Constance  Masciale Carino ’58 writes: To all at Skidmore who initiated approved the joint venture — hooray  and thank you.  You have now completed the circle so eloquently begun by Prof. Agnes Gelinas so many years ago.

It is  important for Skidmore to have a voice in the advancement of the increasingly significant nursing profession.  I am delighted that the graduates of Skidmore nursing have refound their home.  Only good things can come from this relationship.

Lisa Fairchild Heist  ’82 writes: I was happy to read in ScopeMonthly about Skidmore’s partnership with NYU for students interested in nursing.  Skidmore had a very strong relationship with NYU Nursing in the past–it was our primary site for clinical training.

As a senior in 1982, I learned of the school’s decision to shut down Skidmore’s program in Saratoga and in NYC. It was an expensive program to run and maintain but provided me with the tools to be a great nurse.  I am still practicing today, and despite numerous nursing shortages in the last 27 years and two major economic downturns, I have always remained employed.  How many professions can claim that?  There is always work within our profession, as there are so many avenues that one can take.  The traditional hospital-staff RN just scratches the surface.

Nursing schools have seen a surge of applicants with this current economic crisis, and there will be an even bigger shortage soon when many of the older baby-boomers begin to retire.  I applaud Skidmore for having the forsight and wisdom to offer this program with NYU to those students who want to make a difference in people’s lives.

BROADWAY BABIES

by Michele Herman ’79 

I imagine that at most family dinner tables you get a mumbled thank you when you pass the salt.  I’m proud to report that at ours, the recipient is more likely to hold the salt shaker aloft and intone the words of the vengeful Sweeney Todd when he picked up his barber’s razor after years in exile: “At last, my right arm is complete again!”

Yes, our household has the Broadway musical bug, long and hard and deep.  When one son hits the other and says he had it coming, what’s a family to do but slip into its best “Chicago” floozy voice and say in perfect unison: “He ran into my knife.  He ran into my knife 10 times!”  Should my husband’s stomach growl, the next sound you’ll hear will be “F-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-d me” in his deepest, most ravenous “Little Shop of Horrors” Audrey 2 voice.

And yet we’re hardly what you’d call a theatrical family.  We don’t make grand entrances, we wear unassuming clothes, and we never break into song in public unless explicitly invited to so.  We do have one talented singer among us (my husband), but he has trouble remembering words and reading music.  We have a quiet appreciator who occasionally builds a set for a school production, off in some corner where the spotlight never shines (my 17-year-old son).  We have a born actor with a face that can register a thousand emotions, but he refuses to take a theater class or be in a play (my 14-year-old son).  And me?  The great regret of my life is that I’ve never exhibited the least sign of musical ability of any sort.  My musical career hit its high point in 1977, at the Penfield dorm talent show.  I helped choreograph and co-starred in a production number of “Dance 10, Looks 3” from “A Chorus Line” (also known as “Tits and Ass”).  We wore balloons under our leotards

But if there’s talent in fervor, stand up and give my family a hand.  We are the Lunt-Fontanes of Broadway-musical passion, and we deserve one of those special lifetime achievement Tonys.  Show us a good musical – at a local high school, on TCM or at some majestic theater — and we’re goners.  They wash over us in that sneaking, unpredictable way of a crush, an obsession, religious zeal.   Only instead of rising up in church to proclaim the word of the Lord, we have this little vamp inside us that puts the soundtrack on the stereo and plants our feet in the living-room rug and belts – to anyone who will listen or even to anyone who will immediately clamp hands over ears — certain strings of words set to music, words that will sit dumb on the page for most people but that thread themselves through our veins and stir our souls like no other liturgy: My doll is as dainty as a sparrow; I play the violin; it’s too darn hot; poor Jud is dead; anything you can do I can do better; sit down you’re rocking the boat; a weekend in the country; do you wanna have fun?   

There are many definitions of family life.  Here’s mine: it’s the one place on earth where you can do a rough approximation of a Russian dance while belting in a terrible Yiddish accent, for no reason beyond some synapse lighting up like a string of sequins in your brain when someone happens to use the word biddy, “All day long I’d biddy-biddy bum, if I were a wealthy man,” and they’ll still love you. 

