Tag: 1982

Greetings, classmates,

It’s never too late to keep learning: Rachael Adler just graduated with a master’s in marriage and family therapy from the Wright Institute in Berkeley and is now training at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Richard LeComte recently received an MA in arts administration from the University of Kentucky, where he works as a writer. Congrats, both!

If you’d like to learn more about screenwriting and storytelling, check out Liz Keyishian’s calltoadventure.media, a writers’ development company. She’s sourcing a bunch of her mentors for upcoming writers’ retreats from her friends at Wes, including Peter Blauner, Dan Greenberger ’81, Cary Bickley ’82, and me (Laura Fraser). She’s planning on tapping a lot more Wes talent “because they are the best people I know,” she told me from her apartment in Melbourne . . . and she’s offering a friends and family rate for Wes grads who’d like to attend her workshops in Breckenridge, Melbourne, and other great locales (contact liz@calltoadventure.media).

Fresh off his smokin’ solo performance What They Said about Sex, Steve Budd has a new show, Seeing Stars, that premiered at the San Francisco Fringe in August, which explores family dysfunction, mental illness, and father-son relationships. He also published a piece of creative nonfiction that connects baseball and Judaism in The Under Review, https://www.underreviewlit.com/issue-8-summer-23/remove-contents-and-pray.

Cheryl Stevens has semiretired and traded in her litigator card for the role of a neutral, arbitrating disputes and labor and employment cases for the American Arbitration Association. She says her new role has given her more time to create mugs, plates, and other things in clay—though not satisfied with puttering as a potter, she agreed to become the president of the board of directors for the Berkeley Potter’s Studio and editor of their member newsletter. When not up to her elbows in clay, she sings backup with an R&B band of mostly lawyers, a developer, and a judge–the Coolerators.

Emilie “Bunny” Attwell has retired from her job with the state and is working remotely with the Local Mental Health Authority in Houston, as well as writing psychiatric reports for the Texas Medical Board.

After 33 years, Larry Selzer is still with The Conservation Fund, a national nonprofit that buys land for conservation. They recently completed their 4,000th project, protecting 9 million acres across all 50 states!

David Brancaccio, who hosts public radio’s Marketplace, recently revealed that his inspiration for getting into radio was not CBS legend Edward R. Murrow, but, as he wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay for the 50th anniversary of the George Lucas movie American Graffiti, Wolfman Jack. David is also having fun with a streaming video series, Skin in the Game, looking at what video games can teach us about the economy, personal finances, and tech careers. (If you want to know what video games can teach you about the possibilities of love and creativity, read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zavin, a book Liz Keyishian recommended to me).

Kim Traub Ribbens is scaling back her massage practice, but still working on a 102-year-old client she’s seen for 20 years, which probably explains her longevity. She traveled in New Zealand and Australia with Marcy (Neiterman) Maiorana, who was at Wes for two years, and spent time meeting people in the Maori community and learning about their culture. She also recently had dinner with Gene and Tamara (née Haigh) Lanza when they came to Savannah, catching up on each other’s lives.

Among his other pursuits, including being a councilperson in Denton, Texas, Paul Meltzer has a podcast, Turn Up the Yummy, about making delicious food while avoiding everything your doctor wants you to avoid . . . . Susan Smythe is also active in her local government, serving on her local borough council again after her previous term ended in 2016. Her husband Robert Smythe is about to open a bakery, Pastry Pants, featuring everything yummy your doctor wants you to avoid.

My husband, Peter Eckart ’86, and I ventured down the peninsula for a delightful dinner with Christian Vescia and his wife, Lucia Sanchez, as well as my class notes co-conspirator, Michael Ostacher, and his wife, Laurie. Christian has retired and created an amazing rose garden, and Lucia is still working as a pediatric physical therapist. Peter and I are excited that we’ve successfully lured Michael and Laurie down to Mexico for Thanksgiving to eat some pavo and a bunch of other things your doctor wants you to avoid.

Bon appétit! Til next time!

