How to Become the Tree, Mascot of Stanford University

Suffer some sort of extraordinary reversal of fortune as a child that results in erratic brain-wave patterns, such as crashing your bicycle into a baseball backstop so hard that aluminum fragments become implanted in your molars.

Spend your puberty through high school years concocting wild, preposterous schemes to get into Stanford.

Obtain compromising photographs of admission officials.

Accept early-decision admission to Stanford.

Run for Tree in the spring. Emerge, naked, from a maple-syrup-filled coffin in the middle of campus. Break into the clock tower; sleep in 15-minute intervals. Arrange a trapeze system allowing you to swing from one side of the quad to the other. Pass out in the dean's office during a disciplinary session for self-immolation in the student union.

Accept the position of Tree during a ceremony so secret and sacred that it makes the Masons look like tailgaters.

Build your own Tree costume over the summer. This is your chance to put your own stamp on Tree lore. Become feverish and rant deliriously about how it's time to shake things up, the conservative alumni be damned. Create a palm.

Put a Stones mouth on it. Give it a nose ring and a chain, and sunglasses. Buy enough duct tape to handle any potential crisis.

Train for Treedom. Hire a choreographer away from the gymnastics team; begin grueling two-a-day sessions. Prepare to lose 8 to 12 pounds per game, despite drinking water heavily, and to pull your left hamstring so many times you'll lose count.

Debut your new Tree in the fall at an all-campus rally, of which your memories will be hazy at best. Sustain critical damage to the costume by the time you reach the second dorm and reconsider the experimental floating x-wing frond design.

Prepare for the Big Game. Expect a mass of bureaucracy to dog your every arboreal step, trying to limit your explosive (and, if the Big Game Committee is to be believed, riot-inciting) dance moves to a 3-foot-square patch of turf somewhere in Mountain View.

Enjoy a triumphant Rose Bowl appearance after crushing the Cal weenies.

Choose a successor. Pick a Tree slightly different from you but similar enough that you'll be forever recognized as the Banquo of the lineage. Consider all applicants - their pros and cons, their stunts, written applications, and any proffered bribes.