I knew I would love Mary Lou Song when she held our first group meeting in a Starbucks. While other groups headed to computer labs and gray offices, the eight of us found ourselves sipping mochas on bright orange couches. Mary Lou paid for our coffee, then sat down and asked us about ourselves. She encouraged us not to be shy and assured us this would be the best summer of our lives, smiling sweetly the whole time. Then she handed back our papers.
“Bland, flat, colorless, dull,” she had scribbled on mine in dark blue ink. I looked around at the other seven and saw by their fallen faces that they’d also gotten heart-crushing comments. We sat in silence, absorbing our inadequacy for the first time.
“Remember, there’s no crying in journalism!” cheered cute little Mary Lou. We looked at each other, smiled and tucked our papers out of sight.
By the end of the week, team rankings came out showing our group in first place. We had scored well on our current events quizzes – while other cherubs were staying up until 2 a.m. eating pizza and coining slang, we were quietly, unobtrusively reading the news.
We showed up to the Cherub Olympics on Friday night without any group cheers. We’d made up our team name, the Merry Lou-natics, on the walk over. Mary Lou gathered us and said, “Okay, guys. All you have to do is beat Stacey’s team, and I’ll take you out for dinner.”
Stacey’s team had three more people than we did and was growing – Stacey had just recruited Chip Lebovitz for tug-of-war. They were aggressive, hostile, intimidating and mean. And we defeated them soundly.
“Great job, guys! Where do you want to go for dinner?” Mary Lou asked us.
It took everyone a while to say anything. We’d known she was the third employee of eBay, and rumors were circulating that she was married to the inventor of Skype.
Finally, cheeky Ian spoke.
“How about lobster?” he said.
We all laughed. He wasn’t serious, but nevertheless we sat down the next Friday at a back table at Davis Street Fish Market. Mary Lou sat at the head of the table like the mother of the clan, and we pored over the menu, searching for the cheapest dish. The last thing we wanted to do was impose on this woman who was already being so generous. Hana, Lauren and I settled on salmon pesto pasta. Ian, for all his talk, ended up getting a cup of soup.
In the coming weeks, we fell behind in the rankings. We had been forced to participate in a late-night game of telephone charades and had failed to effectively act out “washing the dog.” The next week, we gathered in a room with the other groups and were challenged to link instructors to biographical facts that were read out loud. Our strategy was to have Hana stand up the fastest, every time, and raise the card that read “Mary Lou.”
We guessed that Mary Lou kickboxed. We guessed that Mary Lou rode a motorcycle. We almost guessed that Mary Lou had been offered marijuana during an interview and declined. But, “No,” someone joked, “Mary Lou’s crazy. She would have accepted it.”
Our strategy won us very few points. But we did get the satisfaction of hearing Mary Lou’s adorable crackling giggle from the balcony and her protest, “No, guys! Bad strategy!”
At the end of the fourth week, the entire program gathered in the auditorium to hear Mary Lou tell “the eBay story.” It was a collection of lessons in love she’d learned in the 1990s, as the company went from a tiny start-up to a brand name recognizable worldwide. She boiled the talk down to one Confucius quote.
“Find a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life,” she said. She talked about surrounding yourself with people who are as passionate about journalism as you are. She talked about how, for her, working at eBay was never about the money.
Lauren and I made eye contact across the auditorium seats. This talk, this was what Mary Lou was all about. It didn’t matter that our stories weren’t perfect or that we might be doomed to giving up our first-place title to Spencer’s Kornhuskers. All that mattered was that we all loved the same thing, and we all loved it a lot.