Making it in the 'Real World': not all Yalies fail

Lounging comfortably in a director's chair, Hansel Tookes, CC '03, describes a life that sounds as unpredictable, and fortunate, as that of the fairy tale character who shares his name.

REBECCA ROSENTHAL/YH Hansel Tookes, CC '03, is hungry to meet everyone at Yale, but not anyone of the MTV-hungry generation.

Tookes recently progressed to round five in competition for a spot on MTV's The Real World, set to take place next in New York City. He said he decided to apply when friends told him during Cultural Connections that he seemed like a character fit for the show. So he asked a friend to help him make a video.

"I sat at a table in LC and talked," Tookes explained. "I did not sing a song; I did not dance." About three weeks later, an MTV representative told him that he had advanced to the second round and would have to submit a 30-page application to remain a candidate.

Tookes completed the forms during the October tercentennial celebration. "I sat on the wall in front of Sterling on Cross Campus and filled it out during Parents' Weekend," he said. "Then I got another call telling me that I had moved to the next round and that they wanted a picture of me."

After he sent his senior portrait from high school, he received another telephone call. Days after Halloween, Tookes set up a videophone conference for the next round, and three MTV representatives called him within an hour and a half.

"That's when they asked me all the craziest questions in the world," he said. "They were really into my views on race and my relationships."

Among other things, his interviewers asked him for an estimate of the number of girls he could sleep with at any given moment. Tookes said that since he was not about to call his female friends, he simply replied to his interviewer, "More than you."

Tookes added that, during his videophone interview, sirens were audible in the New Haven streets outside, and the MTV representatives asked him about it. Tookes thinks that his nonchalant response about hearing sirens all the time must have made the interviewers realize he wasn't the "white-bred black guy" they wanted. MTV, whose application process lasts for eight rounds, has not since contacted him, but Tookes said he would not have done the show anyway because he doesn't want to interrupt his college experience. Also, he fears how his personality would have been portrayed.

"My own thoughts of what they would have edited my character into were not very good," he said. In any case, he thinks he does not have the kind of personality that the casting directors were looking for.

"I think they wanted a character that would fall apart in a predominantly black community," he said. He also noticed that the MTV representatives asked leading questions that would allow them to edit his character as it would appear on television: "When I sensed that, I was kind of resistant to it because I saw they were trying to mold my character."

Though Tookes had reservations about appearing on The Real World, he assumes a high-profile presence at Yale. He greets passersby with a smile and says his goal is to meet everyone here, which, he says, starkly contrasts with his quiet childhood.

"I really did not talk until I was five," he said, and now he believes that some students have "a very inaccurate perception" of him.

Fellow sophomores know Tookes as last year's chair of the Freshman Class Council (FCC), but Tookes insists he did not come to Yale with the goal of winning that position. "During Cultural Connections my classmates were like, `You should be class president,'" he explained. "So I decided to run for chair. I got to meet a large percentage of my class very early on, and it really helped make my Yale transition easier."

He now serves as the FCC advisor. Tookes also helps organize Calhoun Master's Teas. Last year the guests he brought included BET veejay Donnie Simpson. He also returned to Cultural Connections last August as an aide. "I wanted to do Cultural Connections again, just to hang out with people that I might otherwise not meet at Yale," he said.

Tookes, who hopes to be a neurosurgeon, has helped with research since last year at the Yale School of Medicine in the neurosurgery department. The story of how he secured such a position as a freshman seems as unlikely as the feat itself. "I was at a store in New Haven, and I saw a girl I recognized from Calhoun," he said. "I met her dad, and since we were both buying futons, he offered me a ride back to Calhoun."

When they returned to the dorm, the man gave him a business card that showed his affiliation with the Yale Medical School neurosurgery department. Tookes was later referred to Dr. Charlie Greer, who leads a spinal cord research project.

"I'm lucky," Tookes says, "Dr. Greer had just graduated, and there was one opening [for a position in his lab]."

Hansel Emory Tookes III has proved a difficult name to carry, and Tookes rejoiced when classmates picked something new to tease him about. "When I was little, I absolutely hated my name," he said. "I was called Hansel and Gretel all the time. But in kindergarten, I slipped in the bathroom and hit my head on the sink and cracked my head open."

Stitches and plastic surgery left Tookes with a scar on his forehead. "People started calling me Frankenstein and I was actually happy that they were not calling me Hansel and Gretel," he said. But, he admits, the nickname "still made me cry every day."

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