Sharing political views, having similar ideas about child-rearing – these are foundation for a solid marriage.  But I say you should marry the man who shares your love (or loathing) of musicals.  My husband and I were a match made in heaven.  He brought, among others, “Guys and Dolls,” “The Cradle Will Rock” and “A Little Night Music” to the marriage.  I came complete with “A Chorus Line,” “1776” and “Hair.”  The other 60-odd musicals on our shelf?   If you live on the Upper East Side I’m told you can forage on the curb and come home with antiques; here in the West Village if you’re not careful you end up with boxes full of well-worn LPs.  That’s how we came to have a library from “The Apple Tree” straight through to “Zorba the Greek” (the surprise dance-floor hit at our wedding).  We even possess an original copy of the exalted 1961 Judy at Carnegie Hall concert.

And if one day you produce children, and they should happen to love a good show tune too, then your work is complete.  Musical genetics is a complicated business.  My in-laws are both aficionados; my father-in-law even prides himself on having once dated a Broadway chorus girl from “Carousel.”  I’m the product of a mixed marriage, and often felt the strain — a mother with a soft spot for Cole Porter and “Finnian’s Rainbow” but a father who was in the anti-camp camp of people who could never suspend disbelief when actors broke into song; it irked him every time.  (They did agree on one thing.  Whenever I lowered the record-player needle onto “The Music Man,” my first musical obsession, and Robert Preston asked for my attention, my attention please, one of my parents was sure to deliver the family bromide: “he’s not a singer but he can sure put over a song.”) 

But aside from my husband and me, our generation is littered with show-tune ignoramuses.  Take his otherwise wonderful and well-rounded oldest brother.  Tell him you’ve never heard of folklorist Alan Lomax and he’ll recoil in horror.  But watch him stare blankly if you ask him to hum a few bars of “One Singular Sensation.”  He’ll then mumble something about not living in New York City, which makes about as much sense as saying you have to live in New Orleans to appreciate jazz. 

I recently read an Usula LeGuin fantasy novel called Gifts in which a father anxiously waits for his particular talent (too complicated and grisly to explain) to manifest itself in his son.  How proud I was on that enchanted Friday evening, our family’s video night, when we knew that our younger son, in 2nd grade at the time, had the dominant gene.  I had taken “West Side Story” out of the library.  His eyes got big when the male dancers snapped their fingers.  He snapped back.  He’s never been the same.  That year he sang “Officer Krupke” in the school talent show, with his big brother – no ham but a real trouper — as the silent Krupke, pretending to write out a ticket that was actually the lyrics in case his little brother forgot a line.  Of course he didn’t — when you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way. 

After he wore out our cassette of “West Side Story,” we happily followed this boy into his long “Oliver!” period, folding in his other long-standing obsession with 19th century London, the bloodier the better.  That year’s talent show number was “You’ve Got to Pick a Pocket or Two,” complete with Fagin cape and Fagin hat and a chorus of urchins borrowed from his third-grade class.  He next settled in for a year with “You’re a Good Man Charlie Brown”; as far as I’m concerned, happiness is the choral tour de force known as “A Book Report on Peter Rabbit” and Snoopy’s show-stopper, “Suppertime.” 

And then, in 2005, we saw the Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, the distilled one in which the frighteningly talented singers double as musicians.  We had such good seats we could see the runs in Patty Lupone’s fishnets and the rosin on the bow of Johanna’s cello.  From then it was all Sweeney all the time — the Len Cariou Sweeney (on our old LP), the George Hearn Sweeney (on the video we took from the library) and the Michael Cerveris Sweeney (the new CD).  Instead of leaning in for a goodnight kiss at bedtime, I found myself singing “kiss me” in something approximating Johanna’s half-crazed soprano.  At the talent show, other kids did numbers from “High School Musical.”  Our son, bless his dark and twisted musical heart, walked onto an empty stage in a white lab coat and spooky makeup and carrying a razor (really a butter knife), and sang, a capella, “The Tale of Sweeney Todd.”   The restless audience went dead silent.  This time his long-suffering big brother played the unfortunate role of the customer. 

The holiday season of 2007 approached.  Christmases tend to take on identities: the year we got the puppy, the year it snowed enough for a snowball fight.  That Christmas, when the “Sweeney Todd” movie opened after nearly unbearable anticipation, was the Christmas of lost innocence, the year Santa got thrown over for Johnny Depp.  

