emma: winter 2010

winter 2010

emma willard school

Moving From

NEWS

OZ

to

TV career takes a healthy turn for Amy Chiaro ’92

“Stowe in Winter,” by Candy Barr ’69, a well-known plein air painter and colorist, who lives and works in Vermont and Arizona. A graduate of RISD, Barr also teaches drawing and painting and is a juried artist with the Vermont Arts Council. She exhibits at Gallery Andrea in Scottsdale, Arizona, Vermont Fine Art in Stowe, among others. Her daily work can be seen at CandyBarrArtist. blogspot.com.

Emma, the Bulletin of Emma Willard School, is published by the Communications Office three times each year for alumnae, parents, grandparents, and friends of Emma Willard School.

The mission of Emma is to capture the school’s remarkable history, values, and culture through accurate and objective coverage that adheres to the highest journalistic and literary standards.

Rachel Morton

Trudy E. Hall

Editor rachel@rachelmorton.com

Head of School Trudy J. Hanmer

Susan H. Geary

Web and Production Manager Class Notes Editor sgeary@emmawillard.org Jill Smith

Class Notes Coordinator jsmith@emmawillard.org Please forward address changes to: Emma Willard School 285 Pawling Avenue Troy, New York 12180 518.833.1787 alumnae@emmawillard.org or visit www.emmawillard.org/alumnae

Bidwell ID

Design www.bidwellid.com

Associate Head of School Larry Lichtenstein

Director of Advancement Linda Passaretti ’84

Director of Alumnae Relations

emma willard school winter 2010

features

14 Coal Driven

Leading a movement to awaken America to the dangers of coal, Sierra Murdoch ’05 wins an award and begins a life’s work.

19 Sister Act

The Chiaros create the vision for television—not just watching it, but making it.

21 The Wizard Behind Oz Amy Chiaro ’92 is the wizard behind Oz, Dr. Oz, that is, the new hit TV talk show on NBC.

25 More than Puns and Puppets Victoria Chiaro ’00 gets Sirius about children’s TV.

departments

On the cover Amy Chiaro ’92 is co-executive producer of The Dr. Oz Show.

Photograph by Bob Handelman.

02 Headlines

12 Spoken Word

Where will you be five years from today? Trudy Hall says when women set goals, there’s nothing they can’t achieve.

What does it mean to be of mixed race? A speaker answers the question: “What are you?”

03 Emma Everywhere

Alumnae together again.

Gargoyles unearthed, soccer team has undefeated season, and faculty awards announced.

08 Click 10 Action

Printed on 100% recycled paper that is manufactured entirely with nonpolluting, wind-generated energy.

Revels with all its triumphs (jesters! acrobats! costumes!) and tribulations (slipping beards, stuck dragon) brings us together yet again.

28 Connections 31 Class Notes 35 Memorial List 80 Women’s Work Prosecuting murderers, thieves, and drug dealers is all in a day’s work for Kate Browning Hendrickson ’75.

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headlines

By Trudy E. Hall, Head of School

2,333,000 Minutes I picked up the small, red book, intrigued by the cover design, and noted the title in miniscule font: Where Will You Be Five Years From Today? You know those moments. You are suddenly in your own private universe, time freezes, and you are totally alone with just your thoughts for company.

Before I even opened the book, I was imagining where my choices might take me in the 2,333,000 minutes that make up five years. The creators of this itty-bitty tome reminded me that in just under five years Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel and Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, and five other plays. Yikes. I had better hop to it. (Why is it that being reminded of how productive others are never increases your own productivity?)

All around me every day, I see the amazing array of choices women have and what they make possible with those choices. Just this past month I have talked with a woman who took a yearlong sabbatical to travel to nearly every continent, a woman who created a documentary of her You are the driver life with her parents and is using it and you know to foster multigenerational conversations, a woman approaching her 60th the destination. birthday who was planning a move across the country to a town where she knew no one, and one who is discovering herself by saying “yes” to every experience New York City offers to 20-somethings. These women are not just living their lives, they are leading their lives. They are making choices that take them in interesting directions, expose them to new ways of thinking, and challenge them in all the best meanings of that word.

Lead your life, don’t just live it.

emma

How did they come to believe they had permission to make such choices? Did they have affirming parents?

Did they go to a girls’ boarding school that told them they could do anything they set their minds to? Did they have a supportive spouse who urged them to live life with verve? Or is the recipe really much easier than that? I think it is the last. In fact, I think any of us could use the 2,333,000 minutes brilliantly if we did one small thing: set goals.

