Tray carvings

Carvings generally fall into three four a bunch of categories: Wilbur trays, "Tray of" trays, tray puns, Cult of Tom trays, trays with pictures, and...other trays.

Contents

Wilbur...

(An unlikely but intriguing possible source for the great resentment towards Wilbur may be the late 19th century serialized novel "Wilbur of Williams", [note: title may need correcting] which can be found in the Williams Archives. It is, naturally, a romance. Jealousy, perhaps?)

I don't know where the story above came from but this is the true story. Once upon a time, there was a Williams student who was named Wilbur, and he sucked. To spread the word about how much Wilbur sucked, his friends took the time during meals to carve reminders for other Williams students on Mission and later Greylock trays. They later became creative outlets for people give other examples of how much Wilbur sucked. Wilbur graduated years ago, but was succeeded by another Wilbur (his brother) who sucked even more. This Wilbur's friends brought the Wilbur Sucks message into the digital age and started the Wilbur Sucks facebook.com group. Everyone is encouraged to join and will receive a Wilbur Sucks nickname upon entry.

Extant Wilbur Trays

• Wilbur Sucks I - LXII (beyond?)
• Wilbur cooks with spices (Greylock?)
• Wilbur was framed (Greylock)
• Wilbur plays ice hockey (Greylock)
• Wilbur takes econ
• Wilbur invaded Poland (Greylock)
• Welcome to Wilbur Country (Surgeon General's warning: Wilbur Sucks)
• Wilbur works the corner (Greylock)
• Wilbur failed the MCATs
• Wilbur tips poorly (Greylock)
• Wilbur has halitosis (Greylock)
• Wilbur felches (Greylock)
• Wilbur eats veal (Greylock)
• Wilbur watches figure skating (Greylock)
• Wilbur worships false idols (Greylock)
• Wilbur sets up false idols (Greylock)
• Wilbur brakes for moose (Mission)
• Wilbur rides the night train (Driscoll)
• Wilbur is out of his element (Greylock)
• Wilbur is a Saddam body double (Greylock)
• Wilbur is a weapons inspector (Greylock)
• Wilbur is out of his element (Greylock)
• Wilbur fucked your girlfriend
• Goose Blows Goats (Wilbur Helps) (Greylock)
• Both Wilburs Suck (Mission)

A few years ago, some students took it upon themselves to redeem Wilbur's image in the public eye by recording the following positive attributes.

• Wilbur donates blood (Mission)
• Wilbur Votes (Mission)
• Wilbur Recycles (Mission)
• Wilbur Saves the Whales (Mission)

I, WILBUR: The Truth Behind the Trays.

I feel I must set the record straight. While well-meaning and reasonably thorough, the previous entry is incorrect at least partially. I write for and represent the group of individuals who began, begat, and beset upon the world the Wilbur Tray Series. At its pinnacle, the Series exceeded about 150 Trays and up to almost 20 people were involved in the creative process surrounding the manufacture of each Tray. We knew Wilbur. We were his roommates, his teammates, his friends. To begin with, Wilbur did not suck in many aspects of life. He worked hard at school and had, in my humble opinion, a solid GPA. He was a fast and strong lacrosse player, he dated a pretty, smart, athletic girl, and it’s rumored that he fucked DeRosa’s girlfriend. Of course, this is a highly simplified and generic view of Wilbur. In truth, he worked too hard and his scholastic diligence often caused him to miss nights of beirut and general tomfoolery. His lacrosse game relied upon his quick first step and he was oft-injured after his stellar junior year. His girlfriend throughout college was terrified of us and we substantiated rumors that Wilbur had cut her tongue out, eradicating her power of speech. Please forgive my candid tone. Wilbur was, is, our friend. He once drank a bottle of gin and insisted we shoot him point blank in the chest with a pellet gun, a request we obliged more than a few times. However, he also missed the amHerst game his senior year because he had to take the MCATs and would not reschedule them. It was also famed coach Renzie Lamb’s final home game. We won despite the absence of Wilbur’s power sweep and played amHerst again the following day in the first round of the playoffs. Back from his MCATs and freshly rested, Wilbur made it to the Herst to help us out with the speed we needed. We lost by 2 goals. Poor Wilbur, he will read this. However, he is emotionless. He has no pity, no remorse. It is what prompted his nickname: The Automaton.

