Sticks and Cakes
JENNY CHANDLER, captain of the Dartmouth women's lacrosse team, was once a "mystery birthday woman." Four years ago, Chandler and her best friend and classmate, Mary Thomson, wrote to the parents of their fellow freshmen, offering to deliver a birthday party to the first-year students. The service included a birthday cake with a personal message from home on it, balloons, blowers, party hats, and champagne. "We always wore sunglasses and cowboy hats and would surprise them at midnight on their birthdays," said Chandler. "And, of course, we would sing 'Happy Birthday' to them. It was a great way to meet freshmen and a very lucrative and good business experience. We got a lot of letters from contented parents." The one-time mystery woman has packed plenty of activities into her four years at Dartmouth. As a freshman, she was a member of the field hockey team that went to the national championships. She shelved field hockey to concentrate on dramatics and appeared in seven stage productions. She studied in Toulouse, France, under Dartmouth's Language Study Abroad program as a sophomore and represented her class in the Green Key Society as a junior. Chandler, a resident of Princeton, New Jersey, is now in the English honors program and carries a 3.4 gradepoint average. She designed her own major, which combines French literature, art history, and English literature. She is the third generation of her family to attend Dartmouth. Her father, Dr. James J. Chandler, graduated in 1954. Her grandfather, Jim Kapp Chandler, graduated in 1927.
Chandler started playing lacrosse in the seventh grade and captained the lacrosse team at Princeton Day School. "Being captain at Dartmouth is very different," she conceded. She has played lacrosse for four seasons at Dartmouth, although her sophomore year was spent on the junior varsity. "I came back from France at the end of the winter term and I was out of shape. So, during the winter of my junior year, I tried to improve my skills," she said. Chandler returned to the varsity that spring.
The weather conditions in Hanover set lacrosse back a bit in April. Through its first three games, the team had been able to practice outdoors only five times. Chandler plays attack and can double on defense. She said she is working hard to improve her skills. Junior Sandy Bryan is the team's top scorer. Bryan scored 36 goals as a freshman and netted 27 goals and had six assists as a sophomore. Bryan was selected to play for the U.S. lacrosse team. "We're looking to Sandy for leadership," said Chandler, who is one of the two seniors on the team. She acknowledged that this is a "building year," with a need to replace a number of key players lost through graduation. "We'll have to outsmart and surprise our opponents," she said. "We have to be realistic about our wins and our losses and keep our frustrations at a positive level."
Explaining her decision to drop field hockey to concentrate on dramatics during her sophomore year, Chandler said that "you have to make a choice, and I wanted to spend some time being in shows." Her seven stage productions included H.M.S.Pinafore and A Doll's House. "Then I decided not to be an actress. I've put drama on the shelf. I'm going to law school at Boston College next year." Chandler taught tennis for two summers and last summer wrote for a publication of Common Cause in Washington. This summer she plans to teach sailing.
ashless. drama, literature, sport — Chandler (white shirt) will try almost anything. And she has.
