Author: classnotes

Please write to your class secretary.

Hi all! Here’s what we have:

Victor Khodadad will be singing the role of Don Jose in Peter Brooks’ adaptation La tragedie de Carmen with New Camerata Opera in New York City this fall. Please visit www.newcamerataopera.org for more information. He recently saw Barry Levine for dinner and enjoyed reminiscing about the days of yore!

Jonathan Torop recently moved from UBS (after 11 years) to Morgan Stanley. “It’s a good change and I’m required to be in New York City twice a week, which is great because working from home was getting a bit boring. I’m also getting involved with AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, in order to maintain the bipartisan, pro-Israel consensus in Congress. In addition, I joined a group called the Israel Economic Forum that connects global businesspeople with Israel counterparts. We were in Spain in February where we spent time with members of Spain’s small Jewish community. We have a solidarity mission to Israel in June that I’m looking forward to.”

Peter Brastow and his wife, Carolyn (Gencarella), “are still swimming along—and getting along swimmingly. Thing 1 (Julian) does the ski-bum thing in Bend, Oregon, which will be followed by a stint on the local fire crew for the USFS this summer. Thing 2 (Kaden) will finish up at UCLA in June, and vamos a ver which road he chooses. Carolyn still has her toes in science education, doing a bit of work still for San Francisco Unified School District as well as teaching a class in the education department at San Francisco State University. I, myself, continue to try and save the world in my own little corner (the San Francisco Environment Department), while it otherwise goes to hell in a handbasket.” Peter added: “We’re getting a ton of rain again this winter—maybe won’t quite match last year—and the snow is coming down again in the Sierra, where I’m headed next weekend to ski with my sis.”

Peter and Carolyn regularly see Arieh Rosenbaum, his wife, Barbara, and their two children, who “live about a half mile away.” Their older child is graduating from high school. “Arieh continues to work at the intersection of medicine and information technology as the chief medical informatics officer for Brown and Toland.” Like Peter and Carolyn, he has dreams of retiring soon! In the meantime, he exercises even more than Peter does, and on April 14, completed a triathlon in Folsom, California, where he won his age group! Arieh and Peter, as usual, look forward to next year’s 35th (!) at Wes.

That’s all for now. I hope all of you have been enjoying the summer. Please write with any news or updates that you have.

Classmates,

By now our 35th Reunion is behind us (although we’re writing this beforehand because of the deadline). Check our next issue for those stories. Until then, know that a couple of you asked if we could mention our dear classmate, Kate True, in our column. Kate passed away in October of last year and was mentioned in the obituary section in the previous notes. 

Dina Goldman wrote of her this way:

“Kate was a very self-contained, thoughtful, poised, lovely person who also happened to be an incredibly gifted artist. She had a quiet charisma and was magnetic to so many of us.”

Always feel free to share thoughts of any of our ’89 classmates who have transitioned. We’re happy to share good memories and stories here. 

Wishing you all well!

Peter writes for this issue.

Rich Silverman advises, “Three years back in NYC and two years at Corcoran. Love being in the city and try to take advantage of all that it has to offer—member hours at the MOMA, book talks at Hunter and the Apollo, hole-in-the-wall restaurants in Chinatown, and walks in Central Park. Tonight, I’m going to see Phil Rosenthal at the Beacon.”

Rob Wrubel writes in, “My daughter, Annie, will attend Wes starting this fall, and she’s excited to be heading to Middletown. We live in Colorado Springs, far from Middletown, and I look forward to visiting the campus this fall.”

Reid Cramer shares, “I’ve co-produced a record of music with Smithsonian Folkways featuring the singing of Sonya Cohen Cramer, who started Wesleyan in the Class of 1987 but marched with the Class of 1988. The record is called You’ve Been a Friend to Me and is a collection of beautifully sung folk songs, traditional ballads, and original music that reflect the full arc of Sonya’s musical life. Sonya was an amazing woman, who passed away in 2015, and it was exhilarating to be her partner. She had a beautiful voice and remarkable spirit. Growing up in a musical family, she was exposed to many kinds of folk and traditional music, but her time at Wesleyan, and especially her study of Carnatic singing with T. Viswanathan, sparked a lifelong engagement with singing as a craft and a practice. Along with a stellar group of people, she helped form the Wesleyan Women’s Singer/Songwriter Collective, which produced a captivating cassette of music, songs, and poems called SPIN.”