When we were sophomores, we lived in Mission Park. Dennett, 4th floor, to be exact. This was in ‘01-’02, prior to the renovations that made that cinder block a desirable place to live. We were often bored, cooped up in our hallway, with its firedoors and dull lighting. We had no common room. For the most part, we amused ourselves by imbibing inappropriate amounts of Fleischman’s gin and case after case of our beloved Busch Light and P.B.R. At the time, there were six of us: Bee, The Automaton, Radar, Rack, Kam, and me. I’m Mojo. I don’t recall the date specifically, but it was maybe mid-way through the first semester. September 11th had numbed us all. A couple of us had just ended long-standing relationships, others had begun new ones. All in all, we were reliant upon one another, as friends and cohabitants, for entertainment and solace both of which often occurred in the form of a mean bender. As I said before, Wilbur was sometimes a serious part of our steam-letting. More often than not, however, it seemed he was not. Living and eating in Mission while our friend was seldom around and not enthused by our shenanigans prompted us to adopt a mantra: Wilbur Sucks. We’d be at ‘family dinner’, when all 6 of us would be eating at that infamous, now famous, dining hall. “Where’s Wilbur?”, someone would ask. “I think he and Kristin had to study and were having dinner at Dodd”, someone would reply. “Man,” one of us would interject, “Wilbur SUCKS.” Everyone would nod in agreement over their Upscale Pizza or salad bowl.

Please realize, this wasn’t said out of real spite or hatred. He was our friend. But he went above and beyond to piss us right off. So it began. Inspired by the occasional carving we’d see on those oddly-shaped Mission Trays (‘peneTraytion’ was a favorite) Kam and I set to writing “WILBUR SUCKS” into the Trays. Kam’s carving tool of choice was his fork, which he would rinse, in a short ritual, in the remains of his drinking water before scratching his lower-case print into the beige plastic. I carried a Swiss Army knife in my pocket attached to my keys. Its awl provided a precise sharp point with which I etched our legacy in a fine-lined, all-caps print. While Rack often had football practice, he enjoyed long meals and was present for much of our inscribing. Bee and Rade were fully loyal to the cause, brainstorming new ideas and even scratching out the occasional work for the good of our ouevre. So, in Mission it began. White flakes and filings curling from the already scratched Trays as our fingers ached under the pressure we applied to make our mark. We took pride when we’d get our own Trays at meals. We would reach for one of the stacks and flip the Tray over eagerly, anticipating a rare find like the elusive XVI or one of the original unnumbereds. Often times, right out of the wash, the marks were hard to read until the Tray dried. This was especially true of my narrower grooves. However, what we truly loved, what got us beaming from deepinside, was waiting in line for a new batch of chicken fingers to emerge from the scullery and hearing groups of friend around us delight in their finds.

“Hey, Vlad, I got one of those Wilbur Trays!”

“That’s great, Jeb, I got number twelve. Who is this poor bastard?”

“I don’t know, Vladdy, but apparently he sucks, huh?”

“Yup.”

And so our days were brightened.

All in all, we don’t know exactly how many Wilbur Trays we finished that year and I was sidelined from my work for 6 weeks with a broken right index finger, my carving finger, but our estimates range from about 85-100. We started with just “Wilbur Sucks”. Over and over, we etched these letters with as much variety as we could muster, with the hopes of covering every piece of flat serving plastic we could get our defacingly creative mitts on. We were unknowing followers of Haring, Basquiat, and, eventually, the Romans. We started to want to catalogue our history, numbering the Trays from the numeral I. Each was different and we were sure to pass on to one another which we made so we’d know which consecutive number to carve at our next earliest convenience. The simple beginnings morphed into limited edition Trays such as the infamous “Seventeen Lambda” so named for the slip of the fork which caused a lambda-esque mark. These were the Limited Edition Mission Trays:

XVIIλ (the infamous seventeen-lambda)

WILBUR LEGALLY SUCKS (21)

XXX WILBUR SUCKS HARDCORE ltd ed. (30)

WILBUR SUCKS 40oz

WILBUR SUCKS .44

Upon the completion of sophomore year, and the final realization that we’d made it out of Mission alive, we left our Trays behind us, but with the knowledge that Wilbur’s little brother would be joining us the following fall. We also knew that the chances of his living in Mission would be great and that his mates and he would be reminded, daily, about his unfortunate genetic malady.

