Christopher Buckley ’75, the speaker at Class Day this weekend, is a little nervous about his speech.
“It’s all rather nerve-wracking, really,” he wrote Sunday on The Daily Beast. “Let me say to President Obama, as he addresses Notre Dame today: I feel your pain.”
Without mentioning the university where he will be speaking, Buckley described a previous commencement speech he gave at his former boarding school, Portsmouth Abbey in Rhode Island, as well as the challenges of addressing some 8,000 people from an open-air stage.
Adding to his anxiety is the memory of speaking from the same Old Campus lectern at his own Yale graduation over 30 years ago, he wrote. As class historian, Buckley ended his address by quoting a profane line of graffiti he had seen in the old Cross Campus Library, causing his classmates to cheer and his parents to gasp, Buckley recalled.
“At the level of taste, it was on par with Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction,” he wrote.
The Class Day festivities begin Sunday at 2 p.m.