It’s really true that my memories of Reunion last year are fresh, but that’s probably because time flies by so quickly and May 2022 seems barely yesterday. I had a chance to see Michael Roth when he visited here at Stanford, and Wesleyan held a reception for him at the faculty club (hosted by Bill Greene ’86, P’20 and his wife Kera Greene). Michael joked that he was in town to discuss Stanford’s purchase of Wesleyan. In truth they have a plan for Wesleyan’s future and continued success and that was great to hear.

Ah, the marking of time: Kweku Forstall has good news to share. Grandparent news! “My wife Adrienne and I welcomed our first grandbaby into the world recently. Her name is Nora Marion Rash, born in Wilmington, North Carolina, to our youngest daughter Cailey Rash and her husband Caleb Rash.”

Ken Kaufman writes (after reading the last class notes) that he is suffering the ravaged of this passage of time, too, with health and life updates: “Lavinia Ross isn’t the only one. The only difference is that my cardiac incident waited till August. I even managed to shut down the D.C. Red Line for half an hour. In other news, I’m closing in on 15 years at the IRS and starting to cast an eye toward retirement.”

Mark Sirota writes that Anthony Pahigian came up from D.C. with his wife Gordana, and he met them, and some of their friends, at the Guggenheim in New York. “I can’t remember the name of the artist we went to see, but we had bagels for lunch.” My memory is like that too. No photos from Mark, but those sometimes help.

Steve Maizes (my second cousin, something I knew without the help of AncestryDNA or 23andMe) has career and class news: he recently joined CrossCountry Mortgage as the in-house lender for The Agency, the real estate brokerage in LA, which is notable because our classmate, Paul Lester, is partner there. “Excited to be working with Paul.”

Ginny Pye encouraged me to share my news, too, so I will relate a couple of things. I’ve had a chance to see Matt Solo a couple of times, and the last time I spoke with him, he was filling sandbags to help prevent his home from sliding off the hill into the valley. It still stands. Matt continues to work in television in LA. I also ran into my old friend Joe Barrett at the reunion. Our reconnection turned into a lovely working relationship. Because of my work in addictions, Joe invited me to join the board of Key Recovery and Life Skills Center, a nonprofit and the first residential drug and alcohol treatment center for substance use disorder in the Puget Sound region. (They have an innovative recycling center, too, Seadrunar, that partly funds their work.) It’s been really important work professionalizing the services they provide there under Joe’s leadership. Joe has just agreed to take over as the permanent CEO and he’s amazing! It is really meaningful work that they do, providing care to people and families in great need, and especially meaningful to be working with Joe, his partner Monica Ramsey, and an incredible board. What an enriching opportunity.

Laura and I continue to hope that you share your updates with us. With Class Notes now online, too, we can more easily keep people updated. Connections are so important, so please keep in touch.

Warmly,

Michael and Laura

Greetings, classmates,

I sent out a nudge about class notes and since you’re all dutiful A students at heart, I got a bunch of good material. Thank you.

First up is Ginny Pye who has, yes, another novel­—The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann—coming out in 2023. If anyone needs inspiration for a later-in-life career, look no further. I saw Jenny Boylan ’80 in New York at a diner near where we used to share an apartment and passed along how pleased Ginny was to get a blurb from her without even asking. Jenny shrugged. “She’s a wonderful writer.” As her former publisher at Shebooks (My Mother’s Garden), I agree.

Suzanne Berne also has a new novel, The Blue Window, out in January. She and her husband Ken Kimmell have seen a lot of Wes friends recently: Rick Goldstein, Raf Ornstein, Elyse Klaidman, Martha Murdock, Shirley Hedden, Jane Hammerslough, and Ezra Palmer ’81, Ginny Pye and John Ravenal ’81, and Jessica Barton ’81.

Patty Smith is also writing up a storm, with a flash fiction piece showcased in a Page to Stage performance in Richmond, Virginia, and a couple of essays coming out soon in an anthology. She’s still teaching creative nonfiction and American literature at the Appomattox Regional Governor’s School in Petersburg. She and her wife also recently Zoomed with Michael Lucey, Holly Brown, Jenny Curtis, Anne Wise, and Joanne Godin ’81.

