SPEAK, MEMORY

Me, at the time I began writing Strange Tango.

The destinies of a pantheon of gifted Cornell graduates unfold through the internet.

        After my niece had graduated from pre-kindergarten several years back, she started summer classes at vacation bible school where she saw Luke, a former classmate who had left the class to be home-schooled in anticipation of his father’s deployment to Iraq.
        “Do you remember me?” she asked him.
        “Yes,” he shyly replied. “I do.”
        The weeklong pattern of rainy and gray New England weather inspired me to remain in my cocoon and to revisit my early adulthood. Once a person has entered my orbit and been a significant part of an era in my life, a bond of shared experiences is created. There is history between us. I carefully choose the people I invite into my space, so relationships have been of long duration. I can recall only one significant disappointment.
        Prompted by a vivid dream, I sought to reconnect with someone who once mattered to me. “We don’t want any contact with you at all,” he replied. Still, I persisted. How could someone with whom you have had a symbiotic bond—a karmic connection—change, or age, so much? He had such love of beauty, how could charm and grace be replaced by fear and inflexibility?
        Or had he simply forgotten me?
        For the next nine months, I sought openings that would reveal the answer to me until, finally, I released the beautiful memory of a dear friend to the stranger he had become. My dream was indeed prophetic: his heart was dead inside.
        Other reconnections have had far happier endings.
        I now live in Oklahoma, and my main conduit to the world I once inhabited is through the internet. I had remained happily off the grid until a photograph and article of me as a young child on the first day of first grade in southwest Oklahoma surfaced: the local paper had digitized its archives and placed the stories online. Instinctively, I felt the action was an invasion of my privacy, that I was caught up in a new media order I could not control. So, I reconciled my ambivalence by using technology to document my life: to search for people from my past and to piece together, through references on the world wide web, information available in the public domain.
        The year I arrived at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, I was the only student from our city of less than 100,000 to attend an Ivy League university. My name is engraved on a plaque at Lawton High School for the highest cumulative grade point average in English over three years. The faculty had voted for me to be the school’s representative to Oklahoma Girls State, where I was named an Outstanding Citizen and First Alternate to Girls Nation in Washington, D.C.
        I was a class officer, captain of the debate team, and lost an election for student body president by one vote. Interestingly, I had received two ballots but, like a good citizen, I returned the extra ballot. The situation had not passed unnoticed; returning home for vacation, I was surprised that a prominent columnist in the local newspaper mentioned this tidbit.
        Foreshadowing my destiny, I was both the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine and a columnist for the school paper.
        At Cornell, I was accepted into the English honors program and took graduate-level courses. My coursework was distributed in 18 academic disciplines, including at the Cornell Law School. On the extra-curricular side, I was a student adviser in the College of Arts and Sciences and a resident adviser in a special summer program for prospective students of color. I chaired an ethnic student organization and was a member of the Ethnic Studies Committee to bring the emerging discipline into the university curriculum. After successive rounds of competition, I was also selected to serve on the Student Finance Commission, the funding organization for hundreds of Cornell student associations.
        But my most significant achievement was winning a landslide election to serve on the University Board of Trustees. In this capacity, I wrote editorials for the Cornell Daily Sun and was seated on the Dean of Students Selection committee, the Academic Affairs Committee, and the public relations oriented Trustee-Community Communications Committee. Presciently, I supported two innovative student initiatives: the installation of a new student governance system at Cornell and the creation of a Third World Student Union with programming relevant for Cornellians of color.
        The University administration recommended me for Glamour magazine’s annual college competition to select the Top Ten College Women in the country.
        I had volunteered to help the Cornell Fund with a capital development campaign to build a new Performing Arts complex. Attending meetings of the Senior Class Gift Committee, I persuaded my classmates to accept an innovative new idea: that the funds traditionally raised for an inscribed bench or plaque, or building repair, should instead be donated for the Performing Arts complex. This gesture of solidarity could then be leveraged in soliciting alumni funds.
