Tag: 1982

Dearest Classmates:

We have a bit more space this issue as it will be entirely online, so a lot to catch up on, mostly as it was sent to us. Some things to mourn, many transitions, and some hopeful updates. Please have a read.

We are deeply saddened to learn of the sudden death of Dr. Carol Evans. Carol had a 30-year career in international security and was the director of the Strategic Studies Institute at the United States Army War College. The army embraced strategies she developed for countering China’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region. She advised the director of Central Intelligence, the National Ground Intelligence Center, and the Defense Science Board. Carol was in Wesleyan’s program in Ghana in 1981–1982 when a coup d’etat and martial law shut down the university outside Accra. A fellow student in the program remembers Carol as the cool, organized presence who helped get the Wesleyan folks back home safely. In addition to her academic and policy work, Carol also found time to teach economics to master’s students at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and to travel widely with her daughter, Fiona.

Eric Sack ’83 is retiring from his full-time faculty position in the English department at Southeast Community College in Lincoln, Nebraska. Eric spent the 1980s as an investigative reporter in New York City, and his experiences living in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn led him to leave journalism to pursue education with a focus on inner-city and disenfranchised students, leading him to SCC. He writes that his most gratifying accomplishments at SCC will always be watching students gain confidence in their ability to use written English as they work toward a more fulfilling and productive life for themselves and their families. He hopes to continue part time in the fall in the writing center while he helps raise identical twin granddaughters.

Mark Sirota writes, “I left my job as general counsel of Trusted Media Brands after 30 years at the company and am taking the summer for some rest and relaxation before planning the rest of my life. I continued my ‘old men watching older men’ perform while the older men are still alive concert tour with James Taylor at Tanglewood, The Rolling Stones at MetLife, and Billy Joel’s 150th and final concert of his residency at Madison Square Garden, where he was joined by Axl Rose. I was in Washington, D.C., in July to celebrate my twins’ 21st!! birthdays with them, where I was hosted by Anthony Pahigian and his wife, Gordana.”

Reina Galanes moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1988. In October 2021, she retired from careers in health-care insurance administration and instructional design. Two years later, she joined End of Life Choices California (EOLCCA) as a volunteer. The mission of this nonprofit organization is to provide Californians with information and support to successfully navigate their legal end-of-life options, including medical aid-in-dying. Reina says, “Talking about death is the proverbial elephant in the room. Our lives are unpredictable and so are the timing and manner of our deaths. What is important to you? What do you want to happen? What do you not want to happen? Have you shared your end-of-life wishes with your loved ones? It’s never too soon and can always be too late. It’s your life, your death, your choice.”

John Robinson writes, “Our adult kids are all doing great. Maya [Sonenberg]’s latest book, Bad Mothers, Bad Daughters, came out last year, and she is working a book now about Merce Cunningham. (Maya is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Washington.) In my retirement, I think I’m busier than before: now doing the business side of the arts for all who need it—producing, advising and supporting performance art, choreography, music, and now film too. You can see a couple of films I’ve executive produced. They are currently streaming (on Prime) and elsewhere: Thin Skin (director: Charles Mudede) about the life of a Seattle jazz trumpeter; and Anu (director: Sudeshna Sen), a coming-of-age story for the whole family (I have a small role in this one). And more to come soon with new episodes of Uncertain Detective series, and a film of the Kronos Quartet’s final concert together in San Francisco.”

Patty Smith writes “I spent 10 days of June in residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) working on my newest novel-in-progress. And in July, my wife, Cindy, and I headed to New England for vacation. Highlights included a delightful dinner with Ginny Pye and John Ravenal ’81 at their lovely home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a fabulous get-together with Terry Cowdrey and Laura Fine Warren at Laura’s home in Massachusetts.” Patty is still teaching American literature and creative writing at the Appomattox Regional Governor’s School in Petersburg, Virginia, and still writing. 

Carlos Hoyt wrote to let us know he has a book coming out in November/December (with his colleague, Minna Ham), Diversity Without Divisiveness: A Guide to DEI Practice for K-12 Educators.

Cary Dier, technical editor in the Operational Evaluation Division of the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) Systems and Analyses Center (SAC), is a recipient this year of the 2023 W. Y. Smith Award, named in honor of General William Y. Smith, who led IDA for five years.