Terri Seligman is still lawyering, married to the same person, and her kids are all grown up. She has a wonderful new hobby: playing with two Afro-Brazilian percussion groups, one all women (Batala) and one co-ed (Mambembe). “It’s been fabulous getting back to music, and fun to be a performer again.”

Christian Vescia enjoyed the reunion, as he has in the past—he and his wife Lucia reconnected at our 10th Reunion and married two years later. He retired from full-time work in October, leaving a Silicon Valley fintech start-up (Affirm) where he worked designing training programs and curricula. Now he’s busy with travel (Hawaii), exercise (swimming), gardening, guitar lessons, political activism (he’s keen on Andrew Yang’s Forward Party), and general puttering. Lucia is working part time doing physical therapy and sensory integration work with young kids.

Daniel Meier has been in touch recently with Peter Schochet, Joe Merrill, Dave Gaieski ’81,  Doug Jones, and Roger Hale. He hopes to return to campus next year; his niece is Wes ’26.

The “Stupid Dogs”—Jack Taylor, Bruce Crain, Dan Hillman, Kevin Foley, Stephen Daniel, John Mooney, Alex Thomson, and Peter Frisch—gathered again, as they have every year since graduation, “an event that’s ever more precious with the passage of time,” says Jack.

Congratulations to Charita Brown, who was recognized as a “Woman of Integrity” honoree at the Black People Rock Honors Ceremony (Maryland) for excellence in mental health advocacy, and who was also awarded a mayoral citation from Baltimore mayor Brandon M. Scott.

Susan Smythe says she and her husband Robert are enjoying working in the same place—Swarthmore College—where Robert, after a career in theater, is running the bakery in the school’s new sustainable and beautiful dining center, for which Susan was the project manager. (I don’t remember a bakery at MoCon…)

Paul Meltzer has been focused on local politics in Denton, Texas, a city of about 140,000 (“larger than South Bend, Indiana,” he points out). He served as a city council member, and mayor pro tem, fighting for a balanced, environmentally sensitive approach to growth. He challenged the incumbent for mayor and, as they say in the Olympics, “silvered.” He’s currently president of the Denton Rotary Club, writes regular columns in the Denton Record-Chronicle, and is working on a documentary following 10  aspiring actors from a previous chapter in his life. He’s still happily married to Bonnie Friedman ’79, also retired from teaching creative writing and enjoying much more time for her own writing, and they’re more frequently at their place in Park Slope, Brooklyn, available to catch up with NYC friends.

Mark Sirota visited Joe Barrett at his family home on Chappaquiddick, almost to the day the 44th anniversary of the first and only other time they were there together, October break, frosh year in 1978. “I didn’t catch a fish this time either,” he says.

Beck Lee is hard at work on an initiative to forestall polarization and demonization of those who are unlike ourselves. His “can we all get along?” work, via the nonprofit Cultural Fluency Initiative, will celebrate cultures of all kinds and promote cross-group understanding and collaboration. “It all stems from my great good fortune over the years to have worked with cultural groups, artists, and leaders from so many interesting countries, walks of life, and perspectives,” he says.

Martin “Chip” Shore was bummed to miss our reunion, but he and his wife Shari were off with their son in Tahoe. Chip stopped work in January and spent most of the year skiing, playing tennis, biking, and working on his “honey-do” list, in addition to taking care of his parents. Unsure if he’s going back to work (it interferes with skiing, just saying), he’s volunteering to promote gender equality, transgender awareness, and financial education.

Like a lot of our classmates, Catharine Arnold and her husband John Bozzi ’79, are enjoying being “Nana” and “Papi” to their grandsons. “Lots of things have changed since our sons were babies—nothing in the crib, Snoos, sleep sacks, etc.—but nothing beats that beautiful smile and hug when they see you.” Greg Lewis, an owner and CEO of Aerosol Dynamics, also has a baby granddaughter, another who is a freshman at Columbia, and a grandson in grad school at Brown.

We’re grateful Lavinia Ross survived a near-fatal heart attack in June. “Every day is a gift,” she says.

Jim Friedlander wrote in with some up-to-the-minute news: Bonnie LePard was on the official guest list for the Macron state dinner at the White House on December 1.

