Stars & Streep for Autumn

Divers Notes and Observations

ON THE EVENING of October 17, before an enlivened audience of women from the pioneer class of 1976 and beyond—and including lots of little kids and an occasional babe in arms—vice president for development and alumni relations Stan Colla '66 modestly introduced himself at the official opening of the 25 th anniversary of coeducation at Dartmouth, as "chromosomically challenged." President Freedman again paid tribute to John Kemeny '22 A, first ever to address the student body as "women and men of Dartmouth." And it was then the turn of Mary Kelley, Mary Brinsmead Wheelock Professor of History, to list the struggles, indignities, and eventual triumphs of women as students and members of the College's 8,000 body of alumnae—three of whom are already on the tenured faculty. The next evening, these pioneers were described by Meryl Streep (one-term transfer student in 1970, and honorary degree recipient in 1981) as "canaries in the mine of coeducation."

Ah, Meryl Streep. Not even arguably the most gifted film actress in the nation, ten times Academy Award nominee, twice Oscar winner—what a feat of casting by the Dartmouth Film Society to honor her, particularly this year, with the society's annual film award. After a one-hour compilation of four- or five-minute excerpts from 12 of her major film triumphs, in which she demonstrated the outermost ranges of women's character, intensity, compassion (and genius for a variety of dialects), Streep appeared quietly on the Spaulding stage to an almost hysterical two-minute ovation. During a sprightly 45-minute interview, she recalled days at Dartmouth ("waited on table at the Inn, and tonight I have an executivesuite") and noted that in Hollywood salaries, only one group of actresses comes anywhere near the actors (adding "but Streep doesn't strip"). Finally a clip of "I'm Checkin' Out," from Postcards from the Edge, in which she showed that she might have out-Holidayed the late Billie as an empress of the blues, had she chosen song as a career instead of the stage and screen.

In these parts, the autumn leaves were at their most resplendent in a decade, until a snow flurry a day ago. They were outnumbered only by the leaf-watchers, whose tour buses resembled the circus elephants lumbering across Broadway making their way to the Garden. If you arrived at the Inn at noon, you were lucky to get your lunch by 1 p.m. While lumbering past the site of the old hospital ourselves, we saw a sign "Central Chilled Water Facility," and some new construction taking place. Thinking that's just a bit too much student-coddling, we checked our sources and found that the water will not be for drinking, but eventually to serve the air-conditioning facilities of the entire campus, which now are on a building-by-building basis. There will be four cooling towers, surrounded by a 14foot-high brick wall.

A plethora of distinctive speakers has filled most of the campus's available auditoriums this fall. Former Labor Secretary Bob Reich '68 reiterated his major topic that education and education alone will serve to lift the country's lower-income families into better-paying lives; British statesman and Oxford chancellor Roy Jenkins, in his Montgomery Fellow lecture, favorably compared the accession of Britain's new PM Tony Blair with that of FDR as President in 1932; North Ireland's Maireada Maguire, who won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize by challenging neighbors to abandon ideology and for once really become neighborly; Carl McCall '58, New York State controller, explained why he preferred to handle the state's $90 billion retirement system than raise his own $15 million to run for governor; and the next Montgomery Fellow, the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, in "Homophobia: The Last Respectable Prejudice," observed that the opposite of love is not hatred but fear, that the gay agenda has replaced the communist threat as the target of the fearful, and that the formula for curing homophobia is punitive rejection > conditional acceptance > full acceptance.

"Intimate Encounters: Love and Domesticity in Eighteenth-Century France," now at the Hood (and reported on in this magazine last September), is the first exhibition of its kind: of French genre painting, by masters such as Fragonard and Watteau, a response to earlier, heavier, classical subjects and dealing with ordinary, everyday life—courtship, games, children, honest pleasures. To us, the period was almost as if a dozen French Norman Rockwells were each vying to compose the most revealing aspects of family life on his canvas.

Another sort of intimate encounter was overshadowed in part by a reincarnation of The Jinx, a nemesis of sorts which in days gone by haunted the vast reaches of the Yale Bowl at Dartmouth game time, terrifying the country boys from Hanover so that they even forgot their signals. Fortunately The Jinx did not appear until the second half, by which time the Green had built a comfortable lead. Final D-21, Y-7. Both men's and women's soccer also took the measure of their Eli counterparts and at the moment stand at the top of their Ivy divisions. Earlier, the men, amid a shower of yellow cards, held 11th-ranked Stanford, now coached by former Dartmouth coach Bobby Clark, to an 0-0 tie; then returned East to "vanquish" Princeton by the same score.