By Barbara Anderson

The play’s the thing

Faithful readers of UC Davis Magazine will recall an item in the “Campus Views” section of the fall ’01 issue that described a camel sighting in the shrubbery behind the dramatic art building (now Wright Hall) some years ago and how the writer had wondered ever since just what had occasioned such an unlikely event. Well, we now have an explanation, thanks to Adrian Elfenbaum, M.F.A. ’88, M.A. ’91, who recalled that the camel had made an appearance in one of Dan Snyder’s Christmas productions of Out Our Way. Snyder, a professor emeritus of dramatic art who, along with William Wiley in the art department, mounted a number of such productions in dramatic art’s labs A and B in the ’70s and ’80s, recalls that particular camel with fondness. “He could just get through the door,” Snyder says. “And he was just a sweetheart”—no prima donna temperament from that camel. Snyder’s other encounters with non-human dramatis personae include chickens (“they’re so easy—you just feed them, and when you turn out the lights, they go to sleep”) and a cow that “fell in love with the theater.” Oh, and they sank the Titanic on stage, too.

What’s that song?

They’ve been hawking posters and credit cards in the MU breezeway for years now, but the really bad news just hit this fall with an announcement in Bookstore Buzz, the UC Davis Bookstore’s e-mail newsletter:

“And now, something from the ‘You knew it had to happen sometime’ department. The UCD Bookstore has been Muzaked. Yes, we’ve turned into one gigantic elevator of shopping. If you walk into the bookstore and get the weird feeling that you’re in a supermarket or a drugstore instead, now you’ll know why. We’re also testing out subliminal messages like ‘Go Ags,’ ‘Buy the more expensive paperweight’ and ‘I don’t mind that my prof has made an $80 textbook required reading for my class and I will not blame the bookstore for its price.’”

But we’re happy, right?

From a Sacramento Business Journal story about how turbulence in the stock-market is having its effects on stockbrokers: “If intelligence were the key to wealth, everyone at UC Davis would be rich, and they are not.”

— Kevin Haarberg, Edward Jones

The name game

An Aggie family: Audrey, Davis, Virginia and Kent Johnson. (Photo: Neil Michel/Axiom)

UC Davis is home to many traditions—Picnic Day, the Band-Uh, green water in Putah Creek. One tradition that seems to be gaining ground is that of alumni couples naming their children in honor of the campus.

Such is the case of Aggie alumni Kent ’76, M.S. ’78, and Virginia (McBride) ’77 Johnson, who met back in 1975 while working for Unitrans and who enjoyed their Aggie experience so much they decided to name their son Davis. Davis and his older sister, Audrey, are now Aggies themselves, carrying on a tradition begun by their great-grandfather William Johnson, who enrolled at the University Farm in 1916. Soon after, he was drafted into the army to serve in World War I and, upon returning, was needed on the family’s dairy farm in Turlock, so never made it back to the university. “But he was awfully proud of his association with the University Farm,” Kent says.As for freshman Davis, he had this to say: “I’m just glad my parents didn’t meet at Chico.”