Everybody’s free (to wear sunscreen)

Perhaps you have heard it on radio sometime? Soft, mellow words to a soothing beat. The male voice gives you advice on life that goes directly to your heart. He tells you to enjoy your youth, to hold on to irreplaceable friends, and to wear sunscreen. What it this?

The song, called “Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)”, is by the Australian director/musician Baz Luhrmann and is taken from the album “Something For Everybody”. So far this might not seem like anything to put too much interest in, but the story behind the words are something quite out of the ordinarily.

During the late summer of 1997 a certain email was starting to spread across the American continent. The email contained an alleged commencement address given to the graduation class at MIT by author Kurt Vonnegut. Its wit and striking wisdom quickly rendered the letter as one of the most popular and read emails in the history of the inter- net, and its contents was swiftly distributed across the world with the aid of friends-to-friends networks.

One day it also got into the hands of director Baz Luhrmann, as he was just finishing the song entitled “Everybody’s free” with music from the soundtrack of “Romeo+Juliet”. As it turned out, however, the speech was not written by Kurt Vonnegut, but was instead the work of the Chicago columnist Mary Schmich. Ms. Schmich had been doing a column for The Chicago Tribune for about a year. When she, in late May of 1997, had been walking along Lake Shore Drive, wondering what she was going to write about that day, she realised that the graduations was coming up. She thought about what kind of advice she would give in a commencement address, when she saw a woman sunbathing on the shore of Lake Michigan. Thus, the central theme of sunscreen had been born.

The prankster who lifted the column from the Tribune and began circulating it around the internet is as of yet unidentified and is known only as “Culprit Zero”. I am quite sure that he, or she, had no idea of what was going to happen when starting all this. It has been a strange, and amusing story, for those involved. Especially for Mr. Vonnegut.