The naked faithful weren’t about to let a little rain wash out their annual Mifflin Streak last night.
It certainly wasn’t going to stop an undergraduate who dubbed himself ‘Sigismund,’ after the Roman emperor. Now a Penn State senior, he last did the streak his freshman year, he told me.
‘I met my girlfriend here, actually,’ during his first naked dash down Mifflin Road, Sigismund said.
And they’re still together?
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘She’s here tonight — cheering me on.’
Such is the romantic hold of the storied Mifflin Streak.
For the uninitiated: The streak has become an entrenched Penn State tradition since a lone man darted naked through University Park one spring night in 1977.
Now, every Sunday night before spring finals commence, students drop everything to run a block-long human gauntlet on Mifflin Road between Pollock and McKean roads.
Spectators — the ones who form the gauntlet — always outnumber runners. I’d guess that more than a thousand spectators showed up last night — easily. Naked runners seemed to number more than 100, but it’s tough to know for sure. Some students make the dash multiple times in the same night, and it’s not like anyone keeps a sign-in sheet.
Over the decades, the streak has seen more than its share of controversy and outright filth. In years past, some male participants were known to harass, taunt, objectify and otherwise demean women in the vicinity. The experience could prove especially traumatic for students who earlier survived sexual assault, as an undergraduate explained in The Daily Collegian in 1989.
Naked runners have occasionally faced charges of open lewdness and disorderly conduct, though the university police on Sunday seemed to take a more subdued approach to enforcement. No one appeared to have been arrested or cited by the time the streak wound down at 12:30 a.m., about two and a half hours after it started.
In fact, a university employee used a bullhorn to warn the crowd that, at 12:25 a.m., it had only five more minutes of mayhem.
‘If you’re going to do it, do it now,’ he said.
The crowd complied, dispersing at 12:30 a.m. after one last group — about 15 students, men and women — dropped their underwear and sprinted together through the human corridor.
‘It’s a break from studying for finals week,’ said spectator Brian Davis, a student from Allentown. He and a few friends said they saw the entire streak. The male-to-female ratio among streakers ran about three to one, they explained.
They said a lot of people left when the rain got heavier, just before midnight.
But the die-hards remained.
Some ran solo; others, in pairs or groups, apparently for moral support. One wore a Burger King mask and a cape.
Few people — runners or spectators — had any kind of umbrellas on hand. Under an adjacent tree, someone trained a video-camera lens on the group.
Best I could tell, most of the spectators were college men.
The most often heard lines of the night? You could guess them:
‘Come on — take it off!’
‘Do IT! Do IT!’
‘Yo — stop looking at (me), man.’
It all felt more jovial and celebratory than anything, at least the portions that I observed. People clapped and cheered, a loud wave of hoots and hollers following each streaker through the gauntlet.
‘Either you do it or you don’t,’ one observer yelled. ‘If you’re not going to do it, go home.’
When a couple of university administrators appeared to monitor the scene shortly after midnight, most of the students didn’t seem to recognize them. A few unaware onlookers even tried to bring them into the action.
‘It’s not a spectator sport!’ one student hollered at the administrators, police Director Steve Shelow and Assistant Vice President Stan Latta.
Shelow and Latta didn’t budge.
Davis, the undergrad from Allentown, had his own twist on the spectacle.
‘This shows the academic excellence of students at Penn State,’ he said.
His friend D.J., a student from Pottsville, called the whole thing ‘a great start to finals week.’
Lucky for him, he was clothed. One self-identified streaker lamented via Twitter this morning that he was still cold by about 2:30 a.m.
As for Sigismund — well, he said, his Mifflin Streak runs have become like bookends for his undergraduate career.
Besides, he said, ‘tonight was my last time to do it as a student, without it being creepy.’
Amen, brother.