Don’t get grumpy on me now. Think about it. When was the last time you had a laser-like focus on a goal you committed to paper or shared publicly? Can you remember a goal that was so clear you could paint a picture of it? If you have such a memory, then you are one of the lucky ones who know exactly why goal setting works: you invest all your considerable energy in designing strategies to attain what you desire. You lead your life. You are the driver and you know the destination; you refuse to be distracted.

My itty-bitty red book had another great quotation from H. Jackson Brown, Jr.: “Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Louis Pasteur, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” And we all know what they did with the hours allotted them. So where will you be five years from today? What will be better, different, new, interesting, or marvelous because you set one small goal, and then another, and then another? Don’t you owe it to yourself to lead your life? The five-year clock is ticking even as you read this.

e mma everywhere

Mark Van Wormer

Assistant Stage Manager Florrie Stoop ’12 backstage during the fall production of Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), directed

by Valerie Bijur Carlson.

emma everywhere

Gargoyles Unearthed

From beneath 80 years of junk, two faces peered

Ian Smith, director of facilities, was in the subbasement of The Bridges doing prep work for replacing and modernizing the heating system when he made a surprising discovery. He was digging through “probably eighty years’ worth of junk—old infirmary stuff” when he saw a face staring at him from beneath the pile.

“I thought, ‘Holy cow, that’s a gargoyle.’”

So he pulled it out. And in the process, he found another. Both were around eight inches tall and in relatively good shape. He thinks they adorned the outside of a building at one point because they are weathered and the old etchings of ivy roots are apparent on their surfaces.

“They’re interesting,” he says. “They look like they could have been modeled on real people.” He explains that the current thinking about the many gargoyles on campus buildings is that they were modeled on the construction workers and stone carvers around the work site.

His educated guess about the origins of these particular fellows is that they came off the side/back entrance to Alumnae Chapel when the connector from Snell Music Building to the chapel was built in the 1960s.

At the moment, they are residing in his office awaiting a new home.

Robin MacKenzie Prout

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The Newell Chair in Humanities Bob Naeher, Morning Reports

A Call to Arms

100,000,000 women and girls are missing around the world because of gender discrimination.

1%

of the world’s landowners are women.

130,000,000 women around the world have been subjected to genital cutting.

million Several

girls in India are locked up in brothels.

Shall We Dance?

Blame it on Al Pacino. When the film Scent of a Woman was filmed on campus, no one imagined the film, and especially its dance sequence, would have such a lasting impact on popular culture. Though the tango originated in Buenos Aires, Argentina, here in Troy, New York, we feel a special connection with the dance.

Tango and Emma Willard continued their embrace this fall as Jorge Torres, world-renowned tango artist, came to campus. Torres led workshops, in the evening the Emma Willard Dance Company performed, and then everyone took to the floor for social tango. Dance practicums in tango are offered on campus every week.

The oppression of women worldwide is the human rights cause of our time, say the Pulitzer Prize–winning authors of Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

They spoke to the Emma community in February about their work turning oppression into opportunity for women worldwide.

Winter 2010

emma everywhere

One finds joy and fulfillment not by seeking to satisfy one’s own desires, but by losing oneself in the service of something larger.

Soccer’s Undefeated Season For the varsity soccer team it was a season to remember. New coach Andrea Rosenthal ’04 wasn’t exactly new to Emma, having served as JV soccer coach the year before, and being a former Emma soccer player.

Rosenthal had gone on and played at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and recently returned to Emma, hired by Julie Walsh, her former coach.

Rosenthal took on the varsity squad a year later.

The team was heavy with seniors, 11 to be exact, among them the two captains, Monica Yorio and Jenny Porter.

Camaraderie was high. The first game of the season set the tone. They played their biggest rival, New Lebanon, and won decisively. “We worked so hard building up to that game,” Rosenthal says, “we were just really ready for it.”

After that they went six games without a single goal scored on them, which was “pretty remarkable,” says Coach Rosenthal. When they finally faced the other undefeated team, Waterford, in their 7th game, it was a nail-biter. The game went into overtime after Emma finally tied it up with about 39 seconds left in regulation. The team went on to beat Waterford and continued on to an undefeated season.

“I was excited for the girls,” says Rosenthal. “My goal was for them to have a good season and push them to be the best they could be. They rallied around one another and wanted to work hard. We had a lot of fun, too, but it was generally work hard, play hard.”

