Spring 2009 volume 105 Issue 2
Opera! From Chuck Jones’s spin on Wagner to Rent’s take on La Bohème, opera saturates our culture, from the highbrow to the lowbrow. Anyone can give “Ridi, Pagliaccio!” the old college try — but how in the world does someone actually go pro? How does an aspiring opera singer even get started?
A self-proclaimed “shameless scene-stealer” as an undergraduate actress, Frances Sternhagen ’51 doesn’t need to compete for an audience’s attention anymore. Her long list of acting roles on and off Broadway has garnered her numerous accolades: two Tonys, two Obies, and two Drama Desks; the honor of the Helen Hayes Tribute; induction into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
In July 2008 Phil Griffin ’79 was named president of MSNBC, the network where he’s worked since its launch in 1996. He returned to the Vassar campus on November 18, 2008, as AAVC’s Executive-in-Residence.
Last fall, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History reopened after an extensive two-year renovation.
Nonfiction, Fiction, Drama, Poetry
When Vassar Student Association (VSA) president Jimmy Kelly ’09 walks into his student office every day, he sees two giant posters of Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. “I like to think they keep watch over me,” Kelly says.
From the Course Description: “Approaching food as material culture that reveals complex social relations of power, this course begins with the examination of the larger historical processes of conquests and other uneven cross-cultural encounters that shaped the making and remaking of ethnic and regional identities of food.