2008 Woodie Awards
The Way I See It
Brenna McGinn
Issue date: 2/27/03 Section: Letter From the Editor
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When I was contemplating what I was going to write about in my column for issue seven (can you believe it, issue seven?), I first read the senior column (which was a refreshing outlook on the days we have left), followed by the stories in the Feature section of the paper. It came to me: I should write about opportunity. And after deciding so, I reread something that Provoc Feature Editor Jackie Connolly had wanted to use in her section but was unable to publish due to lack of space.
What I read was not some great philosophical piece about the way we should live, and it certainly was not the answer to all of life's questions. Heck, it was not the answer to a single one of life's questions, at least for myself. Rather it was a speech by Conan O'Brien made to the Harvard graduating class of 2000. For those of you who do not know who Conan is...you live in a cave (I do live in a cave otherwise known as the Provoc office but that is an entirely different story to be saved for another column).
As host of Late Night With Conan O'Brien, he is, perhaps one of, if not the, funniest comedians on the television circuit. Though O'Brien is not a personal friend of mine, though I'd love it if he were, he appears to his audience as a regular guy who took advantage of an opportunity and got lucky. I do not admire Conan O'Brien for what he does. In fact, I do not admire him at all. Rather, I like the person that he is: an Irish Catholic kid from Boston with red hair, beady eyes, and pasty skin. What makes Conan so great is that he could be any one of us...and he tells it like it is, just as he told the class of graduating seniors at Harvard as he stood before them.
"The point is that, although you see me as a celebrity, a member of the cultural elite, a kind of demigod, I was actually a student here once much like you. I came here in the fall of 1981 and lived in Holworthy. I was, without exaggeration, the ugliest picture in the Freshmen Face Book. When Harvard asked me for a picture the previous summer, I thought it was just for their records, so I literally jogged in the August heat to a passport photo office and sat for a morgue photo. To make matters worse, when the Face Book came out they put my picture next to Catherine Oxenberg, a stunning blonde actress who was accepted to the class of '85 but decided to defer admission so she could join the cast of Dynasty. My photo would have looked bad on any page, but next to Catherine Oxenberg, I looked like a mackerel that had been in a car accident. You see, in those days I was six feet four inches tall and I weighed 150 pounds," O'Brien explained. And while I'm sure he kept his fellow Harvard grads doubled over in laughter as he addressed them, it was his concluding remarks that will affect not only how I spend the rest of my days here at Assumption, but on how I spend the rest of my days. Period.
What I read was not some great philosophical piece about the way we should live, and it certainly was not the answer to all of life's questions. Heck, it was not the answer to a single one of life's questions, at least for myself. Rather it was a speech by Conan O'Brien made to the Harvard graduating class of 2000. For those of you who do not know who Conan is...you live in a cave (I do live in a cave otherwise known as the Provoc office but that is an entirely different story to be saved for another column).
As host of Late Night With Conan O'Brien, he is, perhaps one of, if not the, funniest comedians on the television circuit. Though O'Brien is not a personal friend of mine, though I'd love it if he were, he appears to his audience as a regular guy who took advantage of an opportunity and got lucky. I do not admire Conan O'Brien for what he does. In fact, I do not admire him at all. Rather, I like the person that he is: an Irish Catholic kid from Boston with red hair, beady eyes, and pasty skin. What makes Conan so great is that he could be any one of us...and he tells it like it is, just as he told the class of graduating seniors at Harvard as he stood before them.
"The point is that, although you see me as a celebrity, a member of the cultural elite, a kind of demigod, I was actually a student here once much like you. I came here in the fall of 1981 and lived in Holworthy. I was, without exaggeration, the ugliest picture in the Freshmen Face Book. When Harvard asked me for a picture the previous summer, I thought it was just for their records, so I literally jogged in the August heat to a passport photo office and sat for a morgue photo. To make matters worse, when the Face Book came out they put my picture next to Catherine Oxenberg, a stunning blonde actress who was accepted to the class of '85 but decided to defer admission so she could join the cast of Dynasty. My photo would have looked bad on any page, but next to Catherine Oxenberg, I looked like a mackerel that had been in a car accident. You see, in those days I was six feet four inches tall and I weighed 150 pounds," O'Brien explained. And while I'm sure he kept his fellow Harvard grads doubled over in laughter as he addressed them, it was his concluding remarks that will affect not only how I spend the rest of my days here at Assumption, but on how I spend the rest of my days. Period.