Fisher Cruises Toward Centerstage

The voice of James L. M. Fisher ’06 has taken him a long way. Today it will take him to the podium at Tercentenary Theatre, where the Eliot House resident will deliver the male Harvard Oration.

And his voice did not crack under the strain of the two-tiered search process.

The Senior Class Committee began the process by accepting anonymous submissions of potential speeches. Based on the text, a handful of applicants were granted an audition in front of the committee, according to Senior Class Committee member Christina L. Adams ’06.

Fisher was ultimately selected from a pool of 15 to 20 applicants for the Harvard Oration—the more serious of the two senior speeches.

“It was a very tough decision,” Adams said.

But Adams said she was confident that Fisher’s speech, entitled “Relax. It’s Only Your Life,” “would resonate well with graduating Harvard students.”

This is hardly the first time that Fisher’s voice has found a wide audience.

As a member of the Harvard Krokodiloes, Harvard’s oldest a capella group, Fisher gave a private performance for Princess Caroline of Monaco.

Fisher says the princess enjoyed the performance so much that she extended a special invitation to the group.

“She invited us all to perform at the palace in Monaco this summer,” Fisher writes in an e-mail. “You can be sure that we took her up on her offer.”

When not performing in the palaces of European royalty, Fisher will lead a six-continent, 24-country world tour this summer as the group’s tour manager.

But Fisher isn’t a narrow artist. The English concentrator confesses that film is his passion. He has spent his summers working for production companies such as Fox and Sony Pictures Studio.

Back on the East Coast, the Tom Cruise look-alike has starred in Harvard-Radcliffe Television’s soap opera, Ivory Tower.

Fisher seamlessly blended his extracurricular and academic pursuits in his award-winning creative thesis.

His thesis, which was a screenplay about a Harvard graduate who avoided the Vietnam draft by teaching in a military prep school, garnered the Le Baron Russell Briggs prize.

After graduation, he is off to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the film industry—a plan of action he jokingly calls “gainful unemployment.”

But Fisher relishes the unconventional post-graduation route he has chosen.

While others in the Class of ’06 will head to Capitol Hill jobs after Commencement, Fisher jokes, “D.C. is just a Hollywood for less attractive people.”

—Staff writer Doris A. Hernandez can be reached at dahernan@fas.harvard.edu.