Tag: 1986

From the Secretary: Congratulations to all who are now 50. My end-of-summer e-mail request for class updates included a prompt: What are you doing in the arts? Here are some updates.

Arts aren’t only found in NYC. Emily Cowan is in northern New Hampshire, where she “has to work a little harder to enjoy the arts, but they are there … I’ve attended poetry classes at The Frost Place, gone to poetry readings by state and national laureates and performances of Klezmer, Scottish, Acadian and Celtic music.” Last winter was a dinner soirée focused on a book by the late Wes ethics professor Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, which is about a small town in France whose Protestant residents sheltered hundreds of Jews during WWII.

Hallie also influenced Dana Goldstein. Her new play, Daughters of the Sexual Revolution, is dedicated to him and will be performed this fall in NYC. Dealing with ethics and sexual politics in the 1970s, a fair amount of the play takes place at “a small, liberal arts college in Connecticut.” There’s also her musical, Liberty, which opens in October. It imagines that the Statue of Liberty herself was an unwanted immigrant who arrived at a time of recession and anti-immigrant sentiment, and was almost deported by the conservatives of the time—which is all true.

Julia Lee Barclay-Morton swerved into writing prose after many years creating theater. This summer she wrote a book about her grandmothers and the Stockholm Review of Literature published her short story “The God Thing.” She is also involved with works associated with the Indie Theater Now’s reading series, featuring Wes classmate Shawn Cuddy. Julia had updates about Spencer Reece ’85 (saw him read his amazing new book of poetry, The Road to Emmaus), Cobina Gillitt ’87 (who just got a professorship at SUNY–Purchase, hooray!), and saw Mark Sussman ’85 in Montreal (when her husband was getting his green card!), and Glenn Mitchell ’84 (a neighbor in Inwood who was her frosh hallmate). “All together, my life is forever and always enhanced by the friendships made at Wes. Grateful beyond measure for that.”

Speaking of frosh hallmates and NYC, Lucy Malatesta and Sarah Tilly and their Foss-2 hallmate Ellen Limburg Santistevan walked The High Line Park this summer when Ellen was visiting them from New Mexico. Lucy joined a community chorus, Concord Singers, in 1995; it’s a non-auditioning women’s chorus that tackles great music at a high level. Ellen’s news is that a piece of her art is in the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe through May 2015. “It is a really overwhelming experience to see one of my paintings, which I fully expected to be on the wall in someone’s living room, instead lovingly curated and installed in an international museum.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus says her involvement in the arts has been a bit surreal. “My daughter, Bex, was just cast as a lead in MTV’s adaptation of Scream. My role is to manage the ‘team’ of experts who are representing Bex—and let’s just say this Southern mama managing Hollywood is never dull. Special thanks goes to David Kohan for talking me off the ledge the first year!”

Dan Seltzer writes, “I miss playing music and am trying to get back to it, including jamming with Peter Durwood recently and feeling a bit of the old magic… mostly I just appreciate the opportunity to wake up and seize what the day offers, orient to the love in the people around me, and try to keep my body in one piece while biking around the city.”

Dana Walcott’s creative impulses have been building: houses, custom cabinetry, recording studios, and electronic equipment for audio recording. “Everything I build involves art. Many people can build things. But can they also make it look good? Well, I can. That’s what makes it art. Science is science. But making science look good is an art. So I may not be involved in the formal arts, but everything I do involves art because I create beautiful things. You should see my new kitchen.”

Ever since Wesleyan “seduced” him into a career in the arts, John Jordan has been involved with dance. He teaches dance history, dance philosophy, and introduction to dance at Cal State Fresno, and serves on the board of directors for the Rogue Festival. “I have trouble imagining what my life would have been like without WesDance and the encouragement to ‘follow my bliss’ (except that I’d probably be making more money).”

Some Short Blurbs: Sarah Flanders: “I took art classes and studied art history at Wesleyan but dropped it for many years. In recent years I have taken some ceramics classes and started drawing and painting again.” Steven Cohen: “In terms of the arts, I do photography and just got back from my first trip to Korea where I took a bunch of photos. I’m still living in my hometown of NYC and still at the same job for over 23 years.”