        Long after I had graduated, successive senior classes would follow suit until the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts became a reality. The spacious and elegant building with its marble walls is beautifully sited along the Cascadilla Gorge.
        In my role as a trustee, I had championed a very popular, young assistant dean for the highly visible Dean of Students position. When Larry Watson was passed over as not having the requisite, high-level experience for the job, I questioned the administration’s commitment to identifying, mentoring, and hiring professionals of color into prominent university positions and challenged administrators to devise a solution. In response, a special administrative internship in the president’s office was created for qualified professionals of color.
        Later, upon arriving at Harvard as an assistant dean and director of academic programs at the Graduate School of Design, Larry recruited me to work with him. I passed up an offer to work with the managing partner of a Boston law firm founded by former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis for the opportunity to be reunited with my longtime friend. Somehow, my instincts told me even then that I was following a path that would exchange what would have been a predictable future for a dramatically different destiny.
        With Professor Derrick Bell of Harvard Law School, Larry drafted the blueprint for what became the Harvard Administrative Fellows Program. He credited his experience at Cornell for this innovation. Years later, I became an AFP Fellow and founding member of the AFP alumni association, established with the support of James Hoyte, an Assistant to the President/Associate Vice President at Harvard, the former Massachusetts Secretary of Environmental Affairs in the administration of Michael Dukakis, a Democratic presidential nominee.
        Throughout my college career, I flocked with similarly altruistic, accomplished, and activist individuals. They have all gone on to highly successful lives—engaged in activities that continue to add meaning to their existence and to benefit society at large. Not all of my fellow alumni chose conventional routes, but each remained authentic, very much true to their youthful selves.
        Today, two of my closest female friends from those youthful years are Louise Gansky Bendel and Susan Bisom-Rapp. Louise met up with my sister and me for the Denmark through Switzerland segment of our two-month, Grand Tour of Europe. She made a special pilgrimage to the house of Isak Dinesen outside of Copenhagen. After living in the Silicon Valley during the heady pre-internet bubble days, Louise and her family moved to an historic home in Massachusetts. Visiting Louise is like returning to the 1700’s in New England and, in fact, the inn immortalized in Longfellow’s ode to the village smithy under the spreading chestnut tree is located nearby. Louise has adopted a back-to-the-earth lifestyle, and her natural, rambling acreage uses no pesticides.
        I met Susan when she had long, flowing, curly hair and was president of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations student government. Susan had attended a candidates debate and informed me that their organization was endorsing me for student trustee. After a high-powered career with a major law firm in New York City, Susan turned to the academic life as a graduate student at Columbia Law School. I once asked Susan if it was possible to have both the career you wanted and the personal life that made it all worthwhile. She smiled and said to me, “I want it all.”
        I remember Susan and her future husband Chuck’s generous offer to let me stay in their Ithaca apartment one summer when they were away and their incredulous surprise when I showed up unannounced at their apartment in San Francisco while they were having a friendly chat over the dining room table. Today, I look forward to the Christmas photo cards that show Susan and her family and the subtle passage of time. Susan chose the high-powered academic life with its involved teaching schedule and presentations both stateside and abroad; she has written numerous books, papers, and articles.
        Quill and Dagger was the bond that brought many activists, intellectuals, dreamers, and visionaries together. Initiates were loudly awakened in the middle of the night and abducted from our bedrooms. A blindfold was placed to cover our eyes, and careful hands transported us to the Quill and Dagger Tower. Once there, our blindfolds were removed and we found ourselves surrounded by disheveled young men and women in their nightclothes. A welcoming circle of properly dressed students guided us into place.
        This was the fabled, ritualistic ceremony for our secret society. Quill and Dagger, like Yale’s Skull and Bones, is the most prominent of the Ivy League’s collegiate societies. Unbeknownst to the initiates, our every contribution to university life had been watched, vetted, and found deserving. Only about 1% of each entering class is selected for Quill and Dagger. Leadership, character, and service are the criteria for this elite group, chosen in consultation with University officials–deans, directors, and department heads.
