Union alumni in the news
Doing what she must
This summer, opera director Helena Binder '76 had great success when the Wolf Trap Opera Company performed Gaetano Donizetti's delightful L'Elisir d'Amore (The Elixir of Love) in Vienna, Va.
Her idea to give the opera a nineteenth-century Wild West setting was called an “imaginative update of this old favorite” by the Washington Times, and she was instrumental in the entire production's staging, set and costume design, and choreography. Binder calls the work the greatest success in her directorial career, a career that is rooted in her experience as a theater student at Union.
Binder remembers two special inspirations: Professors Barry Smith and Hans Freund.
Smith, who taught theater, gave his class a piece of advice that would make a serious impact on her life: “Do what you must do in order to do what you must do.” Freund, a professor of English, taught Binder about the art of acting, often speaking of his own experiences as a Shakespearian actor. He also taught his students the interconnectedness shared by the various branches of the arts. This lesson would eventually lead to Binder's appreciation and embrace of opera as the ultimate art form. For Binder, “opera is the culmination of all the arts. There is drama, art, literature, and, of course, the music.”
The spotlight that shone on the first twenty years of Binder's career was focused onstage. Continuously working in various regional theaters across the country and abroad, she starred in roles ranging from Peter Pan to Shakespeare's Juliet. Binder even performed as lead singer for the rock n' roll band Blotto under the name Blanche Blotto in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These formative years allowed her to gain experience along with a better understanding of how to act.
Her acting also helped develop her love and skill of directing. She started directing both plays and musicals, but it wasn't until she began living in Cooperstown, N.Y., the summer home of the Glimmerglass Opera, that she began to think seriously about turning her attention to the opera.
The opera world has given Binder “a new and ultimately satisfying career, and from that experience I found a new love.” She has directed such notable works as Ermione and Il ritorno d' Ulisse for New York City Opera, The Bartered Bride for the New York City Opera's Education Program, and The Magic Flute for Chattanooga Symphony and Opera. It was in Chattanooga in the fall of 2002 that Binder reconnected with Union alum Robert Bernhardt '73, the musical director of the company and conductor for the production of The Magic Flute. The working experience was indeed magical. One chorus member said Bernhardt was “both musically inspiring and visually clear” and called Binder “a real joy to work with.”
Binder also has made a name for herself as a choreographer for operas across the country. She has choreographed Queen of Spades for the Dallas Opera, Die tote Stadt for New York City Opera, and Bluebeard and La Calisto for the Glimmerglass Opera. She hasn't lost the ability to direct great plays, either. In the mid-1990s she returned to Union to direct both Ten Little Indians and Equus. Binder enjoyed the opportunity “not only to direct, but to teach,” and her experience brought back tremendous memories of her theater days at Union when the Nott Memorial served as a unique, round theater for productions.
Needless to say, Binder spends a lot of time away from home, but she regards travel as “something I must do to do what I must do.” She does, however, enjoy working near her home in Cooperstown at the Glimmerglass Opera and loves her time at the New York City Opera because she has so many good friends in the city.
In the year to come, Binder will be directing productions of Fidelio for the Pittsburgh Opera, Madama Butterfly for the Chattanooga Opera, where she will be reunited with Bernhardt, and L'Italiana in Algieri for the 2005 summer season of the Lake George Opera.
Babs R. Soller '75
Babs R. Soller '75, associate professor of anesthesiology, surgery, and bioengineering at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, has been appointed associate team leader for the Smart Medical Systems Team of the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI).
Soller will help manage scientists working on NSBRI remote medical care projects. The team's research focuses on identifying and developing new methods of assessing, monitoring, and diagnosing health problems on long-duration space missions. New technologies developed by this team will have immediate benefits to medical care on Earth. Soller received her bachelor's degree in chemistry and her master's and doctoral degrees in physical chemistry from Princeton University.
The NSBRI, funded by NASA, is a consortium of institutions studying the health risks related to long-duration space flight. The institute's research and education projects take place at more than seventy institutions across the U.S.
What's it like on “Jeopardy?”
Answer: classes with Professors Sargent and Berk.
Question: What is a great help to a “Jeopardy” contestant?
For Deirdre Basile '86, it was her Union education, and her classes with two professors in particular, that were key in her preparation for competing on the TV game show.
“I could skip right over a lot of information while I was studying for the show because I remembered it from class,” she says. “Having taken a number of classes with Steve Sargent, my favorite professor, I was well prepared for all the medieval history questions. Professor [Stephen] Berk's teachings also stayed with me, and I had an easy time with those questions.”