Though much of the team will be new next year, Rosenthal has high expectations.

“I am predicting it will be a building year. It makes me want to keep going, keep trying, keep getting better. This season is something to live up to.”

emma

Newsmakers Linda Maier received the 2009 Madelyn Levitt and Linda Glazer Toohey Award for Faculty Excellence. The award honors an outstanding faculty member who performs extraordinary service to Emma Willard students. Maier, science department chair, received multiple nominations, including a petition submitted by 23 students. She was also appointed to the Homer L. Dodge Chair in Science and recognized at the opening convocation by Trudy Hall, who said, “You manage simultaneously to model contagious optimism and seriousness of purpose; always approachable, you nevertheless maintain the highest standards of professionalism.”

Robin MacKenzie Prout

emma everywhere

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Carmel Schettino (left) with Linda Maier

Carmel Schettino was appointed the first Henry L. Thompson Chair in Mathematics. At the opening convocation, Trudy Hall called her a “master teacher, curricular innovator, and valued colleague.” She cited Schettino’s multiple roles at the school since her arrival in 2001—teaching, advising, curriculum review, committee chair, and creator of an innovative geometry curriculum.

Kathy Mroczka received the Mariana Stroock Leighton ’55 Award for Early Career Educators who show great promise. A science educator, Mroczka is committed to bringing hard scientific inquiry into the classroom. A beloved and respected “natural teacher,” she is also a working scientist and researcher, and a role model for her students.

Help Us Reach

100%

As the Emma Willard Idea Campaign enters its final year, we have reached the $71 million mark in our $75 million goal. This campaign has already made news as the most ambitious and most successful campaign undertaken by a girls’ boarding school. With one year to go, we are at 94% of our goal.

Where the Money Goes • Scholarships for girls who could not otherwise afford an Emma Willard education.

• A spring break trip to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, for students and faculty who volunteer at two orphanages.

• New state-of-the-art equipment for the Emma crew team, which last spring won the school’s first national championship.

• New endowed chairs and faculty development funds to support the exceptional teachers who are our most important resource.

Help Us Reach 100% by

…giving to the Annual Fund, which immediately supports scholarships for students with financial need. …making an increased gift or multiyear pledge in honor of your class’s reunion. …making a planned or deferred gift. …strengthening the endowment, which provides for future generations of Emma Willard students.

Your gift, no matter the size, has a profound impact—on the lives of girls and on the better world they will help shape.

emma empowers girls when you empower emma.

emma

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Meredith Hunter ’05

—William Shakespeare, Henry V (prologue)

click

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action

By Gia recco ’10

A Walk-On Part Into Emma’s History It was Wednesday night, our first dress rehearsal for Revels, and it seemed as if we were either on the brink of a brilliant success or a massive failure. It was hard to tell which. With heads held high, we paraded proudly into Kiggins. Although the dragon’s wing got stuck in the doorway, we surmounted that technical difficulty and others, and we began to see the benefits of all our hard work.

Producing Revels is a monster of a feat. Songs that seemed so familiar to us turned out to be complicated by nuances we had never noticed before. Lines, which in the past had been so effortlessly articulated by various characters, we now realized were riddled with intricate “thee’s” and “thou’s,” along with the occasional “hark!” This was clearly not the Revels we had experienced in the past—we were no longer the audience, waiting in anticipation to see the seniors perform. We were Revels now, whether we were ready to take on the challenge or not.

Throughout the week, the Class of 2010 experienced a multitude of emotions ranging from frustration as we attempted to learn lines and songs, to elation as we gleefully asked teachers and students to “revelize” us. We dealt with sore muscles and skinned knees, results of intense dance practice and fight sequences.

Amidst the numerous rehearsals, we were all learning how to apply stage

makeup and fake beards properly, and bearded teenage girls milling around the basement of Slocum became a commonplace and comical sight.

The next three performances also had their share of slip-ups, the most memorable being several girls frantically attempting to keep their mustaches and beards stuck in place while dancing the Branles, while those watching stifled peals of laughter. In addition the dragon, as it made its grand entrance, often got stuck in the doorway to Kiggins, a sight that drew laughter from the crowd. Whatever the mishap, the highlights of the play served as ample compensation.

We shared the audience’s delight as we watched the jesters perform acrobatics and leap about, as a Harry Potter-themed alchemist attempted to charm copper into gold, and as a haughty St. George fought the Turkish Knight and dragon with sword in hand.