Emilie Attwell keeps going as a psychiatrist in Texas. “Life is great right now. I came to New Mexico to escape the heat, and it turns out I escaped Hurricane Beryl as well! It is a working vacation. Work starts at 7:00 a.m. and ends at 4:00 p.m. As long as I have Wi-Fi and privacy, I can work!”

David Hessekiel sent a nice update. “Last fall I sold Engage for Good, the corporate social impact conference and digital resource that I started 23 years ago. I consulted to the new owner, a terrific social entrepreneur 25 years my junior, until this May’s conference, at which they were kind enough to present me with a lifetime achievement award. (And, no, that honor doesn’t mean I have some sort of terminal illness—thank goodness.) 

“At 64 I’m far from retired, but I am enjoying the much more relaxed pace of overseeing one instead of two conference businesses—the Peer-to-Peer Professional Forum—and the time that opens up for other pursuits. Besides tennis, pickleball, and swimming, it has meant a return to my journalistic roots. As luck would have it, a neighbor bought our local newspaper last fall and I’m a regular contributor. Incredibly exciting was covering the Democratic congressional primary race this spring between incumbent Jamaal Bowman and George Latimer, which attracted more political spending than any such contest in American history.”

Here is the photo of David at the Engage for Good conference this year.

And for a next generation thing, Ellen (Friedman) and Sam Bender joined Ellen’s father, Joe Friedman ’52, for the graduation of their daughter (and Joe’s granddaughter), Eliza in May. They got mentioned in the Class of ’52 Notes last issue for the musical Eliza directed at Wes in April, but I thought it right to stick them in here for us.

I really like letting people know that they have room to write, since we have space for 2000 words, as it turns out that people will really send updates. We’re so glad to share them with you.

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

Just a little bit of news from a few Class of ’82 folks. Elon Musk says he’s glad to live in interesting times, so I guess we can all decide if it is a curse or not.

Book news from two of our classmates: Virginia (Ginny) Pye writes, “I’ve had an active fall with book events for my new novel, The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann—a Gilded Age story of a dime novelist who sues her Boston publisher for underpaying her as a woman. And I’d be happy to visit book clubs, in person or virtually, of any fellow Wes alumni!” Michael Lucey was nominated for the Modernist Studies Association book award and took honorable mention for his quite incredible work about what happens when we talk, What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk.

Carlos Hoyt, with a PhD and MSW in social work, teaches, practices, and leads in the Boston area. He is doing amazing work on race and other identity constructs, and shares that he had the good fortune of being featured (with an old family photo!) in this Washington Post article, “Race isn’t real, science says. Advocates want the census to reflect that.”

Emilie Attwell writes, “I am still working via telepsychiatry for the Harris Center (the huge multicenter place that covers Houston). I saw today a mother and her two daughters that have autism and ADHD. It boggles my mind to have one daughter that is nine years old and still needs help taking a bath, much less two, and to have to do it as a single mom. . . . Thank God the punitive heat from the summer has abated, and the plants can take a breather.” Thank God for your work, Emilie.

Diana Moller-Marino was an acting professor/director for over 20 years at the Hartt School, University of Hartford. “Loved preparing actors for the profession. Recently left there to teach privately out of my home. I’ve loved teaching students of all ages. Don’t miss the university setting one bit. Still work at Wes every year, guiding monologues written by current students on issues of identity (In the Company of Others) as a key part of new student orientation. It’s wildly appreciated and I find it both satisfying and weird to be back in the Jones Room. I recently directed my first documentary about folks who hang out by the soup kitchen: folks dealing with housing insecurity, addiction and/or mental illness.” You can see her Meet the Streets (about Middletown!) on YouTube.

Steve Maizes has been keeping in touch. “Michael Zeller, Vincent Bonazzoli, and our respective spouses enjoyed a fantastic night of ping-pong, swimming, weightlifting, nostalgic reminiscing, and delicious Italian food around a campfire.” Weightlifting? I didn’t do that at my last alumni get-together, but I read that we will all age better if we do that.

