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About The daily Nebraskan. ([Lincoln, Neb.) 1901-current | View Entire Issue (April 27, 1998)
Sally Boy UNL loses its best customer to graduation TODD MUNSON is a junior broadcasting major and a Daily Nebraskan columnist. Barring academic catastrophe, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln will lose a living legend May 9th because of graduation - Brian “Sally" Fomes is moving on to green er pastures. In a collegiate career that spanned It’s Carmen Miranda! - Halloween 1996. most of the 90s - seven years to be exact - Sally wore many hats: athlete, friend influence (good or bad depending on your interpretation), philanthropist and prankster Cynics may label someone who needs seven years to get a bachelor’s degree in English as a slacker, but Em sure Sally would prefer the title “UNL’s Best Customer.” His annual NRoll parties the day before the start of the school year no doubt pro longed his academic career. On the ultimate Frisbee field, his prowess could not be equaled. You could say that he was the Tommie Frazier of the UNL ultimate team. Always plagued with one injury or another, he managed to pull out some of the most unreal displays of athleti cism by a man dressed in a skirt and a Megadeth T-shirt. Keep in mind that this was usual ly done after a night of drinking enough beer to intoxicate Northern Ireland. Put him in a mountain bike race and the result would be the same, except he wouldn't be wearing his skirt. In a roundabout way. he was into helping others out. During his seven year stay in Lincoln, Sally donated enough plasma to fill Woods Pool twice over, and he sold his body to Harris Laboratories so many times that, thanks to him. a dozen drugs have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But one can sell bodily fluids for only so long before the implanted spig ot gets a little annoying and the prospect of a real job and a lifestyle that doesn't work on the barter system begins to sound appealing. Perhaps this is why Sally buckled down and took 21 hours this semes ter, ranging from Math 85 to advanced philosophy. In the four years that I’ve known Sally, there have been countless moments, always hilarious and enlightening, that could have never happened if it wasn’t for him. Many of these are unfit for print in this family publication, but I have assem bled the best of whats fit to print into “The Top Six Sally Moments.” Think of the following list as a six-pack if you will. After all, Sally is the only person I know who ever spent hours assembling just the right costume so he could host a party as the Old Style Light Princess. Sally Moment No. 1: In what could be expected only from an English major who knows more quotes from “The Simpsons” than Shakespeare, Sally brought his dog. Ginger, to campus one nice after noon. When he arrived at class, he told Ginger to wait outside. All was fine for 10 minutes or so, but Ginger decided she wanted to learn Spanish. She slipped into Henzlik Hall, tracked down Sally’s classroom and sat down at his feet. 1 think this was the first time since third grade that I knew of someone bringing their pet to class without it being show-and-tell day. Sally Moment No. 2: As the king of pranks, there were many toilet paper strikes, and there was the time he liberated dozens of Christmas trees and planted them in a col league's front yard, but nothing com pares to what he accomplished with his roommate. Brett, two years ago. One night, ironically during hemp awareness week, he and friends turned the marble sculpture next to Love Library, the one that looks like a surfboard, into an enormous joint. How they pulled it off, I don't know. Like many other students. 1 was in awe at the sheer scale of the stunt. I really should have known who the culprits were when I saw Brett A swing cat on the town. Money, baby. Money. ana sauy taxing pictures oi tneir work later that afternoon. Sally Moment No. 3: A week after the big October snowstorm, a group of us planned to ride our bikes out to Wilderness Park and clean up some of the damage. We met at The Mill at 8 a.m., and surprisingly. Sally was the first one there, hangover and all. For five hours, on a brutally cold Saturday, we cleaned up a section of the park. The Sally moment happened when we encountered a pesky tree. It was broken in half, but the upper por tion was hanging down at waist level, still attached by a few strings of bark. In a classic example of the blind lead ing the blind, Sally and I pulled at the tree wath all our might until the non broken half was bowing over. We gave up and let go. When we did, the tree quickly returned to its upright position and the broken por tion snapped free and flew 50 yards through the woods. You had to be there. Sally Moment No. 4: Yet again, it's the blind leading the blind. Spooner. Dan-0 and I attempted to ride with Sally in his Volkswagen bus to an ultimate tournament in Iowa. What made it interesting was that there happened to be a monsoon going on outside. On the inside, Sally was hampered because only one headlight and windshield w'iper w'ere functional. Yet, he drove with the skill and precision of Captain Sulu. About the same time as the camper top popped up because of the extreme w inds, we hooligans in the back realized it was n't necessary to add tequila to the Margarita mix. Eventually the weath er. and the fact that the bus was top ping out at 35 mph, made us stop the journey in hopes of finishing the trip in the morning. We all squeezed into the bus' bed "Snow White” style. When we woke up, the bus wouldn't start; Josh had transformed into Spooner, and Sally said my ass made a comfortable pil low. Uh, how about those Cubs, eh? Sally Moment No. 5: This one took place on the last day of school last May. After my last final, I sold my books and met Sally, along with several others, down at O’Rourke’s Tavern. It was 11:30 a.m. After pounding Guinness for a few hours, we bought some off-sale, picked up some Doozy’s and stum bled to campus to enjoy warm sand wiches and cold beer in the sculpture garden. Oh yeah, we were rebels drinking on campus in broad daylight. There was never any fear about getting caught since we were the only people still on campus at 5 p.m. on a Friday. This day was Sallyfied when it came to an end 10 hours later and he was the last one stumbling. Sally Moment No. 6: This