Don't Cry for Cambridge

So Harvard's down $8 billion in the past 4 months, now cruising at about 28 bills...

...It's cast a funereal pallor over the planning of the Winter Seasonal Nonreligious Blah-liday Gala of Harvard, taking place at the Harvard Sailing Club. They've already made drastic changes to the Harvard menu, plummeting from Beluga 1 to a Sevruga 2 in the first course creme-fraiche-and-caviar blinis.

"We are aware that the sevruga caviar has a stronger sea taste and smaller egg," said Eleanor Worthe, 5th-generation Harvard student and Blah-liday Gala director, "but I've received assurances from our Harvard purchasing staff, our Harvard kitchen, and the Harvard somelliers that they'll manage to incorporate it into our revised "recession" influenced celebration. After all, we are all Harvard people, not some etiquette-less rubes from somewhere like Cornell," Worthe finished with a shudder, "or Brown." When asked whether the traditional Nobel-laureate-professor "date auction and naked olympics" were still in the plans, Worthe refused comment.

It's not just down at the piers that the Crimson are feeling the pinch. Ellerby Whittimore IV, Harvard '11, was hoping to spend his year abroad posing for the camera with crowds of blighted African schoolchildren and Vietnamese sweatshop women. His father, Ellerby Whittimore III, Harvard '73, has been struggling to maintain the family's $500 million inheritance, however, in these difficult times.

Said Whittimore, "Father just didn't think it prudent for me to travel to these war-torn, I'm sorry, I mean "less-fortunate" countries without a full complement of support. I've been forced to reapply to more developed countries with greater infrastructure and Harvard connections."

According to the Whittimore spokesperson, it is standard family protocol to have a "full complement" of a personal chef, a personal assistant, a personal bodyguard, and a personal advance person and aquisition expert whenever a Whittimore left the Martha's Vineyard-Georgetown corridor.

Mr. Whittimore IV now hopes to spend his year exploring the, as he puts it, "grimier elements" of Geneva and Zurich.

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