Stay healthy, happy, and creative!

What at lovely gathering at our 40th Reunion in Middletown in May. The pandemic door creaked open and a number of us were able to be together for it. Go to the Wesleyan University ’82 Reunion Facebook page and have a look as many of us have posted photos there. (https://www.facebook.com/groups/Wesclassof82).

Kudos to Sarah Chapin Columbia for her Distinguished Alumni Award and a big shout-out to Joe Fins (my COL classmate!) for receiving an honorary degree for his groundbreaking work in medical ethics (and for his service to the University, it goes without saying). Many thanks to Ginny Pye and Bob Russo for speaking at our class dinner.

Forty years is a very long time, isn’t it? It was lovely to celebrate it. Laura Fraser and I appreciated seeing you all, class notes really live. It remarkable how special it was to be together, something I hadn’t quite anticipated. I will take the liberty of writing that I really loved spending the day with Michael Lucey, eating a (large) breakfast at Ford News on Main Street, hanging out at Eclectic, reading our bound theses at COL and attending its reception, and getting a signed copy of his newest publication, What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk, an amazing book.

Still, some catching up to do:

Emilie Attwell writes, “I am fine, the same. For the last 11 months, I have worked for the Harris Center. That is the mental health center in Harris County, aka Houston. Uvalde hit us hard. So did abortion laws and the heat is hotter than f@#%. Cold beer helps!”

Rob Lancefield writes that last year he retired from a 27-year career in museum work, most recently as head of IT at the Yale Center for British Art. “No regrets.” Rob is enjoying a simpler life largely free from Zoom meetings, looking forward to having his favorite guitar made playable again, and to reacquainting himself with it.

Chris Garson is still happily retired, “12 years and counting,” and very busy penning novels. “I recently completed a modern Arthurian trilogy set in northeast Ohio. If anyone has ins with publishers, shoot me a message!”

Bob Russo (post reunion) wrote, “Jeff Susla, John Brautigam, and I went to hear Graham Nash at a small, 200-seat venue. He sounded great, did a very nice show, and ended with a sing-along of Teach Your Children. Sentimental.”

Steve Maizes (my cousin!) “had the pleasure of a great California visit from Michael Zeller and his lovely wife.”

Alex Thomson is like a lot of folks, sorry he missed the reunion, having had something he could not miss that weekend. (Like so many of us. Life is busy.) Alex goes on: “I went with Moons [John Mooney] to see Phil and Friends a week ago. Only differences between the crowd at the show and the crowd in ’82 are cell phones. Same Twirlygirls, same Deadheads, same shenanigans . . . same good  friends . . . just a bit older . . . .”

Michael Levine has been living in Williamsburg, Virginia, since 2000, practicing occupational and environmental medicine. “My wife Liz is a prof at William and Mary, and son Andrew is a rising sophomore at Virginia Tech. I collect antique woodworking machinery (hoard broken and rusty things) and make some efforts to preserve American democracy.” He stays in touch with former roommates Garrett Randolph, Anthony Pahigian, and Neil Richman, and the folks from the Wesleyan crew. “I was very sorry to have missed our 40-year reunion—but look forward to seeing you all at 50!” We do too.

I will finish on a deeply sad note. Julie Kraushaar Zurcher passed away on July 23 after a struggle with her mental health that developed over the past year, unable to find a clear diagnosis or successful treatment. I had a chance to sit with her husband Werner and son Bryce ’18, in their home in Ladera, California, to remember Julie’s vibrancy, love, and optimism. I met Julie freshman year in Clark Hall and we lived near each other in Silicon Valley. When I moved here in 2010, we stayed in a hotel until our housing became available. Julie happened to be staying there, too, returning herself with her family from Switzerland and waiting for their own home to become available, and we recognized each other immediately. Her warmth and hospitality made our transition from Cambridge so much easier. She will be missed terribly, but our memories of her and how she touched us will remain.

Greetings,

Hard to believe our 40th is upon us. Big thanks to fundraising superstar Joe Barrett and Virginia Pye for hosting a happy hour to reconnect us before we saw each other IRL at the reunion (yay!).