Junior year saw me off to Melbourne, Australia, away from the friends and co-artists with whom I’d lived in such close proximity. I missed a whole football season and Rack’s shaved head. My return coincided with Kam’s month-long departure for the duration of Winter Study. My artistic soul pined for his return. However, I found another interesting lot of people. Men I knew from the previous two years, people like The Dog and Gregor, who now lived with Radar and Rack placing them closer to me and to my heart. Gregor’s ascerbic humor and outlook on life provided a solid sounding board for The Dog’s anger over the “Girlfriend incident. Coupled with the usual spark from Radar and the sage judgement from Rack, this was a veritable breeding ground for new Wilbur insults. I was also now living with Goose, whose objective disgust of Wilbur was helpful in balancing our strong bias, as well as Kam, Bee, and of course, the Robot himself, as well as a handful of others: Doc, whose bizarre, no-holds-barred razzing meshed seamlessly with the work of Deaner, Blakely, and more. It was upon Kam’s return that our now enlarged force set to work bouncing ideas off of one another like a New York City taxi passenger against the door frame. We decided that the Wilbur legend must persist in the red brick confines of Greylock Dining Hall. So it was. We decided to put aside our sophomoric yet accurate decree and focus on slightly more pithy, witty, timely, and thought-provoking Trays. Ideas were suggested, shot down, modified until they evolved into the Greylock series. Here is what we recall, in no particular order:

• Wilbur Sucks in Greylock
• Wilbur Blows Goats
• Wilbur Eats Veal
• Wilbur Wears Fur
• Wilbur Hates Babies
• Wilbur Kills Puppies
• Wilbur Beats His Girlfriend
• Wilbur is Copraphagous
• Wilbur Shot JFK
• Wilbur Has Nocturnal Emissions
• Wilbur Plays Ice Hockey
• Wilbur is a Saddam Body Double
• Wilbur Gives Footjobs
• Wilbur Watches Figure Skating
• Wilbur Invaded Poland
• Wilbur Is Out of His Element
• Wilbur Failed His MCATs
• Wilbur Is Catholic
• Wilbur Rides the Night Train
• Wilbur Felches
• Wilbur Tips Poorly
• Wilbur Spits
• Wilbur Worships False Idols
• Wilbur Swallows
• Wilbur Doesn’t Recycle
• Wilbur Voted For Bush
• Goose Hates Wilbur [and Rade]*

*added later

• Wilbur Still Sucks
• Wilbur Is French
• Wilbur Has Malaria
• Wilbur Has Halitosis
• Wilbur Went To amHerst
• Wilbur has Webbed Feet
• Wilbur Doesn’t Flush
• Wilbur Is a Vegetarian
• Wilbur is a Communist
• Wilbur Putts From The Rough
• Wilbur Drinks Zima
• Wilbur is a Teetotaler
• Wilbur is Incontinent
• Wilbur Douches
• Wilbur Works The Corner
• Wilbur Dropped the Ball
• Wilbur Was Adopted

It was our hope, after all our effort, that we would one day be able to reclaim the Trays we had defaced in the name of art and information dispersal. However, upon inquiry into the matter before a Greylock meal during my senior year, I learned that Wilbur Trays were being systematically destroyed by the Dining Hall Staff and Services so as to prevent futher “vandalizing” by the unknown assailants of the beige plastic. I was crushed. Our Warholian workshop of Wilbur wailing was wasted. I sometimes wonder about the definitions of art. Part of my Williams number-one-liberal-arts-school-education focused on that very topic. If it once was, but is no longer, is it art? Is the concept itself art? Without the originals, is it art? Yes, yes. A thousand times, yes.

LAL!!?

Cult of Tom

• Cult of Tom
• Cult of Tom Tom
• Cult of Tom Tom Tom

and so on . . .

The Cult of Tom story orginated in 2000 when Tom Fleming ('00) and Jeff Grant ('00) were talking to each other and realized that people would wear pretty much any free T-shirt. Thus, Tom decided he could start his own cult merely by printing up shirts that said "Cult of Tom" and distributing them. The only rule for the Cult of Tom was that you must wear the T-shirt.

Then, Tom asked everybody with the shirt to wear it and come to his thesis defense to ask questions (perhaps silly questions or pre-arranged really intelligent ones). It was afterwards that "Cult of Tom" began being scratched onto Driscoll trays.