Basile appeared on the show that aired on June 17, a contest in which she finished second. Her father, actor Brian Dennehy, also came in second place on “Celebrity Jeopardy” in 1999.
The best part of being on the program is hearing from people who supported her, she says. “Even my car mechanic sent me a note congratulating me. I've heard from a couple friends from Union that I haven't heard from in a long time, which was great. The whole experience was fun, if a bit surreal.”
Unfortunately for Basile, she was up against a formidable opponent in Ken Jennings, an all-time Jeopardy champion who weeks after the show with Basile was still winning with earnings approaching $1 million. “He is the nicest person,” Basile recalls. “He doesn't come across that way, people always say to me 'he seems so arrogant,' but he's not. He's fast on the buzzer. He gets all the questions that everyone knows, buts he's so quick. By the time the other contestant and I had gotten the hang of ringing in, he already had 10 or 12 grand to work with. He could play with that, and it took the pressure off him.”
In “Final Jeopardy,” Basile was the only contestant to correctly question the answer: Answer: “In the NATO phonetic alphabet [Alpha, Bravo, etc.], the two that are title Shakespearean characters.” Question: “What are Romeo and Juliet?” She finished with a $12,000 tally and walked away with a $2,000 prize for second place.
While a student at Union, Basile enjoyed watching “Jeopardy” with her Tri Delta sisters. Years later, her daughter became a “Jeopardy” fan and told her mother about the program's contestant search. “She told me I had to do it, so I sent a postcard in and luckily mine got picked.” With about 100 other contestants, Basile was asked 50 “Jeopardy”-type questions. She was one of twelve people selected for a screen test. “Then they say, 'Don't call us, we will call you.'” (Producers called her weeks later and told her to come to Los Angeles for the taping. But they pay airfare and hotel costs only for returning champions.)
Basile was surprised by the stopping and starting during taping. “If [host Alex] Trebek misspeaks or something goes wrong with the set, they stop and repeat things,” she says. “They will even re-tape your answers and questions that have already been asked.”
The show is careful to not let any information get out that could influence a contestant. “We couldn't even look in the direction of the writers during taping,” Basile says. “You can't even talk to anyone in the green room besides the fellow contestants. We had to just sit and watch the other games until it was our time.”
Hip-Hop 101
Nick Conway '97 isn't your stereotypical professor. No tweed jackets for him; he's more comfortable in a t-shirt and pair of shorts. And no Mozart on the office radio; instead, he is carefully studying the “intense lyrical flow” of Harlem-based rapper Immortal Technique.
Conway is the creator and professor of a class titled “Hip-Hop Music and Culture” at Trinity College and Yale University that has been wildly popular with students. Students had to apply to the class by writing essays, and some included graffiti art, recordings of their own music, and even videos of break dancing. When it was time for class projects, some chose to do research papers, while others wrote their own hip-hop and rap songs. “I knew that I always did a better job when I was passionate about the project I was working on, and I wanted to allow my students to explore their own avenue of interest.”
Conway began his love of hip-hop at the age of 11 when he saw the infamous music video for Run-DMC “Walk this Way” featuring the band Aerosmith. Now, he has some 5,000 rap and hip-hop albums in his collection, which overflows several rooms of his parents' house. Add his disc-jockey equipment, and the Conway living room looks like the inside of a radio station. “I have really understanding parents,” laughs Nick, who commutes back and forth between his apartment in New Haven and his parents' home on the outskirts of Albany.
At Union Conway was a math major, but he explored his hip-hop interests in “Music of Black America,” offered by the Performing Arts Department. “The class was a definite influence when I went to develop my own class. I wanted to make the class appealing to students whether they have their own musical ability or were more interested in the history and culture of hip-hop. That was an approach Professor [Tim] Olsen used really well.”
Conway spent six to seven months putting his class together, cutting material so it could be crammed into a semester of learning. Trinity College picked up the class for the fall term, and Yale University added the class to its spring schedule. “Although hip-hop has been around for over thirty years, it has really become a greater entity to people who are in their college years right now,” Conway says. “People in their late teens and early twenties have grown up with this music, and they can't even turn on their television sets without hearing it.”
This fall Conway began graduate courses in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University at Albany. He plans to earn a doctorate (for his dissertation he hopes to research the Latino influence on hip-hop) and then begin teaching full time. He is continuing his Sunday night radio show on WRPI Troy, Wild Style Hip-Hop, which plays underground hip-hop by emerging artists. He goes by the alias DJ Sho'nuff, a nod to his favorite film The Last Dragon, a 1980s cult classic.
