1998

I don't know whether the lack of news should be attributed to the holidays (this column is being composed just after Christmas and Hanukkah, during the final days of Kwanzaa) or to something else, but there's not much to report. I can tell you that Kelly Wardwell, now Kelly Rierson, married Mike Rierson (Duke '96) on the night of November 22 in San Francisco. It appears that Mike was Kelly's T.A. in a finance course at Stanford Business School and, after some "extra study sessions," they got engaged. If only all academic pursuits bore such fruit. Several Dartmouth alums helped to celebrate the nuptials, including Chantal Barland, Aimie (Cryer) Black, Lani (Sipe) Curtis, Nick Feakins '65, Sam Feakins '01, Jen Jarrett '91, Ben Hill, Shaun Martin '88, Suzanne Michels, Griffin Murray '99, Andrew Obenshain '96, Jordan Richards and Emily Zarins. Mike and Kelly now reside in N.Y.C., so drop them a line if you find yourself in the tri-state area.

"Several persons might be glad to know that I did not drop off of the face of the earth," writes Ali Groff, who is a graduate student at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. Ali is pursuing a masters degree in contemplative psychotherapy (Naropa is an institution founded on Buddhist principles), which Ali explained "is therapy infused with the Buddhist principles of pure presence and meditation that teaches students to be with their own minds in order to truly be available to potential clients in their clinical practice." Good for you, Ali, though I'm not quite sure what all that means.

Eric Petitt graduated from the Haas Business School at Berkeley and is living in San Francisco with his girlfriend, Denise. After graduation he started working at Leapfrog, an educational toy company. Sharat Raghavan recently caught up with Eric and Mike Lee, who is currently working at Apax Partners, a global private equity shop, during a business trip in the Bay Area. Sharat, meanwhile, is working at Ericsson Venture Partners, a venture capital firm based out of New York.

Because it just wouldn't be right if an installment of this column did not include news of an engagement, I'm pleased to report that Kristin Terry has recently agreed to wed Rich Abati (Bowdoin '98), most likely during fall 2004. In the interest of full disclosure, I am compelled to report that Kristin and Rich are similarly-situated associates at the same law firm in Boston that writes my checks (so I had better get invited to the wedding!).

Bryan Galat and his wife, Kate, dropped me a line to announce the birth of their first child, a baby girl name Riley, on May 5, 2003. The Galat crew has setup shop in Atlanta, where Brian is a family wealth planning attorney with a mid-sized firm.

That's all for now. Next installment of this column might involve some creative writing (gasp!) if the dearth of news continues. So help me out—I'd much prefer to have too much to fit in than to have to fill space with empty prose.

91 Waltham St, No. 3, Boston,MA 02118; christian_atwood@yahoo.com