate me" and bellyflopped into mud puddles.

All told, it looked almost as if they were acting out a low-budget rendition of the Mel Gibson epic "Braveheart." ("They may give us parietals, but they will never take away our beer.")

Now I enjoy wild frivolity as much as the next sophisticated, intelligent person (some prefer giving me the sophisticated and intelligent title of "dork"). But I have never and probably will never understand the male fascination of making people look at our naked or near-naked bodies.

Now mooning is one thing. As someone with redneck roots, I can appreciate the act of baring one's behind, especially as the ultimate response to an insult. When you can't come up with an intelligent comeback, drop your pants. Were you the butt of a joke? Disgust the person who humiliated you with a choice view of your butt. If you get a tattoo of a middle finger on a cheek, you can give a double insult.

If you want to get really complicated, as my football team did in high school, you make a game out of mooning. We put the "ass" in "Assassins."

You move in silence, stealthily find your target, uncover your weapon and bang. Points scored.

But you just didn't drop an atomic bomb and expose your bum to everybody just to nail your opponent. And we didn't move amongst the general populace and call attention to our naked posteriors. They weren't part of the game.

We were ass-flashers, yeah, but we had an honor code: no collateral damage allowed.

Butts are one thing — after all, Dennis Franz's rump is on display every other week on "NYPD Blue" — but whole naked bodies are another.

There's a converse to the "If you got it, flaunt it" axiom: If you don't got it, don't flaunt it. You will never find me taking a late-night jog in my birthday suit — I wouldn't be able to outrun law enforcement personnel who would wish to end my streak. If I ran around campus in my Fruit Of The Looms to visit potential dance dates I'd be distributing airline barf bags, not carnations.

I just don't like being naked. If it weren't for pesky issues like hygiene, I wouldn't even shower naked. Even worse, since I make sure I show off as little skin as possible, those parts of my body that would normally be covered by clothes are unnaturally pale (at least I'm assuming — I don't make it a point to look). If I dropped my pants in the middle of South Quad at just the right time of the day, I could blind pilots trying to guide a plane to the South Bend airport. ("Coming in for final approach, tower ... Jesus Christ Almighty, what the hell is that?" "It looks like a great big — ")

Now I'm not going to stand on a soapbox and claim myself the paragon of modesty because I can be tempted to strip publicly. However, it will take a lot more than the $20 someone (ironically from Alumni Hall) bet me to show up in a female's dorm room wearing nothing but a smile.

If a million dollars were at stake I wouldn't mind emulating Richard Hatch and parading around an island in the buff for a few weeks. And with the cuisine on "Survivor" I could potentially look at least a little better naked when I'm finished. I might even get some sun.

But it would definitely be a budget-buster because in addition to buying me off one would need to pay for the pain, suffering, lawsuits and possibly laser eye surgery for those unfortunate people who witness my buck-naked romp. And I'd need a lot of alcohol and a getaway car. But you'd get to watch a plane fall out of the sky for free.

After all, every streaker dies. Not every streaker really lives.

Mike Marchand is an off-campus senior English major who, despite what Gabriela from McCandless Hall might think, cannot dance. He would like to thank Natalie and Megan for finding him interesting enough that he didn't feel the need to shed his threads. His cousin, ironically enough, is a male exotic dancer.

The views expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Observer.

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