1980

Last week, someone mailed me an article. I thought at first that it was WadeHerring's class column. However, I soon realized that it was, well, readable. Furthermore, its message intrigued and even frightened me. I tried to get permission to reprint it but could trace neither the author nor the publication. Nevertheless at the risk of a lawsuit, or even worse, a B-minus from Professor Pease for incomplete citations-I am compelled to share the message.

The subject? Your colleagues may be space aliens. The message? You can spot them if you know the clues.

Clothes, for example. Aliens wear weird clothes. Like the red socks that Regina Rehkamp spotted on the groom and ushers at Scott Herman's wedding. (Regina is a third-year law student at Fordham.)

Aliens are able to live in habitats deemed unfit for mankind. Take AndyWatson-he lived in AXA as an undergrad. Now he is an attorney in Chicago. (Really, A-Wat's apartment is nice, but he lives in the same building as Dave Springer '79. You know how classes with odd numbers depress property values.)

Aliens are reluctant to talk about what they do in their spare time. (They probably phone home.) Other space aliens are secretive about what they do at work. (They probably phone home on the company dime.) Bruce Judson, for example, works for the Boston Consulting Group in New York City and will never tell me about his clients. Laura Murphy Moore,Paula Ness Speers, and Sue Fagerstrom all joined Bain and Company after earning their M.B.A.'s (Harvard, Columbia, and Harvard, respectively.) I still haven't figured out what Bain and Company does.

Other aliens have no spare time at all; they seem to thrive on 90-hour work weeks. Sort of like New York investment bankers, people like Brad Koenig and Beth Cogan at Goldman Sachs, or BruceReeves at Merrill Lynch, or Jamie Ardrey.

Not surprisingly, aliens are lonely. Being an alien is disconcerting. Can you imagine what it must be like to not understand why we kiss strangers at New Year's or molest ourselves with calories at Thanksgiving? As a result, aliens propagate. Donn and Janet Bensing Dack have two daughters, Ashley and Lindsay. Jeff and Tasha Taylor Garnett (still living in South America) also have two little girls, and Orazio and Laura Giuliano Latanzi have one smiling (or so the pictures would have me believe) daughter, Victoria.

Experts say that some aliens choose to settle in and never return to wherever-itis that aliens come from (Harvard?). JoanClements, who works for Merrill Lynch, recently dug in her heels and purchased a condominium in San Francisco.

Some aliens have wisely tuned in to the weird habits of humans. They realize that a surefire way to get lots of presents is to get married. Case in point: John Beyer wed Tracy Bennett '81 (despite the fact that Tracy is from an odd-numbered class). John and Tracy graciously wrote thank-you notes to all of their guests. They even reimbursed the Seattle airport for damages incurred by the arrival of one of our classmates. (Hint: This person has been mentioned in three out of four class columns. His initials are Bob Lisk. I wish other people who do weird things would let me know, so I don't have to write about Bob Lisk again.)

A final note and a change of tone: As I write this in February, Dartmouth is all over the press. The headline-provoking sit-ins, shantytowns, and student arrests remind me of the winter of 1979, when we had our own unrest, unrest that erupted in the hockey incident, the ice sculpture defacement, and the moratorium on classes. Let's hope that today's undergrads come away from the winter of 1986 the way many of our era came away from that sad, frustrating, anxious winter of 1979 at least, a little more aware; at best, more sensitive, thoughtful, and human.

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