Debbie Alter-Starr: “For the last several years I’ve been coordinating a bilingual community network called Somos Napa and co-coordinating the Napa Valley Latino Heritage Month.” In nearby San Francisco, Bill Greene, as part of his “midlife crisis,” accepted a board seat at the Museum of Performance and Design. Edie Cherkas Ellin says, “Kristen Hoyt and I took a class in hand quilting in the mid-1990s and I have been at it ever since. Just an enjoyable hobby with lots of baby quilts, chuppahs, and a few large bed quilts resulting over the years.” George Justice: “I have found myself working much more closely with the arts than in the past, having taken on the role of associate vice president for humanities and arts at Arizona State University… I’ve enjoyed getting to know brilliant visual arts, performing artists, and designers.” Eric Heinze: “I’ve been involved in the arts in the sense of writing (and teaching) about problems of law and justice in drama from the late 16th through to the 18th centuries (Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, Schiller…).” Ayelet Waldman: “For the past 20 years or so I’ve earned my living as a writer, primarily of fiction. My new novel, Love & Treasure, was published this past spring.”

Scott Michaud: “I’m now managing the strategic and executive communications for the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center. ECBC is the organization that has just completed the historic shipboard destruction of the Syrian chemical weapons that’s been in the news all summer, so it’s an exciting time to be here managing our story. Twenty-seven years of speechwriting and it’s still something that I love!” Andrea Wojnar-Diagne was appointed in March to be the UNFPA Resident Representative for Senegal. “I am thrilled to be working for a world where every pregnancy is wanted, every birth is safe, and every young person’s potential is reached —such exciting issues to be working on given the demographics of most of the world’s developing countries—rapid population growth and enormous youth bulges of under 25s. Happy 50th!”

With us turning 50, many classmates have aging parents, and this update from Helen Miller Tarleton was special: “I spent time this summer with my father who has, during the past five years, acquired Parkensonian features. He expressed that this has robbed him of his sense of creativity. So, we spent a week in a pottery studio together hand-throwing and working on the wheel. It was a new experience for me, too. In the afternoons, we played his hammer dulcimer together. He hadn’t played in years and is currently able to remember the sequencing for the first six notes of the song we played. In spite of those limitations, just playing the six notes was perfect. Thanks to my experiences in the West African drumming classes at Wesleyan, I was perfectly happy using a call and response. And, in part, thanks to my experiences in West College, I was perfectly happy repeating those notes over and over again, hypnotized by the sound of the dulcimer strings. Getting to do this with my dad was the best way I can imagine being involved in the arts this year.”

Eric Howard | ehoward86@gmail.com

For this issue of the class report, we begin with Lydia Crawford, who wrote: “I have not found the proverbial work-life balance—when my son was 10 and I was encouraging him to spend less time in front of the computer screen, he correctly noted that I spent my whole day in front of the computer! I then explained to him that I was paid to do work in front of the computer, to which he replied that I could certainly pay him to be at the computer….”

Some of the other news: Sam Atkinson has kept in touch with his three frosh roomies from Clark 312. He sees Tony Antonellis around Boston for lunch and Wes events. He recently spoke to Kevin Freund, who is in Ohio, has the 50th birthday year itch, and is planning the next chapter of his career. Sam also spends time with Peter Hammond every fall, when Peter visits for a reunion weekend in N.H., along with Mark Woodbury ’87.

Michael Tomasson and his wife, Kathy Weilbaecher (Harvard ’87), celebrated their 22nd anniversary. They are both physician researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, and their three kids are in 6th, 9th, and 12th grades. Michael is a physician on the leukemia and stem cell transplantation service and is scientific director of the multiple myeloma program. Generous with his time department: He does experimental science outreach as co-founder of PubStyleScience.com, which uses a combination of Google Hangouts and Twitter to host (very) informal dialogues about issues in biomedical science.

Lisa Clough and John (now Johan) Booth met up again this year at the South Pole. Lisa is a program manager at the National Science Foundation, and spends about a month a year in Antarctica. Johan was spending his 10th winter in Antarctica, where he works for NOAA on many things including keeping track of the size of the ozone hole.