Revels in its simplest form seems to be a high school play and just one of the many traditions that Emma celebrates. Why then, is it so important to every person who participates in it? Perhaps it is because Revels offers the senior class a chance to celebrate the time they have spent at Emma. Maybe because it provides a common experience that bonds generations of women who have attended Emma. Though it is nearly impossible to answer this question, it is safe to say that Revels is a living, breathing entity—a spirited being that will forever remain within Ye Grey Walls.

Meredith Hunter ’05

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Winter 2010

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spoken word

BY RACHEL MORTON

What Are You? Kip Fulbeck knows firsthand what it’s like to deal with issues of identity. His ancestry is Chinese and American, and he has experienced what it means to be someone of mixed race, someone who can’t find an appropriate box to check on a census form, someone who gets asked, often by complete strangers, “What are you?”

Fulbeck came to campus as the first speaker in this year’s Serving and Shaping Her World Speakers Series. His presentation, part stand-up comedy, part serious social commentary, delighted the audience. The artist, slam poet, and author is also a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and he speaks around the country at colleges and other venues, educating and entertaining people on the topic of identity and race.

In his latest project, the Hapa Project (“Hapa” is a derogatory label derived from the Hawaiian word for “half ”), Fulbeck went around the country photographing people of mixed race and having them write, in their own hand, a response to the question “What are you?”

The result was a series of striking images amplified by the handwritten statements. Those images have been exhibited widely and are gathered together in a book, Part Asian, 100% Hapa. Excerpts of this book and others written by Fulbeck can be viewed on his Web site, www.thehapaproject.com.

After the assembly, there was a crowded book signing event and his book sold out within minutes. Fulbeck also participated in English classes, visited the school’s literary magazine group, Triangle, and came to the swim team’s practice (he is a world-ranked master’s swimmer). He stayed for lunch, and then dinner, and his day at Emma gave students a new perspective on identity.

An excerpt from Fulbeck’s remarks: I was born in a time where it was illegal for my parents to be married. I tell people that, especially high school kids, they’re like, WHAT?! I was born in 1965.

emma

A lot has changed since I was a kid. We didn’t have the Internet. Didn’t have ATMs. I said this at a high school recently and a kid asked me, “Did you have money?”

YES, we had money, it wasn’t the barter system! We had money!

You’re young enough that you’ll be able to tell your kids you lived in a time when gays and lesbians couldn’t be married.

Your kids will be like, “What? That’s stupid!”

That will change in your lifetime.

I photographed people around the country, people who didn’t fit into one race.

Identity isn’t something I get to tell you, or anyone else gets to tell you. Only you get to decide.

We love to put a label on people. Like, you come from California. Oh, you go to Emma Willard. I do it all the time. Oh, a banker guy. Oh, a soccer mom.

In the census you are allowed to check more than one box.

But it’s still their boxes. They have a box that says, NonHispanic White. You can’t check Jewish. Why? It’s not really a race.

You know what everyone in this room is? African. That’s it. There is no genetic basis to human race. There is no biological difference.

CoalDriven 14

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Environmentalist wins award and begins lifework

Han Shan/Rickshaw Films

Sierra Murdoch ’05 found her calling as an environmental activist the day in December of 2005 when she and 130 other Middlebury College students joined with thousands of people in Montreal to protest global warming.

They were there to witness the Kyoto Protocol—the second time an international congregation came together to try to agree on worldwide standards to reduce carbon emissions. The United States, for the second time, was not present. But Murdoch was, and it changed her.

Rachel morton By

Winter 2010

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“We sat in on the meetings, we watched the process.

It was so eye-opening for me. We watched them argue about what size table they’d use. I realized how inefficient this process was. How difficult it was going to be for the world to take bold steps to stop global warming.

“We joined thousands of people in a march—the first international action against global warming. And I thought, ‘This is a movement I want to be part of.’”

She not only became part of it, she became a leader by founding and coordinating an organization called Power Past Coal. Because of her work with this project, Murdoch was recently awarded the 2009 Brower Youth Award—she was one of six recipients nationwide recognized as environmental leaders.

Murdoch took a semester off from Middlebury College to run this project, and its success has garnered praise from environmentalists and legislators. What she hoped to accomplish with Power Past Coal was to raise a national awareness of the toll taken on communities and people whose lives are directly affected by the coal industry—not only the coal miners living in polluted communities, but those who live where coal is processed, transported, burned, and disposed of when it’s reduced to toxic by-products.