I will report that your co-secretaries spent Thanksgiving together in San Miguel de Allende, with Laura’s husband, Wes alum, Peter Eckart ’86, and with my wife, Laurie, and our eldest. My first Thanksgiving out of the country and it was lovely. After finally figuring out together that pumpkin and pecan pies cook quite differently at 6,200 feet of elevation, a sense of peace finally arrived.

I decided not to write about what I learned about so many of you from your out of office replies: what programs you run, that you are retiring, etc., and decided only to include what you’ve intended to share with the class. Perhaps I’ll have the courage (or guile) to do that next time. The years pass so swiftly, so please stay in touch, especially during these interesting times.

Greetings, classmates,

It’s never too late to keep learning: Rachael Adler just graduated with a master’s in marriage and family therapy from the Wright Institute in Berkeley and is now training at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis. Richard LeComte recently received an MA in arts administration from the University of Kentucky, where he works as a writer. Congrats, both!

If you’d like to learn more about screenwriting and storytelling, check out Liz Keyishian’s calltoadventure.media, a writers’ development company. She’s sourcing a bunch of her mentors for upcoming writers’ retreats from her friends at Wes, including Peter Blauner, Dan Greenberger ’81, Cary Bickley ’82, and me (Laura Fraser). She’s planning on tapping a lot more Wes talent “because they are the best people I know,” she told me from her apartment in Melbourne . . . and she’s offering a friends and family rate for Wes grads who’d like to attend her workshops in Breckenridge, Melbourne, and other great locales (contact liz@calltoadventure.media).

Fresh off his smokin’ solo performance What They Said about Sex, Steve Budd has a new show, Seeing Stars, that premiered at the San Francisco Fringe in August, which explores family dysfunction, mental illness, and father-son relationships. He also published a piece of creative nonfiction that connects baseball and Judaism in The Under Review, https://www.underreviewlit.com/issue-8-summer-23/remove-contents-and-pray.

Cheryl Stevens has semiretired and traded in her litigator card for the role of a neutral, arbitrating disputes and labor and employment cases for the American Arbitration Association. She says her new role has given her more time to create mugs, plates, and other things in clay—though not satisfied with puttering as a potter, she agreed to become the president of the board of directors for the Berkeley Potter’s Studio and editor of their member newsletter. When not up to her elbows in clay, she sings backup with an R&B band of mostly lawyers, a developer, and a judge–the Coolerators.

Emilie “Bunny” Attwell has retired from her job with the state and is working remotely with the Local Mental Health Authority in Houston, as well as writing psychiatric reports for the Texas Medical Board.

After 33 years, Larry Selzer is still with The Conservation Fund, a national nonprofit that buys land for conservation. They recently completed their 4,000th project, protecting 9 million acres across all 50 states!

David Brancaccio, who hosts public radio’s Marketplace, recently revealed that his inspiration for getting into radio was not CBS legend Edward R. Murrow, but, as he wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay for the 50th anniversary of the George Lucas movie American Graffiti, Wolfman Jack. David is also having fun with a streaming video series, Skin in the Game, looking at what video games can teach us about the economy, personal finances, and tech careers. (If you want to know what video games can teach you about the possibilities of love and creativity, read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zavin, a book Liz Keyishian recommended to me).

Kim Traub Ribbens is scaling back her massage practice, but still working on a 102-year-old client she’s seen for 20 years, which probably explains her longevity. She traveled in New Zealand and Australia with Marcy (Neiterman) Maiorana, who was at Wes for two years, and spent time meeting people in the Maori community and learning about their culture. She also recently had dinner with Gene and Tamara (née Haigh) Lanza when they came to Savannah, catching up on each other’s lives.

Among his other pursuits, including being a councilperson in Denton, Texas, Paul Meltzer has a podcast, Turn Up the Yummy, about making delicious food while avoiding everything your doctor wants you to avoid . . . . Susan Smythe is also active in her local government, serving on her local borough council again after her previous term ended in 2016. Her husband Robert Smythe is about to open a bakery, Pastry Pants, featuring everything yummy your doctor wants you to avoid.

