Gillian Drake Angle Moorhead ’76 After graduate school in theatre directing, I moved to Washington, DC and began my long career in theatre. While working at Arena Stage, I had to supplement my income by giving voice lessons to actors and singers. But I got the idea to expand my theater expertise to lawyers and then to their witnesses. In the basement of the Old Vat Room at Arena Stage, I started a class called “Acting for Lawyers.” The class got a lot of publicity and eventually became my prime source of income. At the time, few people were doing this and I ended up contributing to the creation of a new branch of theatre work called “Applied Theater Skills.” These days, it’s a hot space. For my part, I developed a new role on legal teams: witness preparer. This began a kind of cottage industry of other theatre artists around the country who would start to learn to coach lawyers and a few others to prepare witnesses.
Mary Meriam ’78 I created Headmistress Press in 2013 to publish poetry books by lesbians. We hold an annual Charlotte Mew Chapbook Contest and produce Lesbian Poet Trading Cards, which were featured on AfterEllen and on Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog. Head over to headmistresspress.blogspot.com to learn more about us.
Riva Poor ’56
Rone Shavers ’93 In Place of Now, an exhibition co-curated by Rone Shavers ’93, professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY was shown at the college’s Opalka Gallery this spring. The show, which was devoted to Afrofuturism, drew on Shaver’s expertise in history, literature, and culture and featured the work of eight African-American artists.
In 1968, I had a husband, children, a full-time job, and was in graduate school at MIT. Fortunately, my bosses allowed me to flexible hours to accommodate my schedule. In 1970, I read about how Kyanize Paint Co. had changed its schedule from the standard five eight-hour days a week to four nine-hour days, thereby increasing its profits while giving its employees threeday weekends. Wow! I thought such scheduling innovations called for a book. That summer, I organized several experts to write about the innovation. I profiled three dozen companies on various new schedules, wrote several chapters, edited my co-author’s chapters, and four months later published the book, 4 days, 40 hours: Reporting a Revolution in Work and Leisure. The media gave the book a lot of attention, and a tidal wave of companies adopted new schedules designed specifically for their work and workforce. Today more than 50 million Americans have what we now call flexible work weeks. In 1971, on graduating MIT, many companies would not hire women with MBAs. Billing myself as a “Professional Problem-Solver,” over the next 25 years I solved problems for more than 200 companies and 2500 individuals. I have recently finished writing a book, Raising an Innovator, foreword by Nobel Laureate Paul A. Samuelson, illustrating how my parents reared me and how I created a number of problem-solving techniques, including one for eliminating self-defeat.
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