Mary Schmich

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Mary Schmich is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

Born in Savannah, Georgia, the oldest of eight children, Schmich grew up in Georgia, attended high school in Phoenix, Arizona, and earned a B.A. from Pomona College.

After working in college admissions for three years and spending a year and a half in France, Schmich attended journalism school at Stanford. She has worked as a reporter at the Peninsula Times Tribune, at the Orlando Sentinel and, since 1985, at the Tribune. She spent five years as a Tribune national correspondent based in Atlanta.

Her column started in 1992 and was interrupted for a year during which she attended Harvard on a Nieman fellowship for journalists.

In addition to writing her column, Schmich is also the current author of the long-lived comic strip Brenda Starr and has worked as a professional barrelhouse and ragtime piano player.

She is perhaps best known as the author of an amusing and discursive column, Wear Sunscreen, that included an injunction to wear sunscreen. An Internet rumor erroneously stated that this column was a commencement address by Kurt Vonnegut at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two years after the column was written in 1997, Baz Luhrmann released a song called Everybody's free (to wear sunscreen) in which this column is read word for word as written by Schmich. This song was a number one hit in several countries in 1999.

About four times a year, Schmich and fellow Tribune metro columnist Eric Zorn write a week of columns that consist of a back-and-forth exchange of letters. Each December, Schmich and Zorn host the "Songs of Good Cheer" holiday caroling parties at the Old Town School of Folk Music to raise money for the Tribune Holiday Fund charities.

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