My husband, Peter Eckart ’86, and I ventured down the peninsula for a delightful dinner with Christian Vescia and his wife, Lucia Sanchez, as well as my class notes co-conspirator, Michael Ostacher, and his wife, Laurie. Christian has retired and created an amazing rose garden, and Lucia is still working as a pediatric physical therapist. Peter and I are excited that we’ve successfully lured Michael and Laurie down to Mexico for Thanksgiving to eat some pavo and a bunch of other things your doctor wants you to avoid.

Bon appétit! Til next time!

It’s really true that my memories of Reunion last year are fresh, but that’s probably because time flies by so quickly and May 2022 seems barely yesterday. I had a chance to see Michael Roth when he visited here at Stanford, and Wesleyan held a reception for him at the faculty club (hosted by Bill Greene ’86, P’20 and his wife Kera Greene). Michael joked that he was in town to discuss Stanford’s purchase of Wesleyan. In truth they have a plan for Wesleyan’s future and continued success and that was great to hear.

Ah, the marking of time: Kweku Forstall has good news to share. Grandparent news! “My wife Adrienne and I welcomed our first grandbaby into the world recently. Her name is Nora Marion Rash, born in Wilmington, North Carolina, to our youngest daughter Cailey Rash and her husband Caleb Rash.”

Ken Kaufman writes (after reading the last class notes) that he is suffering the ravaged of this passage of time, too, with health and life updates: “Lavinia Ross isn’t the only one. The only difference is that my cardiac incident waited till August. I even managed to shut down the D.C. Red Line for half an hour. In other news, I’m closing in on 15 years at the IRS and starting to cast an eye toward retirement.”

Mark Sirota writes that Anthony Pahigian came up from D.C. with his wife Gordana, and he met them, and some of their friends, at the Guggenheim in New York. “I can’t remember the name of the artist we went to see, but we had bagels for lunch.” My memory is like that too. No photos from Mark, but those sometimes help.

Steve Maizes (my second cousin, something I knew without the help of AncestryDNA or 23andMe) has career and class news: he recently joined CrossCountry Mortgage as the in-house lender for The Agency, the real estate brokerage in LA, which is notable because our classmate, Paul Lester, is partner there. “Excited to be working with Paul.”

Ginny Pye encouraged me to share my news, too, so I will relate a couple of things. I’ve had a chance to see Matt Solo a couple of times, and the last time I spoke with him, he was filling sandbags to help prevent his home from sliding off the hill into the valley. It still stands. Matt continues to work in television in LA. I also ran into my old friend Joe Barrett at the reunion. Our reconnection turned into a lovely working relationship. Because of my work in addictions, Joe invited me to join the board of Key Recovery and Life Skills Center, a nonprofit and the first residential drug and alcohol treatment center for substance use disorder in the Puget Sound region. (They have an innovative recycling center, too, Seadrunar, that partly funds their work.) It’s been really important work professionalizing the services they provide there under Joe’s leadership. Joe has just agreed to take over as the permanent CEO and he’s amazing! It is really meaningful work that they do, providing care to people and families in great need, and especially meaningful to be working with Joe, his partner Monica Ramsey, and an incredible board. What an enriching opportunity.

Laura and I continue to hope that you share your updates with us. With Class Notes now online, too, we can more easily keep people updated. Connections are so important, so please keep in touch.

Warmly,

Michael and Laura

Greetings, classmates,

I sent out a nudge about class notes and since you’re all dutiful A students at heart, I got a bunch of good material. Thank you.

First up is Ginny Pye who has, yes, another novel­—The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann—coming out in 2023. If anyone needs inspiration for a later-in-life career, look no further. I saw Jenny Boylan ’80 in New York at a diner near where we used to share an apartment and passed along how pleased Ginny was to get a blurb from her without even asking. Jenny shrugged. “She’s a wonderful writer.” As her former publisher at Shebooks (My Mother’s Garden), I agree.

Suzanne Berne also has a new novel, The Blue Window, out in January. She and her husband Ken Kimmell have seen a lot of Wes friends recently: Rick Goldstein, Raf Ornstein, Elyse Klaidman, Martha Murdock, Shirley Hedden, Jane Hammerslough, and Ezra Palmer ’81, Ginny Pye and John Ravenal ’81, and Jessica Barton ’81.

