Going Places With Odyssey 2001
By P Trams Hollingsworth '75
This year's cross-country alumni junket, WC Odyssey 2001: Faculty-Guided Tours of Museums and Other Cool Places, got off to a great start in September with a reunion at the Orangutan Think Tank in Washington, DC. More than 50 alumni, families and friends gathered to hear psychology professor Mike Kerchner's lecture "Monkey Minds," a short history of language experiments with primates and the insights these have lent into human neuropsychology. We also learned that not all interspecies communications depend on a grasp of grammar or even the symbols that represent nouns and verbs in orangutan vocabulary. One long-haired ape just tapped the glass and pointed emphatically as Misty Elliott Corbin '75 obediently presented her hairbrush, checkbook, lipstick ... and explained, "We'd both like to know what's in my pocketbook."
History professor Richard Striner's tour met on the steps of the Maryland State Capital for an introduction to "The Grand Dames of Historic Preservation." Dr. Striner's overview of the preservation movement and its visionary leaders included profiles of Ann Pamela Cunningham, who in 1853 founded the Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union to save George Washington's home from destruction, and St. Clair Wright, the daughter of a Naval Academy superintendent who founded the Historic Annapolis Foundation in 1952 and led the organization for three decades. After Dr. Striner's introduction, our Odyssey group, which included Dr. and Mrs. Toll, took off on a guided tour of the Paca House, the Hammond-Harwood House, the Chase-Lloyd House and other colonial legacies of grand dame Wright.
On sabbatical in France, English professor Bob Day, finding his museum closed without notice, took his alumni tourists Dani Kennedy Lippoldt '82 and Jeff Frank '98 to a nearby bistro, bought them lunch with wine and talked of Balzac and his "Lost Illusions." Trans-Atlantic e-mail report: "A good time was found by all."
Back on this side of "the pond," Odyssey traveled to the Cloisters, a branch of New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to the architecture and art of medieval Europe. We spent much of that sunny Sunday afternoon in the walled gardens above the Hudson River until our tour-guide, assistant dean Mark Hoesly, took us inside "The Middle Ages in Manhattan." (see page 20) Dean Hoesly, who earned his master's of divinity from Princeton University, asked his audience to try to date an ornate archway in one of the ancient halls, and I heard Cindy Stafford Heller '70 M '80 whisper to Nancy Moffitt Skelos Duka '71, "Sometime around the time of Covey math?"
The following Odyssey revealed another beautiful garden around which Isabella Stuart Gardner built her home in Boston. As we wound our way through this small museum filled with the work of many masters, art professor Donald McColl led a group discussion of the religious, political and social cultures that influenced the life and work of Rembrandt. Then Dr. McColl guided us into the special exhibit collected at the Gardner from museums about the world, "Rembrandt Creates Rembrandt." Here were nine etchings and eleven paintings by Rembrandt, including "Artist in His Studio" and "Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem." In this small room our talkative tour of twenty-something became suddenly still and absolutely silent.
Alumni Odyssey 2001 continues though May with faculty-guided tours of the National Building Museum and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC; The National Aquarium in Baltimore; The Clearwater Aquarium in Florida; the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Frank Lloyd Wright Museum near Scottsdale, AZ; Longwood Gardens near Philadelphia and Wilmington; and Hope House Estate in Talbot County, MD. For more information or to make your reservation for Odyssey 2001, call the Alumni Office.
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