CLASS OF 1986 | 2014 | ISSUE 3
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