How she did that was by finding people with stories to tell and giving them a platform on which to tell them. “This is how we are going to make change happen,” she said. “Tell the stories. This is how we’ll affect people’s hearts and minds.”

We joined thousands of people in a march— the first international action against global warming. And I thought,

‘This is a movement I want to be part of.’ emma

Murdoch coordinated many groups across the country who were working with these same goals. “It was very collaborative,” she says. “The whole project involved thousands of people, hundreds of organizers, and dozens of organizations. My goal was to connect all this work, to show it was a national movement, to build bridges to make this project work as a cohesive unit.”

Power Past Coal launched when Obama took office, and Murdoch aimed to produce at least one political action on every day of the first 100 days of his administration. She succeeded way beyond her initial goals.

Power Past Coal organized and supported over 300 separate actions, including demonstrations and lobbying in Congress.

“On the hundredth day, we flew in six different coalfield residents from across the country. They met with major administrators in the EPA, in the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, and with top congressmen. We had a congressional hearing at which delegates spoke about what was happening in their communities and why we need to transition away from coal.”

She also provided media support, and most actions attracted local and regional press coverage. Some of the larger actions received national press, including a mention in Time magazine and others.

Murdoch also helped create videos, which were shown around the country and on the Web site she built with the help of an international organization that originated at Middlebury, Project 350. In fact, Middlebury proved to be an especially fertile ground for her work.

Middlebury Scholar in Residence and nationally recognized writer and activist Bill McKibben is her mentor, and eight Middlebury students served as interns with the project to help create the Web site.

“My role in this project was to work behind the scenes,” she says. “I wasn’t ever out there in the limelight making the speeches. I was there to find those powerful stories and get them to the decision makers who needed to hear them.”

Some of those people to whom Murdoch reached out and brought forward to testify were Navajo women who were protesting a pipeline that was pumping coal waste across their reservation, causing pollution to their water supply. People in Latino communities outside of Chicago were plagued with health issues because they live in proximity to two coal powered plants, so she helped bring them to the Capitol to tell their stories.

And she spent a summer in Appalachia, living with and documenting the lives of the coal miners and their families, whose communities are completely dependent

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BY Sierra Murdoch ’05

Appalachia’s Old Guard

Sierra Murdoch

Retired union miners take a last stand—against coal.

Two years ago, Gary Bowman bought himself 10 plots at the Powell Valley Memorial Gardens, set in the back by the woods. He says he doesn’t want to be crowded when he dies. Bowman was once a big man— 6' 1" when he could stand up straight— back before Bullion Hollow Mine caved in on him. Up until that day he’d been lucky. He’d worked 17 years underground as a mine foreman, and every time a tunnel collapsed he crawled out unscathed.

He likes to tell about the day a voice called him out toward the shaft, and when he went to answer there was no one there. He heard cracking from down in the tunnel where he’d been digging, the timber and rock and earth breaking overhead. Then a gale of dust nearly knocked him over and made Bowman believe in guardian angels. “I know they exist,” he says, “even underground.”

Now that Bowman’s 58 and retired, he avoids tight spaces. His house has high ceilings. It’s the biggest house in Andover, Virginia, and used to belong to the railroad superintendent, back when Westmoreland Coal Company owned the town. Only 15 years ago the men in Andover still worked the rails for Westmoreland, shoveling coal into eastbound trains.

Now Westmoreland Coal is long gone, and old-timers like Bowman have retired. Bowman spends most of his time on the porch with a cigarette and his two overfed mutts he calls Ruthie and Tar Baby. Ruthie has “something of a gland issue,”

according to Bowman. “I guess we all have our complications,” he says.

Bowman’s complication is A&G Coal, a new company with a new way of mining. Instead of going underground, A&G mines with mountaintop removal—a process that explodes peaks and ridges, scrapes out the coal seams, and dumps the crushed rock and dirt into the valleys and riverbeds below.

From his porch, Bowman can count the number of coal trucks that descend from Black Mountain’s hollow in a given day and the number that return. He watches dust billow up from the truck wheels, and he can name the carcinogens in the dust.

He’s seen the kids pick up and leave town, one by one, just like his own kids have done.

And he can describe clearly the first day A&G Coal Company drove a bulldozer into the woods above his house.

That was the day that Bowman got mad, the day he joined Appalachia’s “old guard”—an emerging community of retired miners who are becoming the coal industry’s most steadfast opposition. In recent years, more than three dozen retired miners have become the leading voices in a national effort to stop mountaintop removal. Most of these men came to the cause for personal reasons—a strip mine forced them out of their home, flooded their town, or leaked arsenic into their well.