Though living in New York City is definitely not a prerequisite for musical appreciation, it’s a fine life raising a family a mile and a half away from Broadway and the TKTS booth.  The four of us have seen the lovely (if a little goyische) “Fiddler” revival with Alfred Molina, the flawless “South Pacific” at Lincoln Center, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” “Shockheaded Peter” and last summer’s intoxicating “Hair” in the Park.  We also hit a milestone not long ago: we decided the kids were ready for their first “Forbidden Broadway.”  Back in 2004 I was even able to take my older son to Fred Ebb’s memorial service (there was a little notice in The Times, and he happened to have a half-day of school).  Joel Grey opened with “Wilkommen.”  Karen Ziemba sang a gorgeous ballad called “Coloring Book,” Debra Monk belted “It’s a Business” from “Curtains” and told a really filthy joke, Wayne Brady sang “Razzle Dazzle ‘Em,” and then Liza Minnelli, God bless her, looking more and more as if she stepped off a black velvet painting, got through “New York, New York” and “Maybe This Time.”  I served as my son’s accoustiguide.  That’s Lauren Bacall, I whispered.  She’s about the closest thing we have to royalty in this country.  That’s Dorothy’s daughter.  I came home so giddy with love for irascible, neurotic, brilliant Fred Ebb I could have danced, danced, danced all night.

I think we’ve finally sweated Sweeney Todd out of our systems.  We’re hearing just the occasional hiccup now; once in a while in the shower, when our otherwise gentle younger son thinks no one is listening, he’ll bellow in a heavy Cockney accent, “Oh yes we all deserve to die!  Even you Mrs. Lovett even I!” 

But we seem to be falling headlong into “Cabaret.”   This was spurred by what you might call a series of chance encounters but I call kismet.  First, while we were packing the rental car for our vacation on Cape Cod last summer, who should happen to walk his dog down our block but the original Emcee himself, Joel Grey (and I’m happy to report he was kind and friendly when I kvelled about seeing him at the memorial).  Then, when we got to the Cape, guess what happened to be playing at our favorite repertory theater?  Not long ago, thoroughly bathed in Kander and Ebb, my son and I were riding our bikes down Seventh Avenue singing, way off key, “Money, money, money, money” when a ten-dollar bill appeared on the street in front of us.  I guess that’s one of many reasons we love musicals so much, despite the unlikelihood that any of us will ever get to perform in one: they’re all about suspending your disbelief.  It’s sad but true: I am never going to be Sally Bowles, or either Maria, or Adelaide, or Marion the librarian.  And yet life with my family is definitely a cabaret.

From Lorraine Rorke Bader ’67: 

I just read Scope Monthly, and I was pleased to see the summer reading and viewing for the incoming freshmen [see the story, "Multimedia homework"].  I admire the deep thought and courage that went into the decision to choose a DVD and related reading. The plan to follow up on this introduction throughout the year offers the students an opportunity to experience right away the essence of a Skidmore education, where the arts are integrated into other subjects and creative thought really does matter. It is energizing just to read about it.

 

Got gripes?  Ideas?  Questions?  Comments about the ScopeMonthly e-newsletter and about Scope magazine are always welcome.  So are essays, reports, images, or other communications you’d like to share with the Scope readership.

Scope magazine can only carry a few letters each issue, so here’s where we’ll post a wide range of reader responses or contributions that we can’t fit into print.

Thricely?  Is that even a word?  No matter:  it’s what Scope Quarterly has become — Scope thricely.

This year’s spring issue appears in alumni mailboxes in late April.  But this summer we won’t be printing, and we’ll omit the summer edition every year into the foreseeable future.  We’re sorry to have less frequent contact with our readers, but in the current financial and electronic circumstances this arrangement has so many up-sides that nobody could argue against it.  

 * Saving one issue per year means the planet saves 2.2 million pages of paper, plus buckets of ink and solvents, and untold kilowatts to run huge presses and dryers and binders and bundlers.

 * Skipping that one issue saves Skidmore more than $20,000 in printing costs and another $10,000 in postage.

 * Now that Skidmore offers its ScopeMonthly e-mail and various Web news outlets, Scope readers can pick up and share a lot of news online, without having to wait for the magazine.

 * The upcoming fall magazine will be a bonanza — catching up on spring and summer news and also providing an in-depth look at the hot-button issue of whether liberal-arts colleges like Skidmore are really worth their big pricetags.

 So have a nice, slow summer.  And in September look for a big, busy fall Scope crammed with photos and stories about Skidmore’s big, busy community of students, professors, coaches and counselors, alumni, parents, guest artists…  

Readers of the winter ‘09 Scope Q article about the Phi Beta Kappa lecture on Darwin’s influence in popular culture might be curious to hear one of the comic songs that was played at that lecture.  Many of hese songs are geopolitically incorrect (not to mention disturbingly racist) for our time, but they were considered pretty clever and cute at the turn of the 20th century.  Here’s a fairly tame one:  a 1904 wax-cylinder recording of J. W. Myers singing “In Zanzibar” (borrowed with permission from Glenn Sage’s tinfoil.com Web site); lyrics are printed below.

