3.2. The Sunscreen Song

The Sunscreen Song is a piece of advice for you from the authors of this course.

Wear Sunscreen is an essay written as a hypothetical commencement speech by columnist Mary Schmich, originally published in June 1997 in the Chicago Tribune. It gives various pieces of advice on how to live a happier life and avoid common frustrations. The essay became the basis for a successful spoken word song released in 1999 by Baz Luhrmann.

Here are the complete lyrics.

Rellenar huecos

Twenty years after Schmich first wrote Wear Sunscreen, she told The Telegraph its story. Match the questions with the answers. Write the number.

01. Before it went viral, did you have any unusual reaction to the column when it ran in print?

02. How did it start to gain traction?

03. Where did the idea come from?

04. Did you think, when you filed it, that it was a particularly resonant piece of writing?

05. Do you stick by the advice in it?

06. But your words comprise a hit song.

07. Was that advice things you wish you’d known, or advice you’d already given?

08.  It reads very differently when you know that it was written by a woman. Were you speaking to a younger self?

09. How long did it take to go viral?

10. So how did it get on the air?

11. How did Baz Luhrmann get in touch?

12. Would you mind being known for Wear Sunscreen?

13. Is there any that you’d add in?

14. And did Luhrmann pay you?
sunscreen
Image by Tom Newby in Flickr. CC.

. It was a Friday, I was on my third column of the week and I was out of ideas. But I was walking to work along Lake Michigan and I saw this young woman out sunbathing. And I just thought, “I hope she’s wearing sunscreen”. I kept walking and I thought, it’s graduation time, I could write a mock-graduation speech for my column. I was 43 then, an age where I thought I had all this advice I would like to administer to young people. So I sat down and I wrote what I would tell 18 to 24-year-olds.

. Where does the stuff you write come from? I have no idea. Looking back I have a whole mythology about how that column happened. I was just channelling something, whatever came to my head. It really was not super carefully considered, that was written in four hours.

. There was no such thing as online publishing at the time. Email was relatively new, I know this is hard to imagine, but there were some people who didn’t have email and the people who did were excited by it still. So this thing started going around in the early internet. It was one of the first viral things, people just started emailing it to each-other. It went viral by email, mostly.

. It was about a month after I wrote it. All of a sudden, in the course of about two days, it exploded. I don’t know at what point it got into the ether, but it was later in that summer I got several emails one Friday morning from people saying: “I just got this email, a graduation speech, which says it’s by Kurt Vonnegut but I remember reading it your column. What’s going on?”

. I did get a lot of snail mail, and a little bit of email, about it. I got a lot of response to it, there were people who liked it and I thought that was nice, then moved on.

. When I filed it I had some feeling for it. It’s not that I thought, “That is the world’s best column”, but I had some feeling for it. It made me feel something.

. Maybe, I don’t know. With writing, you sit down and it comes. You can overthink it later, but when you’re doing it, when it’s working, it’s just happening. People have said to me, “I knew that wasn’t Vonnegut the minute I read the line, ‘You are not as fat as you imagine’. That is something a woman would write”. And I said, “You’re absolutely right”.

. One of the people who got it in his emails was a young man named Anton who was working with Baz. He took it to Baz, and they were in the process of putting together a CD of music that had been used in various movies. You’ve got to remember that Baz wasn’t known to many people outside of Australia. I happen to know he was because I’d seen Strictly Ballroom, but almost nobody I knew had heard of him. So I get this voicemail from a man with an Australian accent, and it’s Baz, saying, “I have an idea for the material”. He’s explaining that he thought it was Vonnegut and they’d tried to get in touch with him, and then they discovered it was me. He had an idea of taking those words and putting them over some music that he had used in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. I’ve heard him say that he was just planning to use it as hold music for their office phone line.

. When Baz made it, it was seven minutes long. You can’t run anything in the US radio market that’s seven minutes long. But it became a big hit in Australia very quickly. And I thought, “That’s cool, big hit in Australia”. Then there were a couple of radio stations in the US, one in Santa Monica, California, that were playing the seven-minute version, because they played alt music. Another was in Portland, Oregon, and they stripped out the two minutes of musical interlude and they had a five-minute spoken word piece. They started playing it, and it became a huge hit in Portland. What changed everything was when a freelance writer in Portland did a little blurb for the New York Times Magazine about this cult hit in Portland. Then the whole thing took off. The following day, my phone started exploding with radio DJs and reporters wanting to interview me about it. Somehow my home phone number got on some list so every DJ in America had my number and was calling to get me on live.

. Well, technically the words belong to The Chicago Tribune. But Baz was very generous with me. Once it became clear what was happening, that this song was going to sell, he was quite generous with me. I have no complaints. I get royalties, although it doesn’t make me a rich woman, I’d like to point that out. I’m a hard-working, average journalist! But yes, in its heyday, I got a significant payment, and to this day I still get a little bit. But it was never calculated, I never tried to write a hit song.

. That’s the lesson in it, about writing. Especially for journalists. We come in and we do it, day after day, and you’re never sure what’s penetrating. And it’s work, even if you like it, it’s work. But if you just do it, and do it, and do it, and do it, every now and then, when you least expect it, something pop outs into the universe and resonates in a bigger way than you ever anticipated.

. No, I’m very fond of it. I like the idea that it seems to have meant a lot to many people. I’ve written so much in my life, I’ve been a journalist for 37 years. To have even one thing that endures is very gratifying.

. I do, although the world has changed. I look at it sometimes and it seems a little dated. “Throw away your old bank statements”? Nobody has bank statements anymore! Nobody even has love letters anymore! Keep your love emails.

. Oh, people ask me that sometimes. I’m sure there are, but most of them would probably be things that my mother used to say: “It will always look better in the morning”, and “there’s more than one way to live”. To me, the whole little piece comes down to that idea, that there’s more than one way to live.

Adapted from: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/wrote-four-hours-woman-responsible-wisdom-baz-luhrmanns-wear/

 

Habilitar JavaScript