Stephen Morison updates, “I’m very excited to be joining The American School of Marrakesh community next year. I will be the new head of school. This is a homecoming of sorts. Emily and I began our international teaching careers in Tangier in 1997. Since then, we have taught all over the world but have returned frequently to Morocco to visit family and friends.”

Steven Zubkoff writes, “Jana Craston ’87 and I went to Canada to watch the eclipse at the lake cottage and we spent the rest of our time in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Norwich, Vermont. Hoping to go visit Stu and Susan (’90) Ellman in a few weeks.”

Bob Garcia reports, “Happy to share my first kids’ book, Aim High, Little Giant, Aim High!, was picked up for distribution by Haymarket. The first title I ever authored, Where’d You Get Those? New York City’s Sneaker Culture: 1960–1987 (Testify, 2003), is celebrating its 20th anniversary of publication with a special edition; and my next project is a memoir tentatively titled Bobbito’s Book of B-ball Bong Bong, which Akashic, founded by Johnny Temple, will release in 2025! I’ve also opened an online bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/koolboblove. Very pleased to make strides in literature considering how horribly I did in that subject while on campus, ba haaa!”

Hello, Friends!

We’re in a transitional stage of our careers . . . some of us are winding down, while others changing lanes and revving up for more adventure.

After 35 years in K–12 public education, Tim Sullivan will be retiring in June from his position as superintendent of the CREC Magnet Schools in Hartford, Connecticut.

Linda Ryden is making career changes after 20 years as the peace teacher in the Washington, D.C., schools. While there, she created a curriculum integrating mindfulness, brain science, conflict resolution, and social justice. In 2018 she formed a nonprofit to share the curriculum. Now she works there full time as creative director, and the curriculum is in schools across the country. Linda has a series of books, a YouTube channel, and a podcast for kids. Check out TeachPeaceofMind.org. 

David “Prahas” Nafissian has released an ebook, Becoming the Butterfly that you can download for free. Here’s the tag line: “Is humanity really doomed? I think not!”

This story features me in a surprising role. Steve Shackman, Ira Skolnik, and I often text about our beloved Queens-based baseball team. (If you know, you know. I’m still a little obsessive . . . will travel to London in June to see them play! I’ll see Liz Rabineau there. She is not interested in any of my “baseball shenanigans.” But I digress . . . .) In November, knowing Ira’s passion for U2, I asked if he planned to see the band in Las Vegas. At that time, it seemed a popular adventure. Inspired, Ira created his own Wesleyan reunion. He quickly had six Wesleyan friends signed up for a February weekend. He’ll take it from here: “We had Shack from New York City, Dan ‘Jughead’ Levy ’88 from Philadelphia, Scott Ades ’88 from New Jersey, Bill ‘Hooter’ Houston from Florida, Ed ‘Eduardo’ Thorndike ’89 from Connecticut, and, the biggest treat, Rich Pham ’88, who was traveling from Vietnam for a Vegas business trip that weekend. Since many of us had not seen each other in many years, it was three days of nonstop laughter and reminiscing. We are six ‘old men’ who still think we are college age. No arrests were made, no one went missing, and we made it back with our teeth intact.”

Kurt Lyn reports that he and his wife, Michelle Anderson Lyn ’84, MD,are still enjoying their professional careers, but they recently took a Wesleyan-type detour: launching a vineyard and winery close to their ranch about an hour from Houston, Texas. They invite all their Wesleyan friends to try their wines, Chapelton Vineyards, now available in local supermarkets and fine restaurants.

Erika Ranee (Cosby) checks in for the first time! She has been a professional artist since receiving a 1993 MFA from UC Berkeley. She started teaching at NYU in 2007, when Lyle Ashton Harris ’88 recommended her for the job. In 2023 Erika was one of 15 woman-identifying artists awarded a $25,000 grant from Anonymous Was a Woman. Her solo exhibition with the NYC gallery Klaus von Nichtssagend in 2024 was well reviewed in Artforum. This winter, Erika was selected to show in the 200th anniversary celebration of the Brooklyn Museum. That exhibit opens in October 2024.

You can findYouTube clips of David Abramson’s new storytelling skills. He talks about odd encounters with people from the former Soviet Union, finally tapping into a performance angle of his Russian major! David remembers a miserable foray into theater at Wesleyan when he played a tree in a rendering of Lorca’s Blood Wedding during sophomore year. He works as an analyst of Russian foreign policy at the State Department. His daughter, Hazel ’23, graduated from Wesleyan as an art history major —she lived next to his senior year home across from West Co and the science library. His daughter, Daisy, is a sophomore at Bryn Mawr. He’s in touch with Janet Ginzberg, Skip Lockhart, Jessica Miller, Cheryl Duncan, and Becky Riccio.

Grattan Baldwin files a slightly sarcastic report: “It is with deep shame that I report that my daughter, Annika, is a senior at Amherst; I console myself knowing at least it is not Williams. The good news, Amherst now has my last undergraduate tuition payment. Well, maybe not the very last . . .  in 2023 my wife, Cristina, brought forth our own personal sleep disruptor. Maria Luce Frederica Baldwin is a beautiful bundle of “feed me now.” A few early photos suggest the need for an exorcism, so we found the perfect priest in Milan to do the job. We were pleasantly surprised that in front of God and family, lightning did not strike, an earthquake did not hit, and the holy water did not boil. I consider this a good start. Now that she was freed from original sin, we hoped our overnight tormentor would sleep better; apparently that is not how that works.” 

Bill Gerber sent in this update: “Steve Elbaum and his wife, Jill, was part of a group that recently acquired Cold Hollow Cider Mill in Waterbury, Vermont, near Stowe. Still practicing law in Stamford, Connecticut, Steve and Jill spend many weekends at the mill. John McIntyre, John Brais, Dave Patterson, and I visited [recently] and we were incredibly impressed by how fluent Steve has become in cider production! While there we FaceTimed with Nic Pifer.”

Tavy Ronen shared: “I am still happily living in Manhattan, near Lincoln Center. I have been at Rutgers for almost three decades and am a professor of finance, specializing in market microstructure and corporate bonds. About 10 years ago, I launched a set of Business of Fashion programs for Rutgers Business School, and I get to occasionally hang out with fashion executives and attend New York Fashion Week events. 😊 My daughter is still in grad school nearby, so I feel very lucky to get to spend a lot of time with her. She is, by far, my most notable single-authored work.

            “As we collectively approach our 60th birthday, I think often of Sara Williams, whom so many of us loved dearly. As most of us know, she died so young and tragically. Last month I sat in the Key Park at Gramercy Park, beneath the building she grew up in, and wondered where she would have been now.”

Marc Rosner wrote: “In just one month: 60 candles, wedding bells, and a retirement incentive from Hastings-on-Hudson schools. Four decades supporting science is enough; Diane and I are retiring to build appraisals, restoration, and sales at Hudson Valley Numismatics. (Who knew WESU senior Silversmithing would ignite a second career?) Recently had lunch with Amy Grossman ’88. Always texting Alex Rothman, Andrew Zeller, and Dave Warne.”

And speaking of Alex Rothman, he wrote: “How time flies. Somehow Nina and I are now entering our 30th year in Minneapolis; long enough that our two sons are now off and have found their way (back) to the East Coast. Fortunately, life does lead me back to New York, and on a trip this past March, [I] had a great day eating and wandering about NYC with Dave Warne and Andrew Zeller.

Tierney Sutton updates us too:“The last few years have found me continuing to record and tour with several projects. The Tierney Sutton Band is still going strong and  we’ve opened up to some wonderful new personnel. (My last run in New York featured the great Lenny White on drums [Chick Corea and Return to Forever]). I have also done several tours of the U.S. and Europe with the Paris Sessions trio, which features my husband, Serge Merlaud, on guitar. (We split our time between Paris and Los Angeles when not on the road.)

“March 1, 2024, I released a new album, Good People, which is a collaboration between me and the San Gabriel Seven, a horn-based band that has done projects with many other artists. Eight of 10 tracks were either written or co-written by me, so this is a big departure. I’m especially excited about the title track, Good People, for which I produced a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLq6CqzmTvY). It’s essentially Schoolhouse Rock! for systemic racism in the U.S. I’m planning to create a series of songs and videos to address U.S. history that is too often overlooked.”

Erika Levy shared: “I’m still enjoying my work as professor of communication sciences and disorders at Teachers College, Columbia University. My daughter is now a sophomore at Wes, having as great a time as I did, and it’s fun to visit her. My son is waiting to hear college decisions, and soon my husband and I will be empty nesters. My job keeps me very busy, but I try to squeeze in work with refugees and practice speaking languages. Always happy to connect with my Wesleyan classmates.”

Please write to your class secretary.

Hello, classmates! By the time this issue comes out, Reunion will have come and gone, so next time I hope to share some stories from our 40th.

Arthur Haubenstock recalls the major earthquake that he experienced the day after he arrived in San Francisco. That did not dislodge him from the West Coast, but his new position in D.C. as chief strategy advisor for the Department of Energy’s Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains Office did. Art is helping to “fix the foundation for today’s energy system and ensure it is strong enough to support the clean, equitable energy transition we all want for our future.” His newest daughter was born in D.C., and he has enjoyed mini-reunions with Andy Tauber and Lisa Rein.

Last year Susie Sharpe shared the news about her TEDx talk and many opportunities opened up for her. She has retired from internal medicine and moved across the country to Sarasota. Susie met Michael Murphy in Sarasota and was thrilled to find out he was a fellow classmate. Susie was recently featured on the cover of Ranch Magazine.

Gail Farris and husband, Jay Farris, met up with Marmie Bowman and her husband, David Hunter, in Maryland last fall. And her three-year-old grandchild, Killian (daughter of Kim ’14), loves to sing the Wesleyan fight song.

Joe Pieropan does not have news but sent in a picture of his red-and-black Mazda Miata with vanity plate WESU84.

Marc Dantonio sent in this update:

“Hello, Wesalums!

“So, it’s been great here for our efforts in educating folks around the world in astronomy. I graduated from Wesleyan with an astro degree in 1983, did some advanced degree work in computer science, but have come back to my roots.

“I started SkyTour LiveStream Observatories, a group of remotely accessed observatories in Connecticut and in Arizona with a variety of instrumentation to take deep sky imagery of phenomena in the universe. We started a nonprofit organization, also named SkyTour LiveStream, to accomplish this and to hopefully acquire grant money to expand our programs.

“To the end of keeping the attention of people viewing our livestreams from around the world, I made sure our telescope was an excellent optical instrument with a tuned camera specifically selected to work with our system, while concurrently adding some optical changes to the basic system. Together the system acquires images 25 times faster than the native telescope would have. This means we can show people deep sky objects, including stellar nurseries and dark nebulae (our original birthplace), in a fraction of the time it might take to capture such images. Thus, in one night we can visit many different locations and capture many different objects.

“During our streams, and through friends at SpaceX, we run contests and present a lucky winner with Celestron Binoculars, a Sionyx night vision system, or a full Celestron telescope package. We are serious about astronomy!

“Finally, we make all of these images of fantastical objects available free on our online server, which anyone is free to peruse with almost two years of data. So far people using our data have found vanishing stars, asteroids moving through our fields of view, and more. They can get started by joining our YouTube channel, SkyTour LiveStream with Marc Dantonio, and/or going to SkyTourLive.org, which is our portal to the universe.

“We are looking forward to expanding into the Southern Hemisphere [by] adding a telescope in Australia and continuing the mission in the USA with a mobile observatory with the same capabilities as our best telescopes!

“Without Wesleyan none of this would have been possible in a professional capacity! Thank you WESU!!!—Marc”

Mark Kushner shared, “I am proud to report that I have two kids at Wes. My daughter, Kyra ’24,  had a great experience at Wesleyan as an English and film major.” Mark said she worked hard to finish her senior thesis documentary film, and was captain of the women’s club soccer team. Kyra also co-led “Spike Tape, a student-led theater company she helped co-found, that they started when Second Stage died during the pandemic, putting on over 20 productions a year.  My son, Tor, is a frosh (’27), rowing crew, playing intramural soccer, and thinking about joining CSS as he loves philosophy and economics. And yes, they actually get along, playing co-ed intramural soccer together. Go Wes!”

Laurie Hills is retiring from her role as your class secretary. We extend our sincere gratitude and thanks to her for keeping all of you connected to each other and to Wes. If you are interested in becoming the new class scribe, please contact Liz Martin Taylor ’87, Class Notes Editor, at classnotes@wesleyan.edu.

Dear Classmates,

I’m starting off with the very sad news that our classmate, Janet Wickenhaver Allon, who had a long career as a journalist in New York City, died this past February 17, after a couple of months battling an illness. I asked her good friend Jonathan Weber to write a few words about her:

“Speaking for a magical Wesleyan friend circle, we’re crushed by Janet’s sudden and shocking death, all the more difficult because it was so inexplicable. It was only in December that I saw her in New York, all her charm and smarts and dry humor fully on display, and I never imagined that only a couple of months later I would see her near death in a hospital ICU. Her son, Jonah, and daughter, Lena, were there when I visited, showing incredible poise, and our hearts are with them and their sister, Tess, and Janet’s wonderful partner Larry, who was a hero through a brutal couple of months.

“I’ve known Janet since my first days at West College in 1978, and she was a charter member of an amazing group that has stayed close, with various ebbs and flows, ever since—Hannah Marcus ’83, her roommate, and Lawrence Comras, Steedman Hinckley ’83, Molly Turner ’83, Raleigh Levine ’83, Dena Wortzel ’83, Eric Sack ’83, Becky Mode ’86, Chris Erickson ’87, Ed Hernstadt (honorary ’82), and, if they were still with us, John Moynihan and Sara Garment ’83, among many others. As a freshman, she was a cute, smart, funny, and slightly shy girl from the Philadelphia Main Line, a bit patrician in her way but also goofy enough for WestCo. I appreciated her athletic bent—she’d been a competitive figure skater, and was a strong tennis player, and we even spent one winter break ski bumming together in Vermont, cleaning rooms in a ski lodge (I don’t recommend it).

“Later on we had a lot to share as journalists: in proper Wesleyan fashion she was curious about all sorts of things, and I especially admired her work in the trenches at Street Sheet, and then at AlterNet, her compassion and kindness always shining through. We already miss her very much.”

In cheerier news, Joe Fins is on a partial sabbatical this year, and spent the first semester as an Old Dominion Humanities Council fellow and visiting professor at Princeton, teaching a course in the classics department entitled, Bio/Ethics: Ancient and Modern. While at Princeton, he was also working on a biography of Dr. Lewis Thomas, author of The Lives of a Cell, whose papers are there. This semester he’s teaching in the COL as the Koeppel Visiting Professor of Letters. “It’s been a marvelous homecoming and it’s made me reflective about our time at Wes,” he says. “It has retained its character and remains an intellectually synthetic place.”

Robert Smythe has largely left the stage and turned to his longtime love of baking. He and Susan Smythe opened Pastry Pants in downtown Swarthmore, Pennsylvania—and hope you’ll drop by if you’re in the area.

I stopped by an art show in San Francisco, Evoke, where Paul Baker ’84, who has been making assemblage sculptures for years, was showing some of his new, imaginative, and intriguing boxes (think Joseph Cornell). “I call my pieces ‘constructed sculpture’ since they are about 80% built from scratch,” he says. “The rest is made up of carefully selected objects that bring with them a patina of use and lost history.”

I caught Steve Budd performing his latest one-person show, Seeing Stars, a heartfelt and hilarious take on family dysfunction and father-son relationships, in San Francisco. He’s been touring in Hollywood and other venues. Look out for it!

I’ve been trying to keep writing despite old magazines shuttering, aging out of new ones, and losing whatever luster I once had in the publishing world by starting my own Substack publication, The Phrazer, and have been happy to see many of our classmates on that platform. That nickname goes back to Wesleyan, perhaps coined by Barnaby Dinges ’81, whom I had the pleasure of seeing in San Miguel de Allende with his wife, Vicki. We exchanged memoirs and his Ragged Run was eye-opening. Like a lot of people, I arrived at Wes thinking everyone else seemed to have had it easy growing up and were so confident. Think again. Barnaby’s memoir, among other things, was a real tribute to Wes’s aid-blind admissions policy, because he and his brother, Casey ’79, orphaned and bilked of their inheritance, could never have otherwise matriculated and become the valued and beloved members of the community they are.

Take care, classmates.

Laura