The link takes just a few seconds to start up:

\”Zanzibar\” song

(Trouble with this audio file?  Click this to visit tinfoil.com and listen there instead.)

In Zanzibar (My Little Chimpanzee)
Words by Will D. Cobb, music by Gus Edwards

First verse.
In Zanzibar, great land of glory –
A monkey Czar, so runs the story –
Came from afar with love o’er laden –
To win and woo a monkey maiden – with twang Darwinian –
Sang this opinion.

Chorus.
My little Chimpanzee, you’re all this world to me –
A branch I’ll find for thee in my own fam’ly tree –
No monkey shine for me –
A wedding fine there’ll be –
In high society – In Zanzibar.

Second verse.
In Zanzibar’s great cocoanut castle –
Hail to the Czar – each monkey vassal –
Great King Gazoo – my great ancestor –
Sang to his bride as he caressed her – with chin bone chattering
His Panzie flattering.

When Scope writer Barbara Melville saddled up for a ride on the National Racing Museum’s simulator, photographer Charlie Samuels took stills to accompany the magazine article.  Then they switched:  Charlie took a ride and Barbara video’d him.  Here’s his nearly jockey’s-eye view of the simulator experience — hang on tight:

If this video box doesn’t open, just click here instead.

Virtual vivisection? Not really. Roy Meyers is no mad scientist, but he is mad about the value of IT in teaching lab sciences.

Many years ago Skidmore biologist Roy Meyers wanted to make a virtual human-physiology model more user-friendly for his students (see Skidmore’s upcoming fall ’08 Scope Quarterly), so he enlisted the help of Leo Geoffrion, an info-tech staffer who specialized in academic support. (Both a gearhead and an egghead—with a PhD as well as software and programming savvy—Geoffrion was long a favorite resource for faculty in a wide range of fields. He’s now a Skidmore retiree but still lives in Saratoga and works in the IT world.)

The 1980s-vintage simulator that Meyers wanted to adapt was designed for Unix and then microcomputers; inputting wasn’t easy and the output was just text in tabular format. Meyers and Geoffrion created a Web-based “wrapper” or interface. The output was made more dynamic, featuring time-series plots—that is, color-coded line graphs tracing the effects of a drug or treatment on blood pressure, pulse rate, core temperature, and other functions. The wrapper was a hit. Meyers remembers a time when the Web went down and he had the students use the modeling program without it: “They were pretty dismayed. It really wasn’t easy.”

In fact, the simulator is now so welcoming—plus Meyers has attended professional conferences and given how-to workshops—that “WebHuman” is used by people and institutions all over the world. (Click here to take it for a spin.) Of the roughly 30,000 simulation sessions run in a typical year, Meyers says, most are done from outside Skidmore—recently including the University of Seville’s med school and Australia’s University of Adelaide.

Although WebHuman is based on a narrowly drawn “average” person (without much variation for age or gender or fitness taken into account), Meyers appreciates its wide testing range: “You can track many more responses at once—for example, neural and vascular and renal physiology—than you could in a ‘wet’ lab unless it had a staggeringly complex setup.” Another advantage over real-world labs is that users can save their simulations, share them with others, and refer to them later.

He says, “I used to hear physicians or researchers sometimes say, ‘No simulation can suffice; to really understand and appreciate cardiac physiology you must hold a beating heart in your hand.’ I don’t hear that so much any more, because the models are really useful and comprehensive.” Nevertheless, he adds, “I make sure my students get experience in a live lab as well as with a model. In fact, it’s great to have both together—students can run a lab on themselves and then do the same on the Web model and compare outcomes.”

How does Meyers like other IT resources? Let him count the ways. “Just doing our data collection digitally is a huge improvement. Data can be saved, measured, compared, manipulated much more easily. The only downside is the cost, since computer hardware and software keep changing so fast.

“Digital imaging nice too—no longer having to attach a camera to the eyepiece of a microscope! In fact, digital technology is what lets a confocal microscope even be a confocal microscope. And now, from all the microscopes, you can save the image, manipulate it, share with others…

“I’ve found video helpful too. in my ‘Biology of the Mind’ course, I used to discuss the language disorders that result when particular areas of the brain are injured, and I would act them out, demonstrating how the various aphasia patients would talk. But recently, just on a whim, I searched for these aphasias on YouTube and there they were! I found some excellent videos of actual aphasia patients, so now I can provide students with a genuine, true demonstration. And I found YouTube videos of university experiments with brain-impulse sensors implanted in a monkey, some MRI imaging, a shark dissection lab, researchers discussing their work… It turns out YouTube has a lot of academically useful footage; not just TV clips and home movies.”