You sent some great book recommendations. I’ve already devoured Elizabeth Feigelson’s suggestion, We All Need New Names by Zimbabwean NoViolet Vulawayo, and Ginny Pye’s, Still Life by Sarah Winman, set in Florence. Ginny has a new book coming out, but that’s hush-hush til the deal is inked.

Charita Brown’s memoir, Defying the Verdict: My Bipolar Life (2018), is particularly relevant now because of the uptick in mental-health illness diagnoses during the pandemic. Charita is on the National Alliance of Mental Illness (NAMI) board of directors, was featured in a NAMI short doc, Shattering Racial Stereotypes to Defy the Verdict (on YouTube), and was awarded the Baltimore group’s 2021 Marcia G. Pines Lifetime Advocacy and Service Award. Congratulations!

The wait is almost over: The novel Peter Blauner started writing in 2002, Picture in the Sand, will be out early next year from Minotaur/St. Martin’s Press. Meantime, he’s writing shorter pieces for the New York Daily News and Nancy Rommelmann’s ’83 website Paloma Media. He says Christ in Concrete by Di Donato is an overlooked knockout read.

Speaking of the devil, Matthew Capece writes that while he and his wife Alexis were sipping port and eating nata in Portugal, he read Blauner’s Highway—“a disturbing and gutsy novel.”

David S. Parker, too, has a book out in May: The Pen, the Sword, and the Law: Dueling and Democracy in Uruguay (McGill-Queen’s Press). Yes, he says, it’s a history book from an academic press about a faraway place, but it’s written for the nonexpert with a good mix of jaw-dropping storytelling to balance out the historical-legal explanation of why Uruguay was the only country in the world to legalize dueling, between 1920 and 1992. I must know!

Maya Sonenberg’s third collection of short stories, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters, received the Richard Sullivan Prize and will appear in August 2022 (University of Notre Dame Press). Her daughter is a freshman at Wes, and she met up with Sam and Ellen (Friedman) Bender at Homecoming/Family Weekend in October, when she also picked apples at Lyman Orchards, ate at O’Rourke’s, and hiked at Wadsworth Falls. She recommends In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova.

Jonathan Weber is back from Singapore with a new job, editor in chief of an ambitious online news start-up called The San Francisco Standard. He’s delighted to have teamed up with executive editor Heather Grossmann ’98 to reinvigorate local news.

Congrats to Rachael Adler, who married twice this year (to the same guy)—a COVID wedding at a clerk’s office during the pandemic, then August with the whole family. They moved to Oakland, launched her daughter to college, and she just completed her first semester of graduate school in psychology at the Wright Institute. Whew!

Rob Lancefield retired early from a 27-year career in museum work, most recently as head of IT at the Yale Center for British Art. While continuing some service with professional organizations, Rob is enjoying a simpler life with very little Zoom. He looks forward to reacquainting himself with his favorite guitar.

No sooner did Karen Paz move permanently to her summer house in Maine than she was elected a town selectperson. She recommends The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.

Patty Smith was appointed to Virginia Governor Northam’s LGBTQ+ Advisory Board. She and her wife Cindy married on April 4, 2020, in an early Zoom wedding. She recommends Brian Castleberry’s Nine Shiny Objects, and Stephanie Grant’s ’84 memoir Disgust.

Other book recommendations:

Emilie Attwell: The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish. (“She was told as a girl she could either see a psychiatrist or go to a comedy camp!” says Emilie, who, being the former, had to laugh.)

Karen Wise:  Amor Towles’s A Gentleman of Moscow.

Jim Dray: The Prince of the Skies by Antonio Iturbe, based on the extraordinary life of Antoine De Saint-Exupery (The Little Prince).

Dena Wallerson: Kliph Nesteroff’s We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy.

Susan Cole: The Warmth of Other Suns and Caste by Isabel Wilkerson.

Paul Meltzer: Japanese movies from the 1950s, especially those directed by Ozu, Kinoshita, Naruse, Ichikawa, and Kobayashi.

Jon Philip Rosenberg (who just finished writing the second edition of Atlas Shrunk): Dirty Love by Andre Dubus III and Red Notice by Bill Browder.