When Conway isn't teaching college kids, going to graduate school, or moonlighting as a disc jockey, he still finds time to tutor students in math around the Capital Region of New York. “I'm putting my math degree to good use,” says Conway who enjoys the one-on-one experience tutoring provides.
A track and cross-country star for four years at Union, he continues to run about sixty miles a week, in addition to other training. This season, he came close to the four-minute mile, which he says has always been his goal. Interestingly enough, it isn't the beat of his favorite hip-hop album that keeps him pounding the pavement all year long, but his math skills. “When I run, I count to ten and just play around with addition and subtraction in my head.”
The champion of unheralded heroes
Sometimes when the bug bites in youth, the itch lasts a lifetime. In the case of Irving Sorkin '40, the bug was a lifelong love of show business-a love finally returned this year when he co-produced a show on HBO.
As a boy, Sorkin spent countless hours at the movies. Even his mother knew she could “induce” her son to finish all his milk by rewarding him with money for the movies.
During World War II, Sorkin, a dentist, served with the Army in Los Angeles, where he often hung out at the Hollywood Canteen, watching the goings-on of the glamorous. After the war, he maintained his practice while pitching movie ideas to nearly every famous Hollywood name over the next five decades.
His particular interest was telling the stories of heroes lost in history-praiseworthy acts of courage that never received their due. One of his pitches was about the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry-the first all-black regiment raised in the North during the Civil War. Years later, the movie Glory was produced. Likewise with a biography of Josephine Baker, the black American chanteuse who took Paris by storm-he pitched her story only to have it produced for TV nearly a decade later. He indeed seemed to be ahead of his time.
His daughter Arleen-an actress, writer, and producer herself-has always been her father's most ardent booster, and she would arrange meetings for her father to pitch ideas. She also regularly carries some of her father's treatments with her, and one day, when she was writing a screenplay for Paramount, she had an opening. Noticing the posters on the producer's wall, she thought of a project that might interest him and gave him a copy of her father's latest story idea. It was the biography of Vivien Thomas-the pioneering black surgical technician whose accomplishments and contributions to vascular surgery helped save millions of “blue” babies from death due to circulatory failure.
The producer called Arleen the next day. At long last, at the age of eighty-five and now retired in Washington, D.C., Sorkin saw one of his story ideas come to life. In May 2004, HBO presented Something the Lord Made. And when the credits rolled, they listed “co-producer Irving Sorkin.” Long the champion of unheralded heroes, he finally received a measure of well-deserved recognition.
Rawson Thurber '97
by Morgan Gmelch '05
Dodgeball, the ball-throwing game, is the basis-and title-of a successful summer movie, the brainchild of first-time feature writer-director Rawson M. Thurber '97. The film is Thurber's second comedic success; his first, a commercial series for Reebok called “Terry Tate, Office Linebacker” received the Cannes Film Festival Gold Lion and was voted the most popular Super Bowl ad in 2003 in a Wall Street Journal poll. Recently, Morgan Gmelch '05 had a chance to catch up with the filmmaker.
Morgan Gmelch: Can you describe what you've done since graduation?
Rawson Thurber: I graduated in 1997 and went right into the Peter Stark producing program at USC. I graduated from that in 1999 with a master of fine arts in producing. I started working as an assistant for a screenwriter named John August; I was essentially his apprentice and assistant for two and a half years, during which I wrote and directed “Terry Tate” and the script for Dodgeball. It's a movie that's really stupid and, I think, pretty funny and occasionally clever. It also has a good heart, very tongue in cheek. I have been very lucky since graduation in a lot of ways. Certainly my education at Union was instrumental in teaching me how to think and analyze.
MG: Did you know you wanted to go into film when you were at Union?
RT: I majored in English and theater arts because there wasn't a film program. But I did end up making a short film-my first short film-for my senior thesis. It was called Palaber, and I directed and co-wrote it. I knew that I wanted to be involved in making better movies than the ones I was seeing, but I didn't know exactly how I would go about doing that. There weren't any courses at Union for this. I kind of made it up as I went along.
MG: Were there any film clubs at Union at the time?
RT: There weren't, so when I was a senior, my friend, Mike Ferguson, and I created a club in order to get the funding we needed to make my short film. We formed a club called the Visual Landscape Art, VLA.
MG: Were there any professors at Union who gave you guidance?
RT: Peter Heinegg [English] was my advisor and my favorite professor. He gave me great advice all the way through my years at Union. In the Classics Department, Professor [Scott] Scullion had a tremendous influence on me. Professor Bill Finlay [Theater] taught the first directing class I ever took. It was electrifying for me, and I would say that was really the turning point. I draw on all of their teachings to this day when I'm reading and writing scripts, working with actors, and thinking about stories.
