[Content note: Jokes about death and violence]
This is a true story I wrote in 2014. I’m publishing it on the request of Penelope Laurans, who received it from Anne Fadiman after the story was told at a dinner commemorating the very strange history of Yale football. Of my 273 blog drafts, it was perhaps the one I least expected to publish, but life is also very strange.
If you aren’t sure whether to read this, go to the end and look at the photo. Then, if you want to know the story of the photo, read this. (Spoiler warning.)
It was an October Monday, the night of The Yale Record’s weekly meeting.
We were brainstorming slogans for t-shirts to commemorate the 130th annual Harvard-Yale game (“The Game”), and preparing to sell said shirts so that we might someday commemorate the magazine’s second straight year of not being in debt.
The administration often threatened to take away our office if we didn’t toe the line, so we had to abandon our best idea: John Harvard crucified on the letter Y.
After that, we held a public vote, and resolved to print t-shirts with the two most popular slogans. It doesn’t matter what they were. What matters for my story is the third:
“Whoever wins, our lives will end equally … IN DEATH.”