1981

The clock is ticking. The seconds are winding down. Just two months until our big 10th Reunion, June 15-17, and you still haven't figured out whether you're coming. Decisions, decisions!

Let me help. Yes, you are coming. So is everyone else. It will be, as I have predicted before, the best weekend you have ever had in your entire life. You will cavort with old friends. You will wax lyrical about the old days. You will meet Nina and Eleanor, Chris Blaski's cute (and still alive!) Official Class of 1981 10th Reunion Kittens.

Fallout from this year's Class Mascot competition: It turns out that Nancy Kopsco can, in fact, be intimidated by veiled threats of public humiliation. "Oh no!" she exclaimed, apologizing for not writing sooner. Nancy says she and husband Charlie Rader both had finished their master's degrees in geography at the University of Washington. They'd actually moved from Seattle four years ago to start new jobs, so it was kind of long-distance academia. Now, Nancy says, they're at it again, working on Ph.D.s at Michigan State University. She says she "hopes" they'll attend the big Class of 1981 10th Reunion. My prediction: They'll be there. They'd better be.

More fallout: I received a plain manila envelope, postmarked New York City, con- taining a Xeroxed page of five words, all snipped variously from magazines. The message: "Kevin Lewis for class mascot." To the anonymous, gutless author: Excellent entry, well executed, but late. You do, however, get bonus points for creativity. To Kevin Lewis: Be at the reunion, or I'll start taking these letters seriously.

Jim Pearson weighed in with a (only slightly) rambling account of his visit to the Dartmouth Yacht Club in England. He exacted a DYC burgee in exchange for one of his own, which these days is the Cairo Yacht Club. As in Egypt. Jim actually was in Connecticut at the time of his letter, abetting the birth of his and Dorothy's first child.

Bill Barker also wrote a (slightly more) rambling note concerning his upcoming move to Brussels and Quaker Oats' new European headquarters. He and Leslie, he says, "have begun preparing for the move by eating a strict diet of waffles." If you need a place to crash in Europe, he advises, "Let me know if you find one so I can divert my other freeloading friends there.

Anyway, Joe, a Harvard biz alum of 'B5, is already a vice president making piles of money (he didn't actually say that) in Kidder Peabody's mergers and acquisitions group. Susan got her Master of Architecture degree at the University of Virginia in 1987 and now works in New York. (Does she say where? For whom? No, she does not.) And Jim just finished post-doctoral work at Bell Laboratories, after finishing his doctorate in physics at the University of Massachusetts. He and wife Jean Mandel (married two years ago in Maine) will move to Eugene, Ore., where he'll be an assistant professor at the University of Oregon.

So these three wrote this letter all about their friends. To find out what they wrote about people like Will Blanchard, SueKelley, and Kim Dunn, see next month.

Remember, send in your $110 reunion reservation by April 21 (Pat Berry's birthday), or you'll have to pay $10 more.

57 Rutland Square, Boston, MA 02118

TENTH REUNION