is a key example of Sally's incredible luck. After a spring break ultimate tournament at the University of Texas, Sally and Rody were victims of a terrible error in planning. They had no ride back to Lincoln. No wor ries though. They would just hitch hike the 1,500 miles. Out of all the psychotic, pervert ed, chain-saw wielding lunatics in the world, they were picked up by a fel low who makes custom vans and wanted company on his delivery run. Not only did they ride in a luxurious ly tncked-out van, their chauffeur bought them dinner before dropping them off. Playing bongos with Ginger. Much more productive than homework. His incredible luck goes even fur ther because he entered college dur ing the last year a degree in English came with a teaching endorsement. That’s right, Sally could be teaching your kids some day. Then again, knowing his luck, he'll encounter a fly, young minx at graduation who. after receiving her doctorate, decides she needs a domestic engineer and becomes Sally’s “sugar mama” in exchange for having her dishes washed. On behalf of everyone who knows him. I’d like to wish Sally good luck in the real world. Or, in the immortal words of Nelson Muntz, “Ha, ha.” (The end of the year has come faster than expected and I still have some gratuitous mentions to give. So, Nards, Dugan P. Svenson, Guzzard Boones, Beaner and The Admiral, there you are. Sean, sorry I never helped you find that 6-foot-tall, red headed Asian with enormous breasts. Scotty C. don’t squeeze the Charmin. Malcolm, sorry' we never got to hit the skins, but I’m saving myself for Klaus. To my socialist literature class, let’s forget the final and bring down the man. And to everyone returning in the fall, look out: There’s another Munson coming to UNL.) Higher learning College experience offers invaluable lessons in self-worth LORI ROBISON is a senior news-editorial major and a Daily Nebraskan columnist. Most things worth learning in this life cannot be taught in a classroom. And as this semester comes to a close and I prepare for my last year at this institution, the true meaning of that old saying has been coming into focus. Certainly, after four years at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, we’ve all learned a great deal about our chosen careers (which, hopefully, will materialize into a job very soon after graduation) and gained insights into numerous other subjects and points of view. But our most valuable knowledge will last far beyond graduation to form actualizations that no textbook can impart, no lecture can touch. Long after we’ve all forgotten how to conjugate Spanish verbs and correct ly graph economic models, the truth of what was learned here will be pertinent. That truth for many of us includes a confidence, a self-worth and an inner strength that was perhaps lacking that first day on campus as freshmen - a courage that comes from chasing dreams and watching them come to fruition. For most UNL students, college represents an almost total freedom for the first time in their lives. But, unfortunately, many a student out there will walk away from this institution, this experience with only hazy memories of late-night beer-fests and groggy morning classes. Others will spend so much time complaining and moaning, they’ll for get to open their minds. Pity these poor souls. Perhaps they’re just some of the select few in the world who have so little left to learn that they can walk away from the luxury of receiving a formal education unmoved. Or perhaps they’re part of the fortu nate class of people who have never felt the need to prove something to them selves, to have that goal be one of the last and most important things left in life. And now, with only two semesters to go and that picture of me walking across the stage at graduation coming more and more into focus in my mind’s eye, this goal, this last-ditch effort to better my life, may come to pass. You see, some of us at UNL know we’re lucky to be here. Some of us, while we do occasion ally bitch and moan about the work load, really love what we’re doing. We came here with bruised, uncer tain souls and few directions left in life. And with a lot of effort and work, we’ll leave here with a self-worth and confidence only dreamt of before. No matter how many years it takes to pay off my loans, those things learned about myself, about what I can do and how far I can go, will have been well worth it (or damn near). Because, instead of languishing away at a dead-end. nowhere job, I (as many others do every day) took a chance and followed a dream. For me, that dream was going to a university and having a career suited to my personality. For others, that dream may include quitting a well-paying job on Wall Street to conduct white-water rapid tours down the Colorado River or reining in fear long enough to com plete that skydiving course. And following dreams is rarely com fortable, rarely lull of safety features. There are no safety bags on the road of life, but sacrifices can be made to live as safely, as securely, as possible. Pity the poor souls. My father is one of those people. He’s worked his whole life in a job he’s hated. But he makes a decent living and plans to retire early. He’s earned it. After all, he’s spent the most pro ductive, healthiest times of his life doing a job that has filled him with stress, anger and dissatisfaction. He’s had his chances to change jobs, to switch to a career that offered more personal satisfaction and bigger challenges. But he chose the safe road and stuck with the seniority benefits he had built up. I’m not putting him down for it. It's just that I never felt that sacrificing happiness and dreams were worth a little more security. Sure, I know it’s easy for me to say that, being a rather young adult myself. But surely it’s possible to have a semi satisfying job while maintaining a liv ing - at least, that’s my theory. And we can’t become so mired in our drive to live securely and safely that we become frozen when it comes time to take a chance. Because if nothing changes, noth ing changes. If I and many others had played it safe and not taken the plunge to quit that full-time job and go back to school, we’d be exactly where we were years ago. We’d never had known how far we could go, how good we could do, and our dreams would have slowly evolved into regrets. And that’s a version of hell I’d rather not endure.
