Before the masses learned her name, Wilkinson’s cheer squad was small, but mighty. Her then roommate Angela Mathew, a fellow Harvard undergraduate, was the first to rally when she was originally rejected from the Lampoon staff her freshman year.
“I cried and cried and cried, and she says, ‘Let’s go egg the castle! You’re way funnier than those guys!’ But then, of course, I decided to comp again and she was so supportive about it, and then freaked out when I got on.”
The two first lived together as freshmen after being sorted into a room with two other female students by filling out a “giant Match.com-style survey” about their likes and dislikes. Mathew, a neurobiology concentrator, and Wilkinson, an economics concentrator, quickly became best friends, concluding on the first day, “They put the craziest bitches on campus in one room.”
In February 2014, Wilkinson’s junior year, Mathew was in a head-on auto collision while traveling back from mock trial competition in Virginia. She was with three other students on the New Jersey Turnpike when they were struck by a tractor-trailer. The three others suffered non-life-threatening injuries, but Mathew was pronounced dead on the scene. She was 20.
Wilkinson had just become president of the Lampoon. Our first meeting occurred the day before the one-year anniversary of Mathew’s death, a calendar date that Wilkinson had just realized. She sighs deep with this realization while recounting the sequence of events, but speaks with clarity and calmness. She’s done this before.
“It was hard because it was so sudden, it’s not like she was sick. And I don’t know why I always jump to that, maybe it’s because my father had colon cancer, and it was like you knew this was coming. It wasn’t a surprise. Like I don’t have any grandparents, but it’s like they’re sick and old, you knew this was going to happen. Even with medical things, like a heart attack, like oh okay, he wasn’t healthy, I understand that.
“But something about her being my age and having gone [on] a trip, it didn’t happen in front of me. It felt very not real. It felt like, ‘They’re wrong. She’s going to come back. I didn’t see it. This is just a made up thing that’s not real.’ There was a lot of holding onto that. She had the walk-through bedroom, and we were still living together, and all her stuff is there. It was like, ‘Her suitcase is just gone, because she’s on a trip!’ It’s so easy to say, ‘This is all a big mistake.’ It took me a while to really admit that this is real. And she’s not ever coming back.”
The responsibilities of the presidency and sudden influx of media coverage intensified the pressure for Wilkinson. But camaraderie runs deep at the organization and Parker, then the vice president, stepped in to make sure Wilkinson had time — even if it was just an hour or a day — to grieve and find balance.
“That was a really tough time,” says Parker, 22, a second semester senior. “Obviously Alexis had so much going on, and it was really a terrible firestorm, because she had a lot of media attention on her at this point. Reporters were reaching out for her to write stories and give interviews. There were a lot of demands but also opportunities. I can’t imagine that chaos of it.”
Parker describes her relationship with Wilkinson as “buddy cops” — “Good cop, bad cop, cool cop, weird cop. But always cops. Sisters who are cops.”
The ability to take time off, but also keep busy and be open and honest about a difficult time, shaped Wilkinson’s reign as president. Rachel, Ellie, and Harvard’s campus services played a role in Wilkinson’s resilience during that time, but a story for XOJane on dealing with Mathew’s death became another therapeutic method of coming clean and coming to terms, not only with herself, but also with her staff.
“It was very sort of hard for me to be vulnerable and put those feelings out there, but I think it was important for a lot of people at Lampoon,” she says. “I had just been showing up and doing the work. They knew she had passed away, but I was very adamant that, ‘Don’t talk about that to me, because I’m president, and I’ve got stuff to do. That’s out there, and I’m in here.’ And I think it was good for them to see that I am dealing with it, and I’m not heartless, not that they were thinking those things, but it was a peek inside myself.”
For some of Wilkinson’s press interviews, Parker accompanied. They embraced the media attention, even when they questioned the news peg, knowing that it was best for the Lampoon; it’s not often that the publication gets attention from national networks like MSNBC.
“There was all this pressure for us to discuss gender dynamics,” explained Parker. “But when Alexis and I were elected from within staff, for us being women, it was a consequence of it, it had no bearing on why we were elected or what we planned to do going forward. Then for her, someone who is black and female, that creates a weird dynamic when you’re trying to lead an organization of your friends and writers on staff, but then you’re constantly being spotlighted for being different.”
She added, “I think, on the other hand, the media attention motivated both of us to do something really significant.”
During their tenure as leaders, Parker and Wilkinson pushed the Lampoon staff to produce a much larger volume of writing than usual. They put out seven issues of the Lampoon in their calendar year, as opposed to the typical four or five. And they launched a satirical news website called the Huffington Psst last September. (It was almost called the Huffington Poon… but was vetoed for obvious reasons.) The Lampoon went daily digital for the first time with its summer parody project, integrating video and daily articles into the mix. The site amassed more than 200,000 uniques visits, garnering the attention of both Sheryl Sandberg and Arianna Huffington, both of whom were parodied by Psst.
“We didn’t just be the two women who were in charge,” says Parker. “We wanted to make our own mark on the place.”
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