For the record, Molly McGaan never made a mix tape of herself imitating animal noises.
And her prized possession is not a copy of the atrocious Adam Sandler flick “Grown Ups 2” signed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The gags were part of a fake rejection letter from Harvard that she wrote for a satirical magazine, Citizen Poke, that she started at Francis Parker School in Lincoln Park, where she is a senior.
McGaan printed the magazine last Tuesday at school, put copies around the building, posted it on Facebook and went to bed that night at her Ravenswood home with about 50 Twitter followers. When she awoke she had 1,000.
In the fake rejection letter, which looks super official at a glance — she actually used the opening two sentences from a real Harvard rejection letter — quickly becomes absurd when McGaan, in the voice of a Harvard Dean of Admissions, writes that despite her “proficiency in ‘dank memes’ ” or her “level of $wagg moneyyyyyy,” the school cannot grant everyone admission.
The dean suggests she obtain letters of recommendation from teachers and mentors, not Chief Keef, who “submitted a picture of a dinosaur drawn in crayon on a rolling paper.”
A writer from the Boston Globe soon called her. A television station followed. The Harvard school newspaper did a write-up. And the story has been picked up abroad as well.
But a lot of people weren’t sure if it was real or fake.
“The point was that it would be so absurd it would be funny,” McGaan, 18, said Wednesday night. “It never crossed my mind that anyone would think this is real.”
McGaan, who loves theater and improv, applied to Harvard and was relieved to hear — through back channels — that the folks at their admission office thought the gag was funny.
“March is when people start getting letters back from colleges, and it’s really, really stressful. Especially for me because I got rejected from a theater program at Michigan.”
She did, however, get into the University Michigan, in a different program, so she’s still probably headed to Ann Arbor.
Molly McGaan’s fake rejection letter
