C OV E R S TO RY
Supporting…
Pink was everywhere on January
Perhaps the most moving example of the NWC sense of community came early in 2010, when green and white were replaced with a sea of pink. The sea actually began as a ripple, when Brendan Lemp ’10 and a few friends – including his cousin Madeleine Livingston ’10 and Jei Cho ’10, the international student living with him – decided to wear pink to school on Tuesday, Jan. 5, in solidarity with his mom, Suzanne, who was having surgery that day for early stage breast cancer. They talked about it on Facebook. Other kids signed on to the idea. And when the doors opened that morning, hundreds of students in pink tights, pink shoes, pink shirts and ties, and pink sweaters poured in, their outfits a quiet statement of support for their classmate and his family – and perhaps a testimony to the impact cancer has had on their own.
5th!
Gretchen Kelly ‘10, Meghan Kelly ‘12, and their mother, Anne Kelly, cut up yards of thin pink ribbon for the girls to distribute along with little safety pins. A boy who’d forgotten his pink improvised with four pink stickies on his navy blue tie, vertically spelling out “PINK.” And right after homeroom, the pink army assembled on the gym bleachers for an enormous photo, capped off by a loud group cheer: “Go Mrs. Lemp!” NBC30 got wind of it all and sent a news crew to campus before dismissal. By 6pm, when the “Sea of Pink” story aired, Suzanne Lemp was back in her West Hartford home resting comfortably, buoyed by her surgeon’s excellent prognosis and the simple yet overwhelming beauty of the students’ gesture at school that day. A week later, the kids were treated to pink-frosted sheet cakes during lunch in the Navin Cafeteria, the Lemps’ gesture of thanks to the community that wrapped its arms around them when they needed it most.
The Lemp family treated all NWC students to pink-frosted cake to thank them for their support. T H E M AG A Z I N E O F N O R T H W E S T C AT H O L I C
SPRING/SUMMER 2010
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