CLASS OF 1992 | 2025 | SPRING ISSUE

1992 ARCHIVES | HOME
← 1991 | 1993 →

Greetings all. Hope that 2025 has gotten off to a good start for you all. Lots of news to report, so here I go . . .

First up is my frosh year roommate, James Wilton, who is still living in North Carolina and continues to manage operations in the Southeast for Genesis10. His son, Jack, is now in Fort Myers, Florida, working for Colony Hardware as an operations supervisor (graduated from NC State in 2023). Both of his daughters, Carley and Lola, are enjoying their college years at NC State University (one a senior, elementary education; the other a sophomore, sports marketing), and James and his wife were able to attend a bunch of NC State games this year.

Speaking of undergraduate days, in November I went down to Wes with my daughter, Lila, to attend the Admission 101 program. While there, I caught up with Linda Perlstein, who came from Seattle with her son, Milo. Linda recently left the Gates Foundation and is now supporting Melinda French Gates at her company, Pivotal Ventures.

On the other end of the college process, Karen Cacace is looking forward to returning to Wesleyan in May with her husband, Mike Flynn ’93, to watch their daughter, Sophia, graduate.

Todd Graham and Julie Schwarzwald ’88 met up this winter in Minneapolis–St. Paul and combined their efforts to organize a large and successful Wes alumni happy hour. Todd leads socioeconomic and land development forecasting at a metro planning agency.

Beth Shakman Hurd is a religious studies and politics professor at Northwestern. She has a new book coming out in the spring, Heaven Has a Wall: Religion, Borders, and the Global United States, published with the University of Chicago Press.

Also in the writing business, Jen Crittenden reports that she just wrote the book to an original “raucous musical comedy about friendship, rebellion, and autonomy”—Regency Girls. Set in 1810 England, it tells the story of Elinor Benton, who finds herself unmarried and pregnant. Facing certain ruin, she gathers up her three best friends and sets off on a life-changing road trip to find Madame Restell, renowned for helping women with “female troubles.” Regency Girls will be premiering at The Old Globe theater in San Diego this spring.

Also out West, Ben Parrillo is taking a hiatus from entertainment (with his wife, Sepi, and their 7-year-old daughter, Leon Soleil), building houses in Joshua Tree, California, through his company Bunkrhome.

Jody Sperling and her dance company, Time Lapse Dance, are featured in the documentary Obsessed with Light, which was released in theaters in December. This winter, Jody and dancers are heading on a three-city tour of Egypt—they’ll be performing at Alexandria’s Bibliotheca, among other venues. When not traveling, Jody lives with her daughter, now in eighth grade, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.  

In some very sad news, Carlos Perez reports that his family lost everything in the fires that recently swept through California. Steve Scholand offered Carlos his family home in Connecticut to have time to heal and recover.

And to close things out, we have a first-time notes contributor in Dale Griffith (Go Dale! I love hearing from new folks!). She has a lot of news to catch us up on. After Wesleyan, she taught for 10 years at York Correctional Institution for Women in Niantic, Connecticut. While at York, she worked with author Wally Lamb to publish a collection of the York women’s stories, published by HarperCollins in 2001. After some time in North Carolina, she returned to Connecticut, started teaching English at Middlesex Community College in Middletown, then became full-time faculty. After retiring there in 2016, she came full circle, working with the Wesleyan Center for Prison Education by teaching a course on public speaking at York Correctional.

That’s all for now. I love to hear from everyone, so please keep your news coming!

ADAM BERINSKY | berinsky@mit.edu