Some say men like Bowman are committing treason against their heritage by speaking out against the

thing that’s put food on their tables.

But Bowman says he’s doing nothing of the sort. He’ll profess his love for coal and curse it all in one breath, and somehow he makes sense.

“It’s thanks to coal I never went hungry,” he says. “I never done without.” But he knows coal tears down the things it once built. Andover is emptying. He can’t recall the last time a new house was built in the area.

“We’ve got a dead town,” he says. And Bowman thinks the town will disappear completely if A&G Coal Company is allowed to destroy Ison Rock Ridge.

It’s the ridge above his home, one of the last intact on Black Mountain.

And the truth is, there aren’t many left like Bowman willing to take a stand against A&G. Ask him where his mining brothers have gone, and he’ll grin like he’s about to make a joke. “Hell, I don’t know,” he says. “The ones who are around don’t like it neither. The rest—they’re down at Powell Valley Memorial Gardens.”

Winter 2010

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upon coal, and whose towns are suffering from the effects of years of environmental depredation. Beyond even the terrible effects of black lung disease on individual miners, a new type of strip mining called mountaintop removal is threatening the entire community. With this method, the mountaintop is literally exploded off, resulting in water runoff containing toxic heavy metals, and an environment that resembles a barren moonscape.

“This is a social justice issue,” says Murdoch. “People who are poor or disadvantaged or discriminated against tend to be people who live in areas where coal is most polluting. They live in closest proximity to coal mines and to waste disposal facilities. They don’t have the political weight to say, ‘We do not want this in our community.’”

Murdoch believes the situation is dire and we can’t make change fast enough—not only for the sake of beleaguered communities, but for the earth itself.

Some of the repercussions of our environmental crisis, like the rising of the sea level and the escalation of extreme weather patterns, though catastrophic in their own right, will also lead to competition for decreasing resources—clean water, food, access to dry land as rising levels take out coastal cities.

“We’re going to get to the point where we’ll see catastrophic changes in our climate,” she says with surprising calm. “I guarantee this will happen unless we act immediately, and some of it will happen even if we do act immediately.”

Yet in spite of seeing and hearing firsthand about the terrible toll coal has taken on communities and

individuals, and understanding the ominous and inevitable facts about our environmental future, Murdoch remains optimistic.

“It definitely scares me,” she says. “But what has motivated me is not the fear, but the excitement of being part of something that other people like myself are so passionate about. This is what I’ve dedicated myself to, being part of this community of young people who want to stop climate change.”

This fall during her last semester at Middlebury, Murdoch was named a Fellow in Environmental Journalism—a program directed by McKibben that supports promising young journalists in a year’s project of reporting on an environmental topic. Each year one Middlebury senior is awarded this Fellowship, and this year, it was Murdoch. She is writing about the Appalachian community of coal miners and their resistance to mountaintop removal mining. When she graduates in January, Murdoch will return to West Virginia and continue her work there.

“Going through this process has opened up a lot of opportunities for me,” Murdoch says. “It’s made me think about a nonprofit I might want to found. Or about future work I might want to do. I would like to spend time in other parts of the country where people are fighting coal. I’d like to visit the desert southwest and learn from the Navajo women who are doing important work. I firmly believe this is how we are going to transition away from coal.

“Coal is something I could work on for the rest of my life,” she says.

I was there to find those powerful stories and get them to the decision makers who needed to hear them.. emma

By Rachel morton

photos by bob handelman

Nine years separate sisters Victoria and Amy Chiaro, but not much else. These women are close friends, neighbors, and even colleagues of a sort. Their homes are within one block of each other in Manhattan’s East Village. They share a car. They co-parent a black toy poodle named Napoleon. And both are having a ball with their careers in television—Amy ’92 as the co-executive producer of The Dr. Oz Show, a syndicated show on NBC, and Victoria ’00 while working behind the scenes on award-winning children’s television shows. >>

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[ sister act ]>>Their early rural existence at the family country store, bakery, and apple farm in Troy seems a long way from New York City’s television industry. But what the sisters remember is being at the heart of the gathering place for locals, the center of information that was buzzing with news and happenings.

Amy’s career path into television news was focused and swift. After many years at NBC News, she is now co-executive producer of The Dr. Oz Show, a new talk show on NBC. Victoria grew up in Amy’s long and impressive shadow. And though she followed her older sister to Emma and has ended up in the television business herself, she has taken a very different turn, and a very conscious one.

