dward A. “Eddie” Gonet IV ’26 and I are sitting on sofas in his dorm on Prescott Street, listening to a suite from the opera “Carmen.” Before he puts it on the record player, he warns me that if I don’t recognize it, I’ll need to brush up on my opera knowledge.

It takes me a second. He seems slightly scandalized that I don’t get it right away. But once I identify the opera, he relaxes. “Oh, excellent,” he tells me. “We can be friends.”

I have the sneaking suspicion that even if I didn’t recognize “Carmen,” Eddie and I would be friends anyway.

I ask him as much outright: “Have you ever met someone you haven’t been able to be friends with?”

He ponders. He wonders aloud. He flicks through his extensive mental Rolodex of all the people he’s met and inevitably befriended. He comes up with no one.

“Perhaps that person will come along, but I highly doubt that,” he says. “You’ll catch me dead the day that happens.”

Eddie attributes his whimsy to this exact ability: to make friends with every single person who crosses his path.

While we’re listening to “Carmen,” we’re also having tea. Today, it’s a berry blend, he tells me as he pours. I spot blueberry scones and chocolate chip cookies sitting on a three-tier stand. The cups and saucers are blue British china, acquired on a trip to Oxford with the Krokodiloes, the on-campus a cappella group for whom he sings bass and once organized world tours.

“Tea time,” for Eddie, is a storied tradition. Every day, he devotes an hour to having tea and chatting with someone — a friend, a stranger who will soon become a friend, it doesn’t matter to Eddie. The ritual began his freshman year, when he got to Harvard and realized that, “oh my gosh, there’s so many fascinating people, so many fascinating stories — I just want to learn them all.”

“It’s very serendipitous how we meet,” he says of his tea time guests. Sometimes, they’re people he meets in class. Other times, it’s younger students — he used to be a Peer Advising Fellow. He’s had tea with his childhood dog, and with locals he meets in the street when he’s touring with the Kroks. After Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022, he gathered some friends and had tea in her honor in front of the John Harvard statue — tourists took pictures. And, every spring, he hosts a Tea Party, where he invites more than a hundred friends from around the world to Old South Church in Boston for the grandest, most whimsical tea time of all tea times.

“I love getting people together, regardless of religion, background, race, party,” he says. “I think at the end of the day, we’re all just people.”

From that perspective, then, it doesn’t seem quite so surprising that Eddie plans to go into law and politics after graduation, even though I’m surprised when he tells me that he’s submitting law school applications after our conversation. How could someone so whimsical opt for such a rigid career?

“I think my place in this world is healing, repairing people and ensuring they have fun and enjoy their life,” he tells me. “I see the law as an avenue for that.”

In high school, he participated in Boys State, a government simulation program where he was elected Governor in Massachusetts, and Senate President at the national conference in Washington, D.C. There, he ran on a platform of bipartisanship — between the Federalist and Nationalist parties — and unity.

Eddie adopts a booming — appropriately senatorial — tone when he recalls his campaign message. “Here’s the Nationalist Party leader and the Federalist Party leader,” he intones. “We’re gonna make them hold hands, and they’re gonna like it!”

He drops back into his normal cadence. “And they did, and it was beautiful, and it was the embodiment of bipartisanship,” he says. He’s since returned as a counselor, hoping to cultivate the same experience for younger generations. He tells me that he will sing songs and drink tea with his mentees during downtimes — and that “everyone just has an absolute ball.”

“You can put a twist to everything,” he says of finding effervescence and whimsy in a buttoned-up world. “I think, as Mary Poppins says, ‘in every job that must be done / There is an element of fun / You find the fun, and snap! / The job’s a game.’”

Mary Poppins is not the only influence from whom Eddie draws his whimsy, though she may be one of his favorites. In second grade, he spoke with a British accent for an entire year because he loved Mary Poppins so much.

He points to a childhood love of the fantasy musical “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” — about adventures taken by an eccentric inventor and his two children in a flying race car — and the show “Top Gear,” a British car review and challenge comedy, as inspiring a lifelong love of British cars. Eddie is, proudly, the youngest member — “by fifty years!” — of the Cape Cod British Car Club, “where we all drive British cars and go on road rallies.” He recalls that his only childhood rebellion was purchasing driving gloves against his parents’ wishes. He did so to drive his very own British car, a Jaguar V12 convertible that he has christened “Lovey,” in style.

Eddie has, by his estimation, appeared in about twenty musicals throughout his life, including “The Sound of Music” three separate times, though none at Harvard, where he gets his performance fix with the Kroks. Still, he references old-timey musicals and comedy frequently throughout our conversation; he cites British comedians Monty Python and Benny Hill as cornerstones of his personal sense of whimsy.

He also cites his grandfather — Edward II — as an inspiration for his sense of humor. “I have taken the essence of his effervescence,” he says. “I love the word effervescent. I think being a bubbly and jubilant person is the way to be. Especially if the world ever seems to be falling to bits, humor can guide us and friendship, especially, will guide us.”

In light of this declaration, I ask him if, in his future political endeavors, he will run on a platform of humor. He’s taken aback.

“Oh, good heavens, you shouldn’t run on humor!” Eddie exclaims. “You should run on principles. You should absolutely run on principles — being a good person and wanting to help people, that's the number one priority.”

“And second to that,” he adds, “if those important priorities of helping people are to have a bit of fun and humor sprinkled into it, I see no issue with that.”

—Associate Magazine Editor Sophie Gao can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on X @sophiegao22.