        My contemporaries included Gary Guzy, Alan Hoffman, Joey Green, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Sky Flansburgh (now organizer/activist Paxus Calta-Star) whose father, Earl, was the architect of the Cornell Campus Store and a prominent Boston architect. Sky’s brother John was one half of alternative rockers They Might Be Giants.
        Gary, Sky, and I were also members of the Cornell University Board of Trustees elected from the student constituency. At the time, Cornell was one of only two universities in the country to invest its student trustees with full membership status and voting rights. The board is comprised of more than 50 trustees elected from various constituencies, including alumni, faculty, the administration and, as ex officio members, the president of the university, the governor of the state of New York, the speaker of the state assembly, and the president of the state senate. Sanford I. Weill, Samuel C. Johnson, and Andrew H. Tisch are or have been Cornell trustees.
        Gary went on to a distinguished career as an influential lawyer and policy consultant in Washington’s corridors of power. Earlier this year, President Barack Obama appointed Gary as the Deputy Director of the Council on Environmental Quality. Environmental issues were always extremely important to Gary and, as I recall, he majored in the relatively new discipline of the History of Science before heading to Cornell Law School. For some people, one image can capture the essence of the soul, and for me that was one unguarded moment. I had gone up to Gary’s office in Anabel Taylor Hall, and just before I came into his sight I spied Gary watering a small plant at the water fountain. He was very caring and meticulous, ensuring that no water spilled over.
        As a law student, Gary had discussed the Day Hall sit-in to protest University investment in apartheid South Africa with Sky, fellow student trustee David Russo, and me. With Gary and Sky advising us, David and I joined a small and representative group of students to follow the Mahatma Gandhi’s peaceful example of participating in a sit-in at the president’s office, in protest over the University’s investment in apartheid South Africa.
        This was a marked departure from the students armed with rifles and ammunition in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph broadcasted across the country during the Willard Straight Hall takeover in 1969. After what amounted to an overnight stay, our entire group peacefully vacated the building and was sentenced to community service. I gave a moving closing speech, which was applauded by the University counsel. Our records in the incident were expunged. To me, this symbolic rebellion was a small price for taking a stand against something as globally unconscionable as institutionalized segregation.
        Once again, my involvement―prescient and symbolic―had a long-term impact. Bishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, later credited the university divestment movement of the 1980’s for the end of apartheid in South Africa.
        Other standouts in my affinity circle included Kimberlé Crenshaw, who became a colleague on the Anita Hill case with my mentor, Professor and Vice Dean Charles Ogletree of the Harvard Law School. A professor at Columbia Law School, Kimberlé’s work focuses on race and gender discrimination.
        Joey Green was the creator of the Cornell Lunatic campus humor magazine. He has written about 30 best-selling books on unusual subjects and has appeared on television numerous times. Joey, who was often the cover model on the Lunatic issues, continues to serve as a model on his book jackets. I remember one evening when I was at the Lunatic office and Joey sat next to me and softly serenaded me with John Lennon’s ballad, Woman, or maybe he was just singing to himself.
        I always enjoyed the dazzling heights of conversations in which Alan Hoffman engaged me. He is one of my closest friends, and yet Alan modestly never mentioned that he is also Phi Beta Kappa. Alan and his wife Sandra, who had worked as an economist in El Salvador, lived for a time in one of the renovated units of the three-family Victorian house we owned in what became the hot real estate market of Savin Hill in Boston.
        Before his marriage, Alan, and one of his housemates, Courosh Mehanian, regularly hosted cultured salons frequented by an intellectual and international group of students and young professionals at their apartment on Dana Street near Harvard Square. Unbeknownst to us, future president Barack Obama was at Harvard during this time and surely our paths had crossed.