This is where the story diverges. Some say that Tom Stackpole ('01) got jealous and scratched out the orignal Tom and put his own name in. Others say that a friend of Tom's started the corrections, and thereby created a new Cult of Tom (Stackpole). At any rate, the original Cult of Tom supporters were angry, and scratched out the new Tom and replaced it with the old Tom. As a result, the system of odd-even number of Toms was created. An odd number of Toms meant Tom Fleming, and even numbers were Tom Stackpole.

Source: members of class of 2000, 2001 -- many of whom still have original Cult of Tom shirts.

Other incarnations of the Tom theme:

• Cult of Thomas Edison
• Cult of Strom
• Cult of Sarah's Tomb (Driscoll; handwriting analysis implies a vandalization of earlier Cult of Tom tray)
• Cult of (Greylock; maybe they got interrupted?)

• ult of om

Tray of...

• Tray of the Thnikkaman (including drawing; Mission)
• The tray of repeatedly hitting yourself over the head with a shovel (Mission)
• Tray of Spiritual Horniness (Driscoll)
• Tray of Snow Bocce 2004 (Mission)
• Tray of the Future (Mission)
• Tray of... to the Future! (Mission; same as above?)
• Tray of Feral Pigs (Mission)
• Tray of the Luv Potion (Driscoll)
• Tray of Williams (Wesleyan)
• Tray of Willful Disregard (Driscoll)
• Tray of Unfulfilled Desires (Driscoll)
• Tray of Tu Madre (Driscoll)
• Tray of GE's Freedom Movement (Greylock)
• Tray of Buttface (Mission)
• Tray of the Love Nest (Mission)
• Tray of Projectile Food (Mission)
• Tray of Knowledge of Good and Evil ("From every tray in the dining hall you may freely eat, but not from the tray of knowledge of good and evil, or God shall surely smack you over the head with it.")
• Tray of Prostitution (Driscoll)
• Tray of it's April 27th of my Senior Year and I still haven't carved a tray! (Greylock)

Tray Puns

• Basic Trayning/I want to be a Driscoll Tray (Mission, was in Baxter)
• Death Before Detrayal (Driscoll and Mission)
• Tray Bien
• Judgment Tray
• Penetraytion (Mission)
• Defenestraytion
• Libertray, Egalitray, Fraternitray (Mission; also says Wilbur Sucks LI)
• Take the A-Tray
• Trayin' Alive (Mission)
• Elizabeth Traylor (Driscoll)
• Traymate of the Year (Driscoll)
• Tray of eMission (Mission)
• Traytor to your Countray (Driscoll)
• Night Trayn (Mission)

Mysterious Drawings

• A proof that temperatures exist below absolute zero using orbital diagrams (Driscoll)
• An illustration of a normal gaussian distribution (Driscoll)
• Some nonsense with a guy in a boat and an angel thing (Driscoll)
• A pretty well-done and detailed sketch of some dude's face, similar in style, as Dan skillfully put it, to the drawings of Egon Schiele; further analysis has revealed it to be the work of Rachel S. Selinsky '06 (Driscoll)

Other

• Tray 3:16 (Mission)
• e^(pi)(i) + 1 = 0 (Driscoll)
• Mea mecum ludit virginitas (Driscoll; this tray presumably commemorates the Concert Choir's 2004 performance of Orff's Carmina Burana)
• Chuck Chuck / buh-Chuck / etc. / Fuck / etc. / Chuck! (Greylock)
• Monkeypo (Driscoll)

Ideas for Carvings

So awful.

• Infiltraytion (I think this one exists)
• Tray the course
• Extray credit for puns
• Wilbur: Zuckerman's Traymous Pig (sucks)
• Et tu, Brutray? Then fall, salad.
• Tray the Earth Stood Still
• Auto-Traycheotomy
• Tray that funky music, white boy
• Jonathan Traylor Thomas
• LNT: Leave No Trays
• My baby takes the morning trayn
• Early Gothic Traycery (with sketches)
• A sketch of the monster from Pumpkinhead 1
• The 6th Tray
• (I'm going off the rails on a) Crazy Trayn
• All aboard the Night Trayn
• Keep food off of the Traychea
• 40 trays and 40 bites
• On the 7th tray, Cod rested.
• The Tray After Tomorrow
• Independence Tray
• Tray? Fine by me.

Sledding trays

Trays that have been stolen and used as sleds often have shallow or deep grooves in the bottom, running parallel to the long axis of the tray. This is courtesy of the rocks buried underneath the snow that Williams students sled on. Rocks: not your ordinary tray carvers.