Elvis among us

There is a hidden Elvis in the Doe Library.

No seriously.

And he's not just Elvis. He's Santa Elvis. I should know. I'm the one who made him out of Bristol board, Magic Marker and glitter glue.

It all started in December, 1991. I'd been working at the Doe Library on the Berkeley Campus for a couple of years, and my friend Lisa, she was in charge of what we quaintly referred to in those days as the "Office Christmas Party."

Now, I had worked at the Library long enough to have developed a reputation as a kind of a zany party decoration making kind of guy, and Lisa asked me to make an seasonal centerpiece for the buffet table, and Lisa being Lisa, she requested that I go with an Elvis theme.

Well, the Doe Library, the original wing of it anyway, is kind of a big Beaux Arts extravaganza of a building with lots of marble and high ceilings and paneling that looks like something from the ballroom scene in "The Poseidon Adventure."

Naturally, I felt compelled to scale up the Elvis centerpiece to an appropriate dimension.

I really outdid myself. I made a cartoon cut-out of the Vegas-Hilton-Era Elvis in a Christmas-themed jumpsuit, wearing a Santa hat and poking his right fist in the air as if to punctuate the final chord of "Burnin' Love."

Damn thing must have stood four feet tall.

Anyway, as memory serves, we were in the midst of our year-end festivities at the library when work began on a new underground facility just outside the main entrance of Doe. One moring, at the behest of the management, the entire staff posed for a picture on the library's front steps, which were to be dismantled and later reassembled as part of this new construction project.

Well, just as we were leaving to get our picture taken, Lisa prevailed upon me to retrieve the Elvis-as-Santa cut-out from the Cataloging Department (where he'd gone on display after the party) so that we could try to sneak him into the picture.

If you go to the Doe Library, there's a whole collection of historic photos on the Northeast corner of the ground floor. The one of all of us on the steps from 1991 is part of a large framed poster way on the end around the corner from the newspaper room.

If you look really close, in the back of the crowd, towards the center, you can see Elvis.

I went there today just to make sure. You can still see him all right. But it looks like they finally airbrushed out the mooner.

Kurt "big daddy" True
21 december 2005