Patty Smith is also writing up a storm, with a flash fiction piece showcased in a Page to Stage performance in Richmond, Virginia, and a couple of essays coming out soon in an anthology. She’s still teaching creative nonfiction and American literature at the Appomattox Regional Governor’s School in Petersburg. She and her wife also recently Zoomed with Michael Lucey, Holly Brown, Jenny Curtis, Anne Wise, and Joanne Godin ’81.

Terri Seligman is still lawyering, married to the same person, and her kids are all grown up. She has a wonderful new hobby: playing with two Afro-Brazilian percussion groups, one all women (Batala) and one co-ed (Mambembe). “It’s been fabulous getting back to music, and fun to be a performer again.”

Christian Vescia enjoyed the reunion, as he has in the past—he and his wife Lucia reconnected at our 10th Reunion and married two years later. He retired from full-time work in October, leaving a Silicon Valley fintech start-up (Affirm) where he worked designing training programs and curricula. Now he’s busy with travel (Hawaii), exercise (swimming), gardening, guitar lessons, political activism (he’s keen on Andrew Yang’s Forward Party), and general puttering. Lucia is working part time doing physical therapy and sensory integration work with young kids.

Daniel Meier has been in touch recently with Peter Schochet, Joe Merrill, Dave Gaieski ’81,  Doug Jones, and Roger Hale. He hopes to return to campus next year; his niece is Wes ’26.

The “Stupid Dogs”—Jack Taylor, Bruce Crain, Dan Hillman, Kevin Foley, Stephen Daniel, John Mooney, Alex Thomson, and Peter Frisch—gathered again, as they have every year since graduation, “an event that’s ever more precious with the passage of time,” says Jack.

Congratulations to Charita Brown, who was recognized as a “Woman of Integrity” honoree at the Black People Rock Honors Ceremony (Maryland) for excellence in mental health advocacy, and who was also awarded a mayoral citation from Baltimore mayor Brandon M. Scott.

Susan Smythe says she and her husband Robert are enjoying working in the same place—Swarthmore College—where Robert, after a career in theater, is running the bakery in the school’s new sustainable and beautiful dining center, for which Susan was the project manager. (I don’t remember a bakery at MoCon…)

Paul Meltzer has been focused on local politics in Denton, Texas, a city of about 140,000 (“larger than South Bend, Indiana,” he points out). He served as a city council member, and mayor pro tem, fighting for a balanced, environmentally sensitive approach to growth. He challenged the incumbent for mayor and, as they say in the Olympics, “silvered.” He’s currently president of the Denton Rotary Club, writes regular columns in the Denton Record-Chronicle, and is working on a documentary following 10  aspiring actors from a previous chapter in his life. He’s still happily married to Bonnie Friedman ’79, also retired from teaching creative writing and enjoying much more time for her own writing, and they’re more frequently at their place in Park Slope, Brooklyn, available to catch up with NYC friends.

Mark Sirota visited Joe Barrett at his family home on Chappaquiddick, almost to the day the 44th anniversary of the first and only other time they were there together, October break, frosh year in 1978. “I didn’t catch a fish this time either,” he says.

Beck Lee is hard at work on an initiative to forestall polarization and demonization of those who are unlike ourselves. His “can we all get along?” work, via the nonprofit Cultural Fluency Initiative, will celebrate cultures of all kinds and promote cross-group understanding and collaboration. “It all stems from my great good fortune over the years to have worked with cultural groups, artists, and leaders from so many interesting countries, walks of life, and perspectives,” he says.

Martin “Chip” Shore was bummed to miss our reunion, but he and his wife Shari were off with their son in Tahoe. Chip stopped work in January and spent most of the year skiing, playing tennis, biking, and working on his “honey-do” list, in addition to taking care of his parents. Unsure if he’s going back to work (it interferes with skiing, just saying), he’s volunteering to promote gender equality, transgender awareness, and financial education.

Like a lot of our classmates, Catharine Arnold and her husband John Bozzi ’79, are enjoying being “Nana” and “Papi” to their grandsons. “Lots of things have changed since our sons were babies—nothing in the crib, Snoos, sleep sacks, etc.—but nothing beats that beautiful smile and hug when they see you.” Greg Lewis, an owner and CEO of Aerosol Dynamics, also has a baby granddaughter, another who is a freshman at Columbia, and a grandson in grad school at Brown.