Lydia Crawford also wrote, “I have been living in Saint Paul for the past 23 years and endured all 23 winters—not bad for a girl who grew up in Saudi Arabia! I moved here after law school at the University of Virginia, was in private practice for a while, clerked for a federal district court judge for a while, and have been with Wells Fargo for the past 13 years. I am a consumer credit attorney, working with all the so-called “alphabet regulations—A through Z—and since the advent of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, I have been quite busy.…[With husband and kids,] we keep busy skiing, hiking, camping, biking, taking in the excellent regional theater in the Twin Cities, and savoring any sunny day above freezing!”

Dan Kolbert has been in Portland, Maine, since 1988: “50 had me freaked out for at least a year but so far hasn’t been so bad (or my dread successfully prepared me). I’m a building contractor and active in the regional community of ‘green’ builders and designers. I host a monthly Building Science Discussion Group as well, which has been both fun and a great way to share best practices. My spousal equivalent and I have two kids, the younger of whom is completely sick of my inability to watch a movie or TV show without telling her who I went to college with. ‘How come you’re not rich?’ she asks.”

Jody Lewen has been in the Bay Area since 1994, currently the executive director of the Prison University Project, which runs an associate’s degree program inside San Quentin State Prison for over 300 people. “I often think about how much my experiences at Wesleyan have informed my work—I seem to be driven to create a little Wesleyan inside San Quentin. I love my colleagues and the students at SQ, but there’s also a great deal of extreme heartbreak in working inside the California prison system. Work is very much the center of my life, so it’s a good thing the Bay Area is as beautiful as it is. Most regularly in touch with Judith Hill-Weld and Katherine Forrest, with occasional signs of life from Tyche Hendricks and Lizzie Carty ’87.”

John McIntyre was on a medical mission to rural Haiti in April; one goal is integrating remote interpretation of medical images from Haiti into the neuroradiology program at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, where he works. “Great to have so much local cross-country skiing right out my door. Great fall and saw many Wes folks at the Head of the Charles when I rowed in a senior masters eight with Alex Thomson ’82 and Kevin Foley ’82. Seeing a lot of John Gemery ’85, Michael Zegans ’85, and Jinny Kim Hartman ’86, all DH doctors. Following in Jon Chatinover ’83’s footsteps in Martha’s Vineyard, I have gotten involved in coaching the Hanover High School swim team and enjoy the rapid improvement of the student swimmers over a relatively short season.”

Eileen Mohan Flaherty has found her second career as a high school English teacher in Hartford to be far more gratifying than the practice of law. She and her husband, Patrick, are savoring their time with daughter, Cat, before she heads off as a freshman to Sarah Lawrence College in the fall.

Bennett Schneider: “I celebrated my 50th on April 5 in New York, eating Chinese food with Julia Barclay, Shawn Cuddy, James Hallett, Cobina Gillitt ’87, and Nathan Gebert ’85. Melinda Newman and I explore restaurants around L.A. regularly and are as close as ever. I’m going on six years of performing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (as an actor in their education series) and 10 years as creative director and director of operations with Doozycards.com, making short animations. The work I’ve done the longest has been as vice-president of the charitable group, The Los Angeles Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence for five years now and as a gay Hindu drag nun for 18 years.”

Eric Howard | EricInMaine@gmail.com

We are nearing (or at) 50 years old, and there are lots of changes in our lives. For me, a new career path means I spend weekends in Maine with my family and weeknights in Boston with my 80-year-old mother. I now do corporate relations in the College of Engineering at Northeastern University, and in the evening I work on a doctoral degree in organizational leadership. The goal is to complete my degree in 2016, the same year my twins get their high-school degree.

Here are similar stories from classmates:
Sarah Bosch Holbrooke: “After living in NYC since graduation, I moved with my family to Telluride in August. My husband, David, runs Mountainfilm.org, and we thought it would be nice for our three kids (Bebe, 18, Kitty, 13, and Wiley, 11) to experience four seasons of outdoor fun. I’m continuing to work in television production, freelancing for the Katie Couric daytime talk show. I think the biggest changes are that I’m making dinner rather than reservations, bears run outside our back door, and it’s mid-October and we’ve already had several serious snow storms. It’s all good, but a real adjustment from Brooklyn.”