It’s a mutual admiration society between these two sisters. Amy thinks Victoria’s work is fascinating. “To be in the purely creative world she’s in, it’s wonderful. I miss some of the creativity and free thinking she gets to do.”

Then Victoria reminds her sister about the stunts she has pulled on various TV shows: “You come up with amazingly creative ideas. ‘Let’s throw our hot anchor in a fat suit.’ Or ‘Let’s put him in an elevator and talk about proper etiquette.’ ” Both admit their lives are consumed with their work and that they love it. And that they have little time left for anything else beyond each other. And Napoleon, of course.

It was December of 2008 and Amy Chiaro ’92 was on top of her game, doing what she loved best—news. She was the senior broadcast producer of the Today show and the executive producer at Weekend Today, where she was in charge of all aspects of the nation’s premier morning show. From 7 a.m. to 9 a.m., what NBC aired was what Amy decided her viewers should see. It was a dream job for anyone in television.

So it took an extraordinary offer to get Amy to even contemplate leaving the Today show. She’d been approached by Harpo Productions, Oprah Winfrey’s production company, about producing a new show they had in development—one featuring Dr. Mehmet Oz as the host.

Amy had always been impressed by Oz— “If there is anyone out there who is the best guest on TV, it’s got to be him”—and she felt he had a genuine passion to help people. Yet she hesitated.

But then she got a call from Dr. Oz himself right after Thanksgiving. He asked her to meet him outside her office at that iconic television locale—30 Rock—Rockefeller Center, the home of NBC. They stood by the big Christmas tree, and he told her about his vision for this show.

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He wanted a show that would be something of a hybrid between news and talk. The audience would have some overlap with the early morning news audience with whom she was so familiar, but the show would have a totally different mission. With so many people without access to good health care, Oz wanted to offer useful medical information and advice. He wanted to become the doctor for those who had no doctor. And he wanted Amy to help him do this.

Amy was sold. “Only someone like him could get me to leave Today,” she says.

“He could do one or two surgeries a day, or he could attempt to help millions of people a day. That was so important to him, and it’s important to me.”

Amy agreed to become co-executive producer, and soon thereafter she stepped down at Today and stepped up into Oz. Amy Chiaro’s journey from Today to Oz could be counted in actual steps—both shows are filmed at 30 Rockefeller Center, and their offices are within a stone’s throw of each other. Her entire television career has been a step-by-step, logical progression. She always knew this is what she wanted to do from childhood, where “the breakfast table was strewn with newspapers,” and her mother, Carla Rasmussen Chiaro ’72, and her father where always “talking about what was going on.”

While she was at Emma, she was editor of The Clock, interned at the local CBS affiliate, and worked at WAMC public radio in Albany. While at Cornell, she worked at the student radio staThere is a fervent tion and during sumbelief in the show’s mers interned in television—one summer on mission—bringing Nightline, another summer at the Today show.

And she also worked as to the people. an anchor, a reporter, and a news editor while in college. She became an associate producer for NBC News Northeast Bureau, and from there she took a job at Weekend Today as associate producer, and practically every year moved up the ladder until in 2007 she was named senior broadcast producer.

From that perch, her job was to oversee all aspects of the 7–9 a.m. slot of the top-rated national morning show.

When she moved to The Dr. Oz Show, Amy got to help develop the show, shape it through many months of research and planning. They knew it was going to be a health and wellness show, but what would be the right show configuration—in terms of both content and presentation—for this daytime audience?

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The set, which had previously housed Late Night with Conan, was radically redesigned to create an intimate space where the audience would actually be physically close to Dr. Oz and would feel comfortable speaking up and asking questions.

“We didn’t want him at a podium,” said Amy. To accomplish this, they designed a central floor area that actually rotates, so the audience seated there slowly spins around, following Dr. Oz as he goes from one side of the horseshoe-shaped stage to the other. “I call it the Orca show,” Amy laughs. “You could get splashed.”

Oz does travel around that stage set, and Amy is always with him. They are able to communicate with each other throughout the show via a little earpiece Oz wears. She might be whispering, “You’re headed to the Truth Tube now,” where guests step up to a large tube on which statistics are projected about their weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist size, dress size, etc. When, during one segment of the show, he tells a woman and her teenage daughter who are dieting and eating too few calories that this is actually going to doom their diets to failure, Amy urges him to emphasize the points he is making: “That’s really great,” she whispers in Oz’s ear during the break. “Let’s really hit home with this idea that they’ve been on a starvation diet.”

