College Wants Hunka Hunka Burning Essays

You might be nothin’ but an egghead. But if you’ve seen Elvis hanging out at the mall, the University of Chicago might be the place for you.

The university, a bastion of Nobel Prize winners, livened up the creative writing portion of its admission application this year with a question inviting “suspicious minds” to flex their imaginations by concocting a conspiracy theory and draping it on Presley’s shoulders.

“Elvis is alive!” the question begins. “OK, maybe not, but here in the Office of College Admissions we are persuaded that current Elvis sightings in highway rest areas, grocery stores and Laundromats are part of a wider conspiracy” involving, among other things, malls, lint, wax fruit and reclusive author J.D. Salinger.

The Elvis question was optional. But applicant Eileen G’Sell took the challenge, concocting a tale in which Salinger, author of “The Catcher in the Rye,” was actually Elvis’ twin, Jesse Garon Presley, previously believed to have been stillborn in 1935.

“Paranoid that his . . . twin’s fame and overall ‘phoniness’ would distract from his own artistic genius, Jesse changed his name to ‘Jerome David Salinger’ and since then has avoided public attention of all sorts,” wrote G’Sell, of St. Louis.

G’Sell, 18, said she wrote that Elvis was appearing at bookstores to promote the re-release of a Salinger book, and leaving behind wax bananas because of his love for fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches. Anyone recognizing the banana connection was inducted into LINT, an acronym for the League of Insurgents for the Neo-Presley Takeover, she wrote.

“For years we thought the mark of a U of C student was to be able to make quirky connections, take an idea and run with it,” said academic advisor Joseph Walsh. “The common attribute of real genius and real crackpot is the ability to find improbable connections.”