Class Notes, May/April 1997

Thursday May 01, 1997 Category: Archives Permanent Link

“Do you have any Irish in you?” asks the guy sitting next to me at a suburban bar, wondering why I’m drinking a Sprite. (For the record, it’s a gin and tonic.) But wait: the pickup lines get better. Another guy walks up singing, “I wanna hold your hand.” We’re at a dive just outside the Washington, DC, city limits you probably wouldn’t set foot in unless you were on assignment to review bars, which I was. At least my belle-of-the-bar stint provided plenty of facetime.

One January night not long after the Presidential Inauguration, I caught up with Mary Shelley, a research assistant at the Urban Inst., and econmeister Amy Weber, who’s at the Congressional Budget Office. Also on hand: Chris Johnson and Jake Tyler ‘95, both paralegals, and Jim Papa and Ben Faulkner, now living in Virginia. They were all at Buffalo Billiards, which-lest you think we’ve strayed too far from our Royal Palm roots-is a fraternity basement-cum-bar with overpriced pool tables and a queue to cue that puts those Day Hall lines to shame.

If you want to dish the dirt on DC Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry, just ring Amanda Ripley. She left Congressional Quarterly Online to join the Washington CityPaper, DC’s alternative weekly newspaper. Roommate Becca Kornfeld holds the office together at Emily’s List, which helps female political candidates, while Lisa Green does health policy consulting at Barents Group. Recently, the trio on T Street had a visit from Ethan Frank-Collins, who has landed in Roanoke, VA, after traveling across the country. He’s now working for a minor- league baseball team.

At a party in Alexandria that might as well have been a Cornell- in-Washington program reunion, I saw Maureen M. McCormick, Grad, who’s working on a master’s in public affairs at Cornell. Lora Levy (it’s now Miss Levy, mind you) is grading spelling tests and doing multiplication tables with fourth graders through Teach for America in DC. And Dan Rich was down from New York City, where he works as a paralegal with Karen Apollo.

Speaking of the City, as all you New Yorkers would have it, we have a coterie of classmates (not to mention consultants) in Manhattan. Kathleen O’Halloran and Annette Barrera are at Price Waterhouse, Gian Fabbri is at Andersen, and Clay Carol lives in the Village and slaves away for Merrill Lynch. Tim Whelan and Cary Segall are securities traders on Wall Street “rolling in the big bucks,” reports private eye Christina Feile, who works as a corporate foreign exchange trader for a German investment bank. Paul O’Connor and Lynn Goldman are accountants doomed to work away their weekends until April 15. In Queens, Madeline Infante is living with Susan Giambalvo (and just across the street from Karen Fadden). Karen’s a media consultant, Susan’s helping the homeless, and Madeline is a program assistant at Columbia. They sometimes see Christine Lydon, who’s doing research at Cornell Medical College. In yet more NYC news, Karen Schnelwar reluctantly has adjusted to life AE (that’s After Europe), toiling diligently in account management at Ogilvy & Mather Advertising. To ease the transition, she breaks for cappucino often with one of her best friends from Cornell, Gail Rosenberg, who works for ABC’s “Turning Point.”

An awful lot of classmates have graduated to, well, yet more time in the library. At Columbia, David Biek is earning an MA in psychology, and Ellen Tchernovitz is working toward her master’s in social work. Dave Stein is a phlebotomist (the guy that takes your blood) at Cornell Medical Center, and he’s moonlighting as a graduate student at Columbia. Meanwhile, Shoshana Sperber is hardly psyched (groan, groan; yeah, I couldn’t resist) that she’s got about five years left before she finishes her doctorate in psychology at New York U.

Pop quiz for everyone reading this column as a study break (and anyone else who’s still with me): Three friends roll in for a party, one of them swilling a soda and announcing she’s the designated driver. What are the other two called? Designated drunks? I’d love to hear your response, along with details of any party you’ve had recently that had any Cornellians-drunk or otherwise-in attendance. (Can you tell this is a pathetic ploy to get you to write in?)

Back to the news. Lauren Garson is counseling inner city kids on self esteem and career and college exploration for the NYC Job and Career Center, Jessica Kaplan is doing marketing for the Book of the Month Club, and Danielle Petersel is prepping for med school next year at Syracuse U. They all met up at Jessica’s for a “We’re-calling-it-a-Super-Bowl-party-but-it’s- really-just-an-excuse-to-have-a-party” party. As Lauren joked, “Who are you rooting for? Who is playing?” Don’t worry- she was just kidding.

Contrary to (my) popular belief, the entire Class of ‘96 does not live in NYC or DC. Gabriela “Gavi” Yariv moved back to sunny California after enduring one too many Ithaca snowstorms. She’s working as a landscape architect at Walt Disney Imagineering, and living in a Santa Monica studio (nickname: The Shoebox) that’s four blocks from the ocean. Cornellian-sightings are a rarity out there, so she was surprised to bump into Christina Kim, Jess Antola, and John Heffernan-all in one night!

A little farther up the coast, Andrea Foster is settling into San Francisco, where she headed after leaving the Annapolis Marriott Waterfront Hotel. She’s now the rooms division manager for the Marines’ Memorial Club & Hotel, where she’s seen Phil Baugh and Eric Sinoway. Another San Fransiscan, Anita Prasad, is adding “VISTA volunteer” to her resume, not to mention trying to decide where to go to grad school. And rounding out our West Coast report, Bryan Olthof is one year into his chemical engineering PhD program at U. of California, Berkeley, and Jen Shaw is doing a combined master’s in public health/dietetics internship, also at UC, Berkeley.

Others in the let’s-get-as-far-away-from-Cornell-as-possible (at least weatherwise) sweepstakes: Palm Beach native Wendy Irwin is in med school at Florida State U., where I can’t imagine she has much time to hit the beach. Fellow Floridian Christine Grund is down in Fort Lauderdale looking into film school while working at a photo studio that shoots cool promos.

Alumni update from Philadelphia: Catherine Oh has ventured into enemy territory. She’s almost done with her post- baccalaureate pre-health studies course at the U. of Pennsylvania, and is planning to attend medical school at Temple next year. Catherine’s roommate in the city of brotherly love is Dana Orange, who’s working as a research assistant in the women’s health education program at MCP-Hahnemann medical school and waiting for those thick envelopes from med schools to pop up in her mailbox.

For the old news round-up (hey, that’s what you get when you don’t write and force me to pump any random classmate I see for information): Kassy Weidner married Jason Gyimesi last August in NYC. They met in an Internet chat room in the fall of 1995, but don’t worry, the wedding was an intimate-not an Internet-affair. The Weidner-Gyimesis live in Pittsburgh, where Kassy is completing a dietetics internship.

Finally, for the now-you-know department (better known as random tidbits): Eva Silvestre ‘97 is in Las Vegas working with low-income housing … Matt Heberger and Karen Ausejo are in the Peace Corps, Matt in Africa and Karen in Ecuador … and Holly Hertel is back in Ithaca, working for our beloved alma mater in alumni affairs and development.

About four of you have written of your own accord, so far, so subtle pleas for news apparently don’t do it. Let’s try this: PLEASE WRITE and save me from the gossip Sahara that is my inbox. (Besides, don’t you want to see your name in nice bold print?) Cheers, and may the force be with you.

Courtney Rubin,Class Columnist