2000 Wylde Q. Chicken Award Winner:
Nick Pelafas
Lifetime Achievement

The Nomination

- Nichole Wlekinski, student

Dear Honorable Wylde Q. Chickeneers,

I second the nomination for Nick Pelafas on the grounds that he is incredibly funny, unpredictable, and crazy. Where do I begin, from the numerous times he's pulled my shirt over my head and poured ice cold water down my back as a "polite" gesture in the early morning in the Uni High Mac Lab, or when he put me in a head lock and got the office staff to come running to kick us out of school, or to times when he has attached various unspeakable pictures to my back during a huge statistics test. Nick is my good friend, although I sometimes don't know why. He definitely deserves the Chicken.

-Art Kolchinsky, student

Nick is senior class president. He's flighty but a good heart--and really the moving force behind the senior class's trip to New Orleans earlier this year, the service project they just completed at King School last Friday, etc., as well as being known for having a fair amount of fun. He played basketbal --starting usually this past year, with the same ease he showed shooting craps as "Harry the Horse" in "Guys and Dolls" last year and playing "Bottom the Weaver" (the character who wears the donkey head) in this year's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream."

The funniest thing he ever said to me was after I'd sent a rather tersely worded e-mail to student council about getting it together. He came running up to me the next day and said: "Ms. Bant! Are you feeling better?" I asked why...I didn't know I was feeling badly. "Well, I just figured you must have been sick to send an e-mail like that. You're usually so much nicer." Needless to say, we both ended up laughing.

- Marilyn Upah-Bant, Office of Development & Alumni Relations

Image

This years winner: a student who has chosen to live his life
outside the lines and yet is successful between them also.
Nominated by a fellow student, supported by faculty and
parents, Nick Pelafas receives a special "Lifetime Achievement of Wyldeness" award from the alumni of the Class of 1972.

The Nomination

This is Nick Sansone, a current junior here at Uni. I am writing to nominate a paper that I wrote in English last year for the Wylde Q. Chicken Award. The assignment was to write any kind of response to one of Shakespeare’s sonnets that we had read in class. Most people wrote serious papers about how they related to the themes of the sonnets or wrote sonnets of their own. However, I had a completely different thought process while reading the sonnet below:

Shakespeare's Sonnet #130

My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lip's red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun,
If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
In some perfumes there is more delight
Than the breath with which my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,
Music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
        And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
        As any she belied with false compare.

Nick Sansone