All the shows are broken into several segments that address different topics. It’s not like Oprah, or Dr. Phil, for instance, which are primarily single-topic shows. In this first season of Dr. Oz, two shows are taped each day, three days a week. It’s a lot of work for everyone, especially the doctor, who must be prepared for each of these diverse topics.

The day begins early. Amy and the producers meet Oz in his dressing room at 7 a.m. She advises him about the morning show. He has already been briefed the night before, but she takes him through it again in more detail.

There will be a quick rehearsal in the studio later in the morning when he’ll go over his lines (which are just a few phrases on the teleprompter to key him into the concepts he wants to discuss). Also during the practice run, props are checked.

Amy says that an important role she plays in this show is to provide the voice of Everywoman, as it were, the woman at home. To raise the issues, the questions we all ask ourselves. “The things I talk to my mom about, to my friends about,” she says.

For there is a kind of fervent belief in the mission of this show—bringing health care to the people, empowering people to ask questions and take control of their health. “This is a service,” Amy says. “People

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ZoCo Productions/Jeffrey Neira

In the Audience Being in the television studio audience of The Dr. Oz Show does seem a little like being in the Land of Oz. And I’m not talking Dr. Mehmet Oz, I’m talking the Wizard.

The floor swivels magically. Cameras on booms swoop up to your face like some kind of quizzical long-necked robotic water birds. We in the audience were excited when we arrived, but after 15 minutes of deft handling by the resident comedian, we are all nearly jumping out of our seats with anticipation, waiting for the show to begin and for Oz to arrive. We have gotten instruction on how and when to applaud.

Instruction on when to stand up and how quickly to take our seats again. This is OK by us because this is TV! We’re going to be on TV! On TV—us!

When Dr. Oz strides onto the set, the house goes wild. Yes, we’ve been told to go

wild, but this audience is truly thrilled to see Dr. Oz, to be near him. An incredibly accomplished surgeon and prolific author, Oz has the kind of medical credentials that would make him a star at any AMA convention.

But here he is, dazzling an audience of laypeople, who can’t help but scream a little and reach out to touch him as he walks past them on his way to open the show. This is the cult of the host. And though Oz is an unlikely object of celebrity worship—he seems modest, thoughtful, and quiet—he has developed a passionate audience who are devoted to him.

After the applause dies down and we all take our seats again, Oz turns and addresses the camera, which has followed him in. Oz speaks warmly, personally, with enthusiasm to the empty eye of the camera telling the people out there at home what the show will be about that day. We in the studio audience sit silently watching the brilliant bubble of television-land that is

enveloping Oz and the camera, and we are feeling a little ignored if truth be told. But then the camera wheels away—commercial break!—and Oz turns his smiling warmth upon us and, we come alive.

No one seems more grateful to be alive than the audience member who is chosen to act as Dr. Oz’s assistant during one of the most popular segments of the show. This is a highly coveted position, and the lucky young woman runs up to the stage laughing and exclaiming, clearly beside herself with joy. Her friend, who was seated next to her, is actually weeping with happiness.

It’s true that there is a kind of glamorous allure to having your face projected into the millions of homes where this show is being watched, and that helps build the excitement and happiness of members of the studio audience.

But there is also something about Oz. He projects a kindness, empathy and understanding, a genuineness, that makes people feel seen and understood. And that’s powerful medicine.Winter 2010

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can ask him things they’re afraid to ask their own doctors. And for some, he is the only doctor they have.”

Amy, the executive producer, Dr. Oz, and their staff dream up the topics that Oz covers on each show. Recent topics have included how to prevent ovarian cancer (Oz gives six warning signs); how to avoid urinary tract infections (one is, amazingly, eat horseradish and avoid chili peppers); testing the safety of your drinking water (Oz provides ways to test and treat tap water). He names three fashion trends that are bad for you—tight jeans, pointy shoes, and dangly earrings. He answers questions about sex and fatigue and lactose intolerance, fertility and weight loss and Lyme disease.

Earlier in the morning during the run-through for the show, the art director, Diann, wheels in a table covered with two large pale mounds. Because The Dr. Oz Show prides itself on dealing with medical questions people might be reluctant to talk to their own doctor about, the mantra is, “There are no stupid questions.”

Today, that question is: Should one squeeze a pimple?

Everyone on the set watches in fascinated horror as Dr. Oz confronts these mounds. They are pimples— