CLASS OF 1998 | 2026 | SPRING ISSUE

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Hi, classmates! Thanks to so many of you for writing in!

In happy news, Mariandrea Mueller has married her longtime partner, raconteur Apul Patel (UC Berkeley ’97). She has taken his last name because she likes how “Mariandrea Rae Patel” sounds. They enjoy traveling and are looking forward to a safari in Tanzania, but are making their home in Los Angeles, California. 

Emily Weissman and her husband relocated a few years ago from the Bay Area to a small town in northern California called Grass Valley. They have chickens and a dog and Emily works remotely at a community development financial institution. And they love the small community they’re in.

Adam Borden was invited to Seattle in November to speak on an Amazon panel and combined it with a personal trip to the Olympic National Forest with Adam Bakun. They saw the world’s largest Sitka spruce tree, with a 59-foot circumference, in addition to eating some great meals together. Jules Cohen and Adam also broke bread—they went to Maneki, Seattle’s oldest Japanese restaurant, where Jules filled Adam in on his work at Microsoft. Adam thinks Jules is probably our only classmate to be working for the same company since graduation! Adam took his daughter, a Middlebury art history major, to Miami and met Franklin Sirmans ’91 at his museum, the Perez Art Museum, for a brief visit. What an impressive modern collection!

Lisa Winegar says she has been lucky to be able to keep in regular touch and often see many of our fellow’98ers this year and will have the chance for more in 2026. To protect the embarrassed and guilty parties, she will keep their names private. In news that apparently surprised Lisa more than anyone, she got married and is now a stepmom. She’s even serving on her school’s board of trustees. (“You can take the girl out of Wesleyan, but not the Wesleyan out of the girl . . .”).  She also wanted to say that she had a magnificent time at our 25th Reunion. And she’s going to make it her business to try and convince all of you to come back every five years! She points out that we have already had to say goodbye to more of our classmates than many can stand, so we need to take advantage of any time we can be together at our beloved Wes. She also lives in New Hampshire now and asks anyone in the Boston metro area and New England/Northeast to please get in touch!

Jamie Pagliaro recently stepped into a new role as CEO of EarliPoint Health, a health-care technology company focused on earlier, more objective diagnosis and outcome measurement in autism. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife and their two teenage children, and plays in a local band (The BARD Band). This year also brought a great reunion with former squash teammate Andrew Frishman ’97, whom Jamie connected with at an education event in the mountains outside of Denver.

Mary Lisio reports she had a wonderful significant birthday celebration in New York that included Danielle Woodrow, Mollie Nelson Webster ’99, Sarah Margon, Mike Lenore ’97, Keri Chaimowitz Topkins ’97, and Sadia Shepard ’97. She heard from many alumni that day and is grateful for her Wesleyan friends!

Ellen Struzziero wrote in to say she is still living just a half hour from Wesleyan in Farmington, Connecticut. She has been there for 22 years now and has three beautiful daughters: Eliza and Scarlett Kamm, whose father is the late James Kamm ’92, Alpha Delt president; and her youngest, Edith Roth, who was born in 2015 to Ellen and her high school sweetheart (her second husband, but who is counting?) After working for the City of Hartford Department of Health for four years during COVID-19 and then mpox pandemics, Ellen went back to working ob-gyn (midwifery) in Hartford. Her older two have started college, one in Connecticut and the other at Stonehill College in Massachusetts, and she says it is absolutely unbelievable that she could have children as old as she was when she first set foot as a frosh at Wesleyan. On a sadder front, earlier in 2025, she lost her (second) husband, and between that unexpected tragedy and the realization that she is now old enough to have kids in college she has been thinking a lot about WesFolk that she hasn’t heard from in years. She hasn’t kept her old Wesleyan email but would love to hear from classmates—the good, the bad—any and all of it. After all, “life is all about the stories.”

Finally, Justin Ring is pleased to have sent in his first update in 27 years! [Editor’s note: “27 what now??”] After five years of teaching screenwriting at Wes, he moved back to LA and finally started his own small production company, Shindig Entertainment. He’s honored that the first film he executive produced, Where in the Hell, is the feature directorial debut of Laramie Dennis ’95. It played in festivals all over the world in Seoul, Melbourne, and Berlin, and even picked up the Best Narrative Feature award for its NYC premiere at the Queens World Film Festival, where Justin got to catch up with Jody Kuh ’95 and Bex Schwartz ’00, who were rockstars for coming out for opening night. By the time this is in print, it should be available wherever you stream films. Justin also got to see Neal Wilkinson’s amazing art installation Fight for America! in London’s West End this summer, where apparently Neal hornswoggled Justin into “karaokeing” We Are the World in front a gaggle of bemused British gamers as part of the show. Justin also sees Jaime McAdams, who is a big deal at MSG/Radio City, whenever Justin passes through NYC and learns exactly what the Yankees are doing wrong. Finally, right before the holidays, Noah Merin, Ashley Knaysi, and Anthony Veneziale let Justin crash their mini–Gag Reflex reunion for a lovely evening. Ashley has become a quite brilliant nurse practitioner and shares a shift once a week with Samantha Smith-Newman ’02, whose husband, John Newman, directed the first short that Justin produced, starring Lynn Chen, because LA is actually a small town, and Wes peeps support each other. Give a Justin shout if you come through LA, ’98ers!

And with that, I turn to 0°F temps but two feet of fresh snow and more coming down. I’m so envious of all of you running into each other and especially those of you still in New England, but snow and my increasingly feisty teenage nieces are still too hard to pass up.

Please keep in touch. It was wonderful to hear from so many of you.

Best,

Abby

ABBY ELBOW | aelbow@gmail.com