We’re grateful Lavinia Ross survived a near-fatal heart attack in June. “Every day is a gift,” she says.

Jim Friedlander wrote in with some up-to-the-minute news: Bonnie LePard was on the official guest list for the Macron state dinner at the White House on December 1.

Stay healthy, happy, and creative!

What at lovely gathering at our 40th Reunion in Middletown in May. The pandemic door creaked open and a number of us were able to be together for it. Go to the Wesleyan University ’82 Reunion Facebook page and have a look as many of us have posted photos there. (https://www.facebook.com/groups/Wesclassof82).

Kudos to Sarah Chapin Columbia for her Distinguished Alumni Award and a big shout-out to Joe Fins (my COL classmate!) for receiving an honorary degree for his groundbreaking work in medical ethics (and for his service to the University, it goes without saying). Many thanks to Ginny Pye and Bob Russo for speaking at our class dinner.

Forty years is a very long time, isn’t it? It was lovely to celebrate it. Laura Fraser and I appreciated seeing you all, class notes really live. It remarkable how special it was to be together, something I hadn’t quite anticipated. I will take the liberty of writing that I really loved spending the day with Michael Lucey, eating a (large) breakfast at Ford News on Main Street, hanging out at Eclectic, reading our bound theses at COL and attending its reception, and getting a signed copy of his newest publication, What Proust Heard: Novels and the Ethnography of Talk, an amazing book.

Still, some catching up to do:

Emilie Attwell writes, “I am fine, the same. For the last 11 months, I have worked for the Harris Center. That is the mental health center in Harris County, aka Houston. Uvalde hit us hard. So did abortion laws and the heat is hotter than f@#%. Cold beer helps!”

Rob Lancefield writes that last year he retired from a 27-year career in museum work, most recently as head of IT at the Yale Center for British Art. “No regrets.” Rob is enjoying a simpler life largely free from Zoom meetings, looking forward to having his favorite guitar made playable again, and to reacquainting himself with it.

Chris Garson is still happily retired, “12 years and counting,” and very busy penning novels. “I recently completed a modern Arthurian trilogy set in northeast Ohio. If anyone has ins with publishers, shoot me a message!”

Bob Russo (post reunion) wrote, “Jeff Susla, John Brautigam, and I went to hear Graham Nash at a small, 200-seat venue. He sounded great, did a very nice show, and ended with a sing-along of Teach Your Children. Sentimental.”

Steve Maizes (my cousin!) “had the pleasure of a great California visit from Michael Zeller and his lovely wife.”

Alex Thomson is like a lot of folks, sorry he missed the reunion, having had something he could not miss that weekend. (Like so many of us. Life is busy.) Alex goes on: “I went with Moons [John Mooney] to see Phil and Friends a week ago. Only differences between the crowd at the show and the crowd in ’82 are cell phones. Same Twirlygirls, same Deadheads, same shenanigans . . . same good  friends . . . just a bit older . . . .”

Michael Levine has been living in Williamsburg, Virginia, since 2000, practicing occupational and environmental medicine. “My wife Liz is a prof at William and Mary, and son Andrew is a rising sophomore at Virginia Tech. I collect antique woodworking machinery (hoard broken and rusty things) and make some efforts to preserve American democracy.” He stays in touch with former roommates Garrett Randolph, Anthony Pahigian, and Neil Richman, and the folks from the Wesleyan crew. “I was very sorry to have missed our 40-year reunion—but look forward to seeing you all at 50!” We do too.

I will finish on a deeply sad note. Julie Kraushaar Zurcher passed away on July 23 after a struggle with her mental health that developed over the past year, unable to find a clear diagnosis or successful treatment. I had a chance to sit with her husband Werner and son Bryce ’18, in their home in Ladera, California, to remember Julie’s vibrancy, love, and optimism. I met Julie freshman year in Clark Hall and we lived near each other in Silicon Valley. When I moved here in 2010, we stayed in a hotel until our housing became available. Julie happened to be staying there, too, returning herself with her family from Switzerland and waiting for their own home to become available, and we recognized each other immediately. Her warmth and hospitality made our transition from Cambridge so much easier. She will be missed terribly, but our memories of her and how she touched us will remain.