Re: Alumni Update Third Request

To Whom It May Concern:

This is not the email for John McNaney, Loyola Blakefield alumni from 1981. Please stop sending emails about your alumni newsletter.

Send.

But then I thought about it. Just how often do we have the opportunity to invent the person we wished we could’ve become since high school? To voice all the imagined triumphs and accomplishments we wished we’d achieved?

Here is the reply I could have sent:

Dear Loyola Alumni Association,

This is John McNaney, class of 1981. Thank you for contacting me. I apologize for my late reply. As you may have read in the newspapers, I have been out of the country for the past year.

Since graduation from Loyola in 1981, I’ve accomplished so many things. Where to begin? After winning the 1983 Pulitzer Prize in literature for my autobiography, I am John, which I proudly began penning in the halls of ol’ Loyola, I completed my medical degree at Harvard. Lying on a blanket in Harvard yard one night, watching a meteor shower, I felt God spoke to me and told me to start a medical foundation that would allow children in third-world countries to receive vaccines free of charge. Turns out, it was incredibly easy to set up this foundation. You just have to know the right people.

On one of my many pilgrimages to South America, I met the woman who would become my wife, Linda. Turns out she was not only a doctor, but also a swimsuit model. And they say brains and beauty can’t coexist! Linda and I rushed back to the states to marry at her father’s country club, and within a year we had our first child, Benjamin. Benjamin is now a Rhodes scholar, if you can believe it. They grow up so fast.

Most recently, as you no doubt know, my Pulitzer Prize winning autobiography was picked up by Hollywood production agency to turn into a film. Originally, the casting director had chosen Brad Pitt to play the character based on me, but then had the novel idea of allowing me to star in the film. Having studied briefly at Juilliard, between graduating from Loyola and beginning medical school at Harvard, I felt confident in that endeavor. After the film’s release in theaters, and the subsequent Academy award nominations and wins for Best Picture, Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay, I have been doing non-stop press tours throughout America and, now, Europe. As a matter of fact, I am writing to you from an Internet café in Rome right on the outskirts of the Collosseum. I am truly blessed.

I hope that this will suffice for the Loyola alumni newsletter. If you would like a photograph to accompany the article, I can have my good friend Ms. Annie Leibovitz send one over from our last shoot.

And, as always, our alma mater’s cheer: “Roll, Dons, Roll!”

With Warmest Regards,

John McNaney