His take on the wired world: “You can’t not use technology. It’s infiltrated everywhere. And that’s mostly a good thing.”

Deborah D’Angelo and Richard Pelzer, Skidmore’s own “Mounties,” are on-call officers who work with the college’s Campus Safety office. Their equine partners, Killian and Kodiak, belong to the officers, who manage their board, training, and care. (See a related Scope story here.) Here are some fun facts about them:

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STYLE NOTES: Both horses wear vintage World War I McClellan military saddles with wide Y-shaped girths and large leather stirrups.

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Google the McClellan and you learn that it’s named for its designer, the Civil War general George B. McClellan. While a captain in the mid-1850s, McClellan adapted it after studying Prussian and Spanish-tree saddles. Jefferson Davis—who was the U.S. secretary of war in those pre-Confederacy years—selected the McClellan for U.S. War Department use in 1859, and it remained standard cavalry issue through World Wars I and II. The McClellan is used nowadays by historical reenactors and for ceremonial events like Commencement.

The saddles are lightweight, with deep seats that look like they’d keep cavalrymen solidly in their saddles during military maneuvers. (McClellans also have a distinctive midline opening running front to back, further lightening their weight.) Killian and Kodiak work in halter/bridles, whose bits can be removed to permit easy grazing, and the horses wear festive-looking bright yellow neck cords that do double duty, serving as lead-lines when riders have time to dismount and let the horses graze.

Like the Skidmore graduates they honor with their presence on Commencement day, the horses get thoroughly spiffed up for the big event. Killian and Kodiak get baths the day before, their manes, fetlocks, and whiskers are trimmed, their feet polished. The next morning, they’re loaded on their trailers by 7:30 a.m. and undergo a final neatening, brushing, and saddling right off the trailer in the SPAC parking lot.

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SKILLS: Both horses have undergone rigorous Mounted Police training that taught them to cope with things that would startle or spook most horses—everything from baby carriages, bicycles, umbrellas, and sudden noises to sirens, flashing lights, and even gunfire. So at SPAC each year, the horses stand calmly even when barking dogs rush at them, dozens of people reach out to pet them, and the occasional toddler walks right up to hug their legs.

BIOS:
D’Angelo’s Killian is a 25-year-old chestnut Thoroughbred who stands approximately 16:1 hands tall. (A “hand,” the traditional equine unit of measurement, is four inches.) D’Angelo has owned the big chestnut since he was 13, and they served together in the Warren County Sheriff’s Mounted Unit from 1989 to this year. D’Angelo has been riding for 40 years. She has ridden and shown in both English and Western pleasure styles and competed in barrel racing. Killian is boarded at a friend’s barn.

Pelzer’s Kodiak, a 15-year-old Shire/Percheron cross, weighs 1800-plus pounds. They’ve been partners since Kodiak was two; Pelzer taught the big colt to ride and drive. Kodiak lives at home in Pelzer’s barn.

TASKS ON DUTY: At events like Commencement, explains Pelzer, “We’re there to assist in any way we can. We help with traffic and parking. Sometimes we’re needed to clear space for the grads to walk through. After the ceremony, we do lots of photo-taking”….

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–”and sometimes we do a little crowd control. This is a friendly crowd, so ‘crowd control’ means riding quietly up and explaining where we want people to move to.” Pelzer served 33 years with the New York State Park Police, where he started and directed the mounted unit. He retired seven years ago as a sergeant.

“Most people like horses. It’s in the American DNA,” he grins. Nonetheless, in his experience, it’s unique to have the horses at Commencement and other college events. Not many colleges field a mounted unit, Pelzer says, although the idea just might be catching on. “The University of Massachusetts at Amherst just started one, SUNY Albany wants to, and the city of Saratoga Springs has two and wants to add another couple.”

AVAILABILITY:
Skidmore’s mounted escort can be hired, through Campus Safety, to dress up “almost any event,” says Pelzer. The horses are “great public relations, ” adds D’Angelo. Says Pelzer, “The good thing about the horses—when you’re on them, you’re ten feet tall. Makes it much easier to get people’s attention.”

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Photos by Gary Gold and Barbara Melville