        These days, Alan is a globetrotting consultant with his own company, The Mission Group. Alan has graduate degrees from Harvard and MIT. He has worked with the World Bank and has helped governments all over the world with their transportation systems. Alan and his family live in San Diego and enjoy a multicultural home life with international travel.
        Raphael Seligmann is another of my friends for life, one of a group of Cornell alumni who clustered in Boston as a rite of passage shortly after graduation. Like Joseph and myself, Raphael and his wife were present on freshman orientation day when a member of the administration welcomed incoming freshmen and told us to look around: 50% of us would marry our classmates.
        Raphael attended Phillips Exeter, which was under an hour from our previous home in Windham, New Hampshire. He was at Brandeis working toward his Ph.D. in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Today, Raphael and his family live in Richmond, Virginia, where he is a business consultant involved with strategic communications consulting, public and investor relations, project management, and branding. Raphael still plays the baroque violin and was the president of Virginia Heroes, Inc., a non-profit mentoring organization. Raphael is one of my creative collaborators on StrangeTango.com: Life as Art, and much of his soul and aesthetic has been incorporated into our global platform.
        Raphael had never revealed that his father was a world famous architect, a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, who has taught at Cornell, Harvard, and Yale. I had often enjoyed talking on the phone with Raphael’s mother when I called at the family home outside Syracuse, but it was not until I searched for Raphael’s whereabouts on the internet that I learned Dean Seligmann was an expert on the works of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, who are among the favorite architects of Joseph and me.
        Other friends who lives have surprisingly intersected with our own include Xavier Ng, my partner in ballroom dancing, which I took to fulfill a gym requirement. X obtained his medical degree from New York Medical School and, interestingly, practiced nearby in Oklahoma and Wichita, Kansas.
        Gilbert Yang was another member of the infamous Ujamaa (Swahili for “family”) group. I was friends with an extended group of Asian American males, their friends and roommates (Joseph, Sherman, Mark, Bill, Doc, Bobby, X, Greg, Gene, Bailey, Gilbert, Lenny, Winston, Lawrence, Tony, Matthew), most of whom lived in New York City and had attended the highly competitive examination schools—Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science, and Stuyvesant; others came from Long Island, Hong Kong, or Taiwan. They all became good friends freshman year while living in a freshman University Hall and High Rise #1.
        As sophomore year approached, the U-Hall #6 brothers did not want to be split up through the housing lottery. They were a matched set, so someone came up with a very clever and resourceful idea: they all applied and were accepted as residents at Ujamaa, which was the dorm for students interested in African culture.
        Gil earned his Ph.D. in chemistry at UC Berkeley, then changed focus and attended UCLA for his M.B.A. In college, I heard a rumor that my understated and modest friend had a father who won a Nobel Prize in physics. 30 years later, out of curiosity, I searched the internet and confirmed this tidbit as fact.
        Two of my favorite professors were English and creative writing professor Kenneth McClane and Asian Studies professor Brett de Bary, who now also teaches comparative literature. During one visit, Ken gave me a painting of the Cornell campus and introduced me to the book, Annie John, by his friend Jamaica Kincaid. Jamaica is one of my favorite living, fiction authors. When I worked with Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Jamaica’s office was a few doors away from mine at Harvard’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute.
        I personally knew Brett and her husband Victor Nee, once taking the train from Barnard, where my sister was a student, to her parents’ Japanese-style home in the suburbs. Victor was waiting there to give me a ride back to the Cornell campus, and I met Brett’s mother and her father, the eminent East Asia scholar and former provost at Columbia University. On the eve of my wedding, Brett called to give me their best wishes, and I treasure to this day their wedding gift, a hand thrown pottery bowl from People’s Pottery on the Ithaca Commons.