MG: Did the liberal arts education of Union prepare you for a career in film?
RT: Undoubtedly. I had a wonderful experience at Union College. Not only the liberal arts background but the quality of the professors and size of the school were great. I got to really know my professors intimately. It also allowed me to be very active on campus -I won political office a couple times, I was on the radio station WRUC, I wrote a column for the Concordiensis, I played football my freshman year, and I was a member of a fraternity [DU].
MG: What was the inspiration for Dodgeball?
RT: I've always been a comedy geek and a sports nerd, and I wanted to put those two worlds together. Some of my favorite movies growing up in the mid-80s were Caddyshack, Revenge of the Nerds, and Stripes, and I liked a lot of the sports films like Bad News Bears and Bull Durham. Not only is Dodgeball an homage to those movies, it is also a satire of them. Sports are taken so seriously in this society, but when I think of dodgeball we played in school, I laugh. Everyone has a visceral memory of dodgeball-you're either getting hit or hitting someone. There is a nostalgic connection to it.
MG: Are sports an easy way to achieve comedy?
RT: I have used sports with my comedy because I know that world pretty well. I've played sports my whole life and always been a fan. I know the intricacies of that world and the hypocrisies and ridiculousness associated with it, little things in sports that I always find annoying or frustrating. The two sportscasters in Dodgeball are my attempt at satirizing play-by-play and color commentators because so many of them say the most asinine things.
Because he wanted to do it
In the early 1970s, psychologist Jeffrey Greene '65 was sitting in his office at Morristown Memorial Hospital in Pennsylvania when he was struck with an idea that came out of left field-“I thought it would be really great to make a wooden sailboat with my own hands.”
Greene had always had a talent for drawing and art, but he had never tried to apply his artistic ability to the functional art form of woodwork. “My job at the hospital just wasn't very fulfilling, and woodworking felt like the right thing to do,” he recalls. “I wanted to make the boat just because I wanted to do it.”
Greene set up a workshop in a rented garage, and soon he began creating his own unique pieces of furniture. They were crude at first, but as time went on he improved rapidly. With the support of his father (a professional artist) and his wife, Valerie, he decided to leave the field of psychology and focus on his ability as a furniture maker and designer. Jeff and Valerie packed their bags and moved to New Hope, Pa., where Greene could refine his skills under the tutelage of master furniture makers Phillip Lloyd Powell and James Martin.
More than thirty years later, Greene is still creating custom furniture pieces at his wood studio in Doylestown, Pa., where he lives with his wife and two children, Leah, 20, and Sammy, 15. Now a master craftsman and artisan in his own right, Greene chooses to work with rare, solid woods, which help him create a design that is balanced in “beauty, function, and strength.”
Greene begins his projects like a researcher. He meets with his clients and asks them to give him as much information as possible about what they are looking for. “I ask for pictures, descriptions, anything the customer can think of, and then I try to give the project my own creative twist.” He relies heavily on freehand drawing as a design exploration, producing ideas that range from the conservative to the contemporary.
After Greene's clients approve the drawings, the actual woodworking process begins. Though a layman may picture a studio full of high tech industrial power tools, Greene's workplace is anything but. “To do artistic work that really stresses attention to detail, I have to work with pretty basic tools,” he says. “I use a ten-inch table saw, an eight-inch jointer, a twenty-inch planer, and an awful lot of hand-tools.”
Greene says a custom dining table with extension leaves takes him approximately a month from the drawing stage to completion, a remarkably fast turnaround considering the high quality of his work.
Greene has several trained employees and participates in an apprenticeship program that brings up to three young woodworkers to Doylestown each year to learn the art of furniture making. In this very competitive program, Greene has served as a mentor to apprentices from California, Brazil, and even Tel Aviv.
He also co-owns (with his wife) the Greene & Greene Gallery in nearby Lambertville. The gallery serves as a showcase for Greene's furniture and the work of other artists, including ceramics, wearable art, fiberglass art, and beautifully crafted jewelry, all selected by Valerie Greene.
Although Greene has strayed from his training in psychology, he doesn't regret his decision to major in the subject. “Psychology was a subject I found extremely interesting and still love to discuss today.” Greene has fond memories of his professors in the social sciences, especially Dr. Clare Graves. “I remember having his psychology class first thing in the morning. It was his charismatic personality that got me out of bed each morning and into the classroom.”
Greene took advantage of the liberal arts curriculum by exploring the Art Department. “I took several art classes but I think I undervalued my talents at the time. Artwork had always come easy to me, and I don't think I realized that it was a viable career path.”