Charlie Berthoud: “After 10 years near Pittsburgh, we moved to Madison, Wis. and love it here. I am serving as the pastor at Covenant Presbyterian Church—a wonderful progressive congregation. My wife is looking for lawyer-related work after 12 years at home with our two boys. Emma Caspar ’85 is here too, and we enjoyed catching up at Nepalese restaurant. Life is good.”

Julia Lee Barclay-Morton: “I fell in love and got married at 50 for starters(!) to my beloved Canadian, John Barclay-Morton. I have found true love and am astonished by the grace of this. Having never experienced it, I didn’t know what I was missing until I found it. I was recently hired to edit a book by the widow of a well-known theater theorist (Stefan Brecht) of his writing on a favorite director/writer (Richard Foreman). This happened in part because of Wesleyan connections and work begun at Wes as a student. I also teach writing at Fordham, which is something new that I have discovered I love. Just two years ago, I moved back to NYC from the UK (where I had lived for eight years), with a PhD in hand (received at 46), a marriage ended, a theatre company disbanded, my father having died and finding out that my last name was a fiction because of WWII (and in the process discovering a new family). There were other losses as well, including a miscarriage, infertility, my stepfather’s death, friends dying, my cat of 20 years dying—in other words life in and around 50. Throughout all of this, I maintained my sobriety and celebrated 26 years clean and sober last year—a reminder throughout all of the good, the bad, and the ugly, that I am lucky to be alive. I feel truly blessed now, renewed after a time of grieving, and now able to participate once again fully in the world.”

Ellen Santistevan: “Going into the field of bodywork has been an absolutely amazing and life-changing journey. Everything about my life is healthier: most especially self awareness and relationships. It has been a true gift. Coincident (or nearly so) with opening myself up in this way has been a flowering of my artwork. Never before have I been so able and so needing to devote myself to writing and painting. There is a feedback loop between the creative personal work (internal) and the bodywork career (external), each of which enhances the other. I don’t suppose that I could have come to this point in my life without all the other experiences I have gone through. Just as I was unable to do a handstand as a child, and now am unbelievably surprised to be able to do so, even as I am approaching 50—age does have its perks.”

Elaine Taylor-Klaus: “In a nutshell, as a socio-preneur I am working to change the way that parents live with and manage children with chronic illness and special needs. Two years ago I launched ImpactADHD, a global resource for parents that is the first of a network of coaching/training resource sites and programs. With an emphasis on the importance of the role of the parent, we will expand the wellness model to teach parents to teach their children to live with and thrive with disease, rather than be defined and exclusively limited by it. We are setting up strong systems to meet the needs of families, introducing a new way to manage old problems. Research is proving that parent training improves efficacy of other treatment methodologies, and health care is moving in the direction of a wellness approach to medical care. These factors combined make the ‘coach-approach’ to parenting an ideal solution for families.”

Ethan Knowlden: “This summer, I had a job change: Senior vice president, general counsel and secretary for Complete Genomics, Inc., in Mountain View, Calif. We have about 200 employees, and my department is two. We have a very cool technology that allows us to provide the most accurate whole human genome sequencing available today. In March we were acquired by BGI, the world’s largest sequencing company, headquartered in Shenzhen. Complete’s mission is to improve human health by providing genomic information to understand, prevent, diagnose and treat diseases and conditions. That is something I’m excited to be part of.”

A P.S. from Eric: Many thanks to you for your generosity: 243 classmates made a contribution to Wesleyan last year. As I am turning 50 this year, I am giving contributions of $50 (or multiples of 50) to a bunch of organizations. Some gifts, such as the one to Wes, are in memory of friends who have died and never made it to 50. If you are looking for a reason to give to Wes, check out thisiswhy.wesleyan.edu.

Eric Howard
EricInMaine@gmail.com