        After I finished Strange Tango, my first book, I returned to academia for a graduate degree in journalism. At the Boston University College of Communication, one of the top broadcast journalism programs in the country, Bill Lord accepted my invitation to lunch and convinced me to enter the program. I wanted to be a foreign correspondent like Peter Jennings, and I began to develop my hard news sense through my association with the former World News Tonight executive producer and creator of Nightline with Ted Koppel.
        As a Vice President of ABC News and ABC News Interactive, Bill always had an eye toward the future; solar power and multimedia were on his radar long before the concepts went mainstream. On our 10th anniversary, Bill invited Joseph and me for lunch at his solar home in Cape Porpoise, Maine. I brought dessert, and Bill and his wife Debbie served Maine’s best lobster rolls and a nutritious salad made with some vegetables from their garden. We enjoyed the tour of their beautiful home overlooking the salt marshes of the Rachel Carson Wildlife Preserve.
        I was also influenced by the arcane mind of Keith Botsford, friend to Jorge Luis Borges and other literary and political world figures; at the time, Keith was also a correspondent for The Independent and La Stampa. Once a year, Professor Botsford invited the students in his international reporting class to his home, with its stunning view of the bay. His house was only a half-mile away from my residence in Savin Hill. There, Keith served us an elaborate, home-cooked dinner and give us a glimpse of his private workspace on the top floor of the house.
        Carol Fulp hired me for my first significant, professional job in Boston. Carol is a life-changing mentor. A vice president for community relations at John Hancock and a prominent figure in corporate philanthropy, Mayor Thomas Menino tapped this consummate insider for the committee to bring the Democratic Convention to Boston in 2004. I am indebted to Carol for giving me the best advice ever: “Lighten up,” she said.
        Another influential mentor is Charles Ogletree—an inspiring human being who has dedicated his entire life to social justice. I first met Tree through an introduction from Larry Watson. When I set off for my new life in the southwest, Tree memorably e-mailed me and my cohorts: “…remember that you will always have friends, and a home, here at Harvard.”
        Physically, I am ages removed from the photo that appeared in Glamour magazine. I acquired a reputation for glamour and stylishness, finally having learned how to apply makeup with specialized Shu Uemura sable brushes. Armani’s face artist, Tim Quinn, who designs the looks for the Milan fashion shows, created my makeup palette.
        In college I looked like an adolescent, and now I pass for a college student. A few years ago, Joseph, Joy (aka, Joy Precious Peach Perfection, the Ewok Princess) our Shih-Tzu, and I left our home that resembled an operatic art gallery in New Hampshire and moved to Lawton, Oklahoma. My siblings have likewise relocated from vibrant lives in international cities so that we could all be near our parents.
        Yes, my wish was granted: I wanted to have a personal life, and I wanted to live my life as art. In my world, the microcosms of power, academia, media, art, and service have been karmically synchronized and chronicled to within six degrees of separation.
        You can know the soul of a writer by the books he or she reads. I have read the protean classics of world literature, yet the ones I enjoy most and whose soulfulness delight me are relatively slim volumes, novellas, eloquence with few words, deeply psychological, stream-of-consciousness, fractured narrative and chronology: Italo Calvino, Jamaica Kincaid, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Virgina Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kahlil Gibran. Theirs is not always easy reading, but nonetheless deeply rewarding and life affirming. Intimate gems of literature call upon the reader to invest one’s own experiences to comprehend what is at once personal and universal.
        In writing my books, Strange Tango and Millennium Muse, I treasured the quiet in my mind that allows me to recover the past as though it were just yesterday. A meaningful look, word, or gesture to me is never forgotten. Even when suppressed, a fleeting memory is likely to echo in an unguarded moment, unbidden, from the recesses of my mind. It is from these seemingly insignificant, daily details and rituals that I draw inspiration for my artistic work, which can take the form of writings, images, and other sensory representations of beauty.
        It is from the cumulative efforts of individual choices that a life is created, a biography is written.
        I chose the title of Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory, for the title of my treatise: a sly allusion for Nabokov, too, has a Cornell connection.