Finally, a shout-out to my co-secretary Michael Ostacher, for exceptional achievement in macaroon making (especially the ones dipped in dark chocolate). My husband Peter Eckart ’86 pronounced, “Everything in the world that is perfect is encapsulated in a macaroon by Michael O!” Indeed.

Cheers!

Laura Fraser and I are hoping that you are enjoying the reopening and the end of the pandemic (and we hope not the end of the end of the pandemic) as you read this. A few lovely updates as time marches on.

“Small world,” writes Rich Lipman. “We were on the same Zoom call recently for the Stanford Ethics in Society undergraduate honors thesis presentations. My son was one of the presenters.” Good timing, too. I was there supporting one of my students and our class email went out soon after, so Rich thought to get in touch. Nice to be there with you, Rich.

After twenty years, six research trips to Egypt, and a lot of rough road and broken glass, Peter Blauner (after a little prodding by this classmate) is pleased to announce that his ninth novel, Picture in the Sand, will be published by St. Martin’s/Minotaur in the fall of 2022. Peter points out “this is only half as long as Moses and his followers spent wandering in the desert.”

     Sharon Marable is a physician living in Sharon, Massachusetts. She is currently working at Southcoast Health in Massachusetts and was recently appointed the vice chair of the Massachusetts Medical Society’s Committee on the Quality of Medical Practice. She is enjoying mentoring students on the medical and public health career pipeline. It’s nice to do good, Sharon.

     Karen Mohr just ran 60k around Chrissy Field in San Francisco. “To celebrate my 60th with Emily Brower ’83 at my side. Great way to catch up with old friends.” I did not run 60k to celebrate my 60th and my feet hurt just reading her email, but that is a wonderful accomplishment.

     Stephen Daniel writes: “All is generally well out here on the sandbar, though a much busier year due to the presence of COVID refugees than our community typically enjoys.  Daughter India ’22 has adored her time at Wes.  Funny how the family generations have lined up—my father Ron ’52, brother David ’77, me at ’82, and India at ’22.  We may all have a private reunion at some point.” Stephen also stepped down as chair of the board of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy just before writing to us “after six years at the post collaboratively building this amazing not-for-profit, though will remain on the board.  Also stepped down from the Board of Jazz at Lincoln Center not long ago after 12 years there. Nice to have some time free up!”

Steven Maizes (my second cousin and basketball star at Wesleyan) writes “post vaccine I had some fun interactions with our classmates from 1982. First Nina Goodwin and her husband Chris came over to demolish my wife Nicole and me in a game of doubles ping-pong. Then Michael Zeller (backed by his lovely wife Gayle) duplicated his multisport athletic ferocity by destroying all competitors in table hockey.” I hope I’m not stirring up controversy by saying this: vaccines are awesome, even if it’s for backyard table games.

     Emilie Attwell writes, “News for me is that I changed jobs. I retired from the state with a pension and full health benefits. I now work for the Local Mental Health Authority in San Antonio at the Center for Health Services as their forensic psychiatrist. The new job is almost all virtual, which is a timely subject currently. She sent me a recent photo of her travel companion, “Lil Bunny.”  Wish we could share that.

“I’m not a regular contributor to class notes,” writes Steve Gorman, “but your message arrived at the same time the announcement for my new exhibition was posted, so here is my news.” It’s a bit modest for Steve to just send a link to his show, Down to the Bone, at the Peabody Essex Museum, where his absolutely stunning photographs of Kaktovik, Alaska—an Inupiat village in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—are shown alongside the work of the great cartoonist, Edward Koren (“a dramatist of the Anthropocene”), where they “respond to the consequences of destabilizing our natural environment and speak to their alarm about the global climate crisis.”

Former class secretary Bob Russo is keeping up communication, and we’re so glad to end on this note. “The most exciting thing Carol ’84 and I have done is to get a puppy. She is a Small Munsterlander (a rare breed, look it up!) She’s a blast and a cure for encroaching old age.” If you have to put it that way, Bob, fine, but I’ll leave you until next time with a quote from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (that I read in Humanities 101, Cosmic Dissolution, during freshman year, so totally appropriate here):

Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.