www.andover.edu/intouch his office’s headquarters remain in the Los Angeles area, he is still actively running his ever-expanding film and entertainment PR firm, which has opened up environmental and marine divisions. Lon is furthering his acting career, spending a good chunk of time on a magical forest island, and enjoying peace of mind. He looks forward to reconnecting with alumni in the Seattle area, including Monica Duda, who is an attorney for Microsoft, and Alicia Robbins, who is a fellow at the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. The Class of 1995 sends loving wishes to Christopher Walter and family on the occasion of Carmel Rodríguez-Walter’s passing, on Dec. 23, 2013. [Editor’s note: Please see her obituary in the In Memoriam section.] She will be sorely missed, but the positive impact Carmel had on so many of us will live on for all time. Lon wrote a poem, excerpted here, that was read at Carmel’s memorial service at Cochran Chapel in January: “With a mother’s love / You spared no kindness at all / Treating us as kin. / Made our strengths well known / While helping us to blossom / Growing from within. / Fortunate are we / Who had the chance to revel / In your love and grace.” Leaping to the People’s Republic of China, Yash Katsumi wrote in to tell us that he, his wife, Meg, and their son, Oscar, are living in Guangzhou and planning a four-year stint in Beijing, beginning in July. With days spent, writes Yash, “taking care of my son, working out, and keeping up with friends on the old Internet,” his schedule sounds pretty chill—but coming as it does after nine months of intensive Mandarin study at the U.S. Department of State Foreign Service Institute in Washington, D.C., his dose of mellowness also sounds very well deserved. Yash tells us that he, Meg, and Oscar have also made a concerted effort to “[take] advantage of [their] location to visit Vietnam, Thailand, Macau, Hong Kong, Japan, and other parts of China,” which has meant seeing some familiar faces, including those of Christopher Woo and Yan Jin. So what are Christopher and Yan up to? We hear that they’re both “very successful, happy, and enjoying life on this side of the world” and, though our correspondent is “not sure what either does for a job,” he believes it has “something to do with money and mergers and crap like that.” (We wholeheartedly cheer the first part, are thrilled we’re not the only ones who have no idea what most of our friends actually do for a living, and found the career summary absolutely hilarious.) From the rest of the note, it also sounds as though Christopher’s main passion in life right now is traveling and that he has gone to some incredibly remote and “mysterious” places— incredibly remote and mysterious places that he will no doubt be writing in to tell us all about at some point very, very soon. Clearly. Ahem. Yan, whom Yash met up with at “a very cool unmarked café in the hilly hills of Hong Kong island,” is based mainly in Beijing but constantly travels between the two for work. Word on the street is that Yan and Yash were supposed to meet at the Killers concert in Hong Kong rather than at said
cool café but that Yash “chickened out because of a typhoon that was coming in that day.” For those of you wondering how this exciting tale ends, Yan “ended up going with his girlfriend, and [Yash] missed a ridiculously awesome concert.” Boo. Still, a dramatic end to a great set of updates, no? Many thanks to those who wrote in, and here’s hoping that we hear from even more of you next time around! And with that, as the lovely Checka Antifonario signed off in an e-mail she sent us in January, “Non sibi, namaste, and happy 2014.” Onwards and upwards!
1996 John Swansburg 349 Adelphi St., Apt. 2 Brooklyn NY 11238 john.swansburg@aya.yale.edu
One the most beloved novels in French history, Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, is little known on these shores, though its influence on English and American literature is far from insignificant. Consider a few titles that were staples in the wood-paneled classrooms of Bulfinch Hall. In On the Road, Jack Kerouac places a copy of Le Grand Meaulnes in Sal Paradise’s knapsack, though the rambling man never does find the time to read it. F. Scott Fitzgerald, for his part, likely nicked the title of his most famous work from Alain-Fournier, and there’s more than a little bit of François Seurel— Alain-Fournier’s young narrator—in The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway. John Fowles, whose novel The Magus was a fixture of Kelly Wise’s Novel and Drama course, called Le Grand Meaulnes a “poignant and unique masterpiece of alchemized memory.” Set at a provincial boarding school in the late 19th century, Le Grand Meaulnes is further removed in place and time than the texts we tend to press into the hands of precocious youngsters packed off to prep—The Catcher in the Rye, A Separate Peace, a dog-eared DVD of Dead Poet’s Society. And yet Alain-Fournier captured, in his titular hero, an essential boarding-school type, one that has persisted into the present. Augustin Meaulnes, known to his classmates as “le Grand Meaulnes,” possesses a preternatural charisma; his peers instinctively follow him, drawn to his easy confidence, intrepid spirit, and informal relationship with the rules. His story—set in motion by a horse-drawn joyride, during which he discovers a mysterious estate and a beautiful young aristocrat with whom he falls in love—is from another era, a pastoral lull before the mechanized depredations of the Great War (which would claim Alain-Fournier’s life, leaving Le Grand Meaulnes his only completed work). But the grandness of Meaulnes, his longing for adventure and power to inspire devotion in his classmates, is timeless. There was a Meaulnes or two in the Class of ’96, though none grander than Michael Krupp, the first Andover school president, according to historian
Michael Beschloss ’73, to set his stump speech to the tune of “I Have a Little Dreidel.” I mean no disrespect to Mike’s campaign platform, whatever it was, when I say we were voting less for his policy positions than for some ineffable quality we saw in him, a je ne sais quoi Alain-Fournier would surely have recognized. I’m happy to report that the power of Mike’s magnetic personality has not weakened with age, as is evident from the constellation of ’96ers still locked in his orbit. Herewith, a briefing from the former president and current owner of the top-notch Area Four pizzerias in Cambridge and Somerville, Mass.: “Jesse Kean just came out to visit me in the Berkshires this past Labor Day; we drank beers and played Legos (we built a spaceship!). I also kicked his butt repeatedly at Ping-Pong and rummy. I did the same to Allen Stack when he and Jesse visited my cabin earlier in the summer for what was supposed to be our annual camping trip. It poured, so instead of going camping we just stuck around and did silly things that probably should not be mentioned in the class notes. Let’s just say it was a lot like high school, only with go-karts and shotguns. Stack needed to blow off a little steam as he was preparing for his latest child—that brings the number of children living in the Stack house (in Alexandria, Va.) up to five! “This time Jesse came solo, leaving his two kids and one wife (Dawn Sticklor ’95) at home. He works as a lawyer in NYC and has a ridiculous picture on the Sidley Austin LLP Web page. “We also went to the Columbia County Fair, in Chatham, N.Y., where I ran into Hamilton Simons-Jones’s sister and dad. I saw Hamilton in Scotland for my 35th birthday last May. He brought his wife, Annette, and their brand-new baby, Selah. She has already met the Dalai Lama. “Also joining me in Scotland were Ting Poo and her husband, Casey. Ting lives in sunny Santa Monica, Calif., and is a commercial film editor and yoga instructor. You might not know it, but you have definitely seen her work. “Quincy Evans just had a second kid and is moving to Philly [secretary’s note: the baby’s name is Kendall Jade Evans; Quincy moved to Philadelphia to work at the financial firm Susquehanna International]. Hannah Pfeifle Harlow is leaving Somerville just as I open restaurant number two literally around the corner from her, relocating to Ipswich with her two kids and husband, Jason; I think it’s because Jason has been coming in for latenight beers and pizza too much. Fortunately, Chris Flygare and his wife, Caroline, also live around the corner and will be keeping me company—as will Meredith Smith, the pizza-slice editor of Serious Eats Boston. Colin Asquith has been known to grab an after-work pint or two at my Cambridge restaurant. He and I plan on riding motorcycles sometime soon. Alex Burns and I just rode motorcycles through the Berkshires and Vermont. To add to his manliness, he has become a judo instructor in NYC. Andover | Spring 2014
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