When I was five years old I drew a pastel portrait in vivid purple and blue inspired by the Queen of Hearts. My work of art, which I named “Heart Lady,” now seems to me to be some sort of drag queen version of the redoubtable visage on the playing cards themselves. Her hat is just a little too far from her head and one arm kind of swims out in front, unattached to the rest of her body. My art teacher liked the drawing, though. She even put it on the cover of the catalog for a show of student work called “A Child’s Vision.” Whatever my large-limbed queen said in a representative way about the visionary power of children’s artistic impulses is still unclear to me, but I certainly did understand that I should be appropriately self-satisfied. “Well, Rachel, I guess you’ve had your 15 minutes,” my dad said to me when we left the gallery after the show’s opening reception. I was confused. We’d been at the gallery for at least half an hour and my teacher had only talked about my drawing for three short minutes. Where was this 15 number coming from? My dad then explained about a man named Andy Warhol and an idea he had that everyone would be famous, world famous no less, for fifteen minutes.
I liked that idea a lot. I like it even more now that I’ve spent a couple years here working for this magazine that so cleverly borrowed its title from Warhol’s ubiquitous quotation. The phrase itself, however, is a bit tired. And collectible quotations themselves are pretty silly—I mean, what good do they do unless you’re trying to market an inspirational journal or you find it necessary to share a little insight into your soul at the bottom of an e-mail about selling House formal tickets?
Even Warhol got sick of it. “My new line is ‘in 15 minutes everybody will be famous,’” he wrote in 1979. Maybe that even works better for our purposes. It’s more jaded, certainly. You can hear the tired sigh, the burden of having said something that people put on bumper stickers. But it also indicates a sort of populist quality, like everyone can get in on this fame and fortune thing and everyone has a story to tell. In that spirit, we present you with our final issue of the year. In Fifteen Minutes everybody is famous. It’s a yearbook of sorts, which goes appropriately with the whole quotation thing. You can meet a lot of people you haven’t seen before: the people who have worked for the magazine this year and the fresh-faces taking their place. We also want to introduce you to some members of the class of 2004 who we think you should get to know.
There’s an important member of the class of 2004, however, whose face is not in full color on the center spread of the magazine. (She is however featured in black and white photos on pages 8 and 11, but that’s not the point.) Like me, Elizabeth F. Maher generally prefers the relative anonymity of a signature at the bottom of an editors’ note to the self-aggrandizement writ large we’re featuring in this issue. But we’ll usher her center stage for the moment, just as we’re taking this curtain call.
An important thing to know about Liz is that her room is a fire hazard. Or at least it was last year (I haven’t been to the Quad in a while). She’s got old issues of FM in one corner and an imposing stack of other glossies—W and Elle mixed with the The Economist and The New Republic and the like—an appropriate combination of perfume samples and politics. That’s the way Liz likes to mix it up. And you can count on her to deliver substance with style every time. Liz was the captain of her soccer team in high school and it shows—she internalized that leading by example stuff. She also often wears pig-tails. She is a friend to the magazine and the people who work on it in a way that it’s pretty hard to find at Harvard, meaning that she puts her friends and obligations to others above her own health, foreign language vocabulary acquisition and many, many other things.
Post-FM we will all look forward to watching her rapid ascent in Boston politics. But that’s the distant future. The immediate future should be much more relaxed. After all, our 15 minutes are up.
—Rachel Dry
I clearly had no idea what I was doing when I stumbled into an FM meeting one Thursday evening in February 2001. I showed up without ideas, without any clue at all as to how a magazine works or what the rules of the journalism game are. But I’m a little obsessed with magazines and it was easy to get caught up in the swirl of story lists, writers’ meetings and FM soirees. And it certainly didn’t hurt that on my first long assignment I was teamed up with the already-elected, already in-The Crimson-know Rachel E. Dry. We were supposed to write a 2,000 word article but the cover story for that week crumped and suddenly, with only a few days left to report and write, we were writing a scrutiny. Rachel took it all in stride and I tried to follow her lead. Though hers is a near-impossible act to follow, I’ve been lucky to be by her side for the past three years.
When Rachel and I found out last December that we were the new magazine chairs, we were ecstatic and energetic and a little bit wary. But no one else was nervous, knowing that Rachel would continue crafting prose from poorly strewn together clichés without discouraging the eager compers who submit that shit. Rachel has an almost preternatural instinct for what elements go into a good FM story. It’s actually amazing to watch her thought process, which after working on more than three dozen issues together, I’ve come to understand and (almost) anticipate. There are few people with whom I can sufficiently communicate with a simple look, a knowing smile or vague, noncommittal phrases. We know each others’ strengths and idiosyncrasies, defense mechanisms and passive-aggressive tendencies. It’s not what I was expecting to find in The Crimson, but it’s the main reason that I could never give it up.
In our final issue, we present 15 seniors who are equally dedicated to beliefs they survive on or activities they love. We took them out for light appetizers and seven bottles of wine at Sandrine’s, in the hope of learning more about what makes them tick. Choosing seniors to feature is always hard and this year we didn’t take a new approach. We wanted to include seniors no one knows and seniors everyone recognizes by name or face. Meet them. Learn more. Read the profiles.
We also have more people talking about themselves throughout the issue. Or, really, FM talking about FM. If you only want to see one page in this issue, please read page nine. Rachel spent a morning (well, actually, many mornings, but only one as a reporter) with two full-time employees of The Crimson who make sure that the paper comes out every weekday. Brian Byrne and George Dioguraei are two of the least known people at 14 Plympton Street, but two of the most crucial. Most people don’t even realize that we have our own presses here, and these are the guys who print the pages and get the papers delivered on time. There are a lot of other interesting characters who operate behind the scenes of our bright red door. When we decided to write about seven “heroes” of the magazine, we immediately turned to the incredibly talented and super-cute Scott T. Duquette ’05 to draw us pop-inspired renderings of our dedicated extended family. Scott has provided us week in and week out with amazing art delivered promptly to our inbox, and should be on the hero’s page as well. We’re also especially beholden to former FM associate editor and current Crimson President, Amit R. Paley ’04, whose quiet support, constant nagging and unintentional comic relief help keep us on our toes. Check him out on page five in our all-time favorite photograph.
There are a lot of other people, whose names rarely (or never) appear in the pages of FM, without whom we couldn’t produce 24 pages each week. And next semester there will be a new crop of executives, whose names and faces you should get to know now (see page 19), who will take charge of finding the people and events that deserve their 15 minutes in our pages.
As we turn the mag over to the new class, I can’t help but laugh at how green I was at my first FM meeting and even at how naive I was last December. We didn’t write all the stories we wanted or execute all the new plans we hatched for improving production and making the magazine fresher. But we learned and made adjustments and along the way we produced 524 pages of content. There is much more to be written, but not here. Be sure to check out the next set of pages in early February. FM will have full-color and a brand new design, but don’t be alarmed. We’ll always be a product of Warholian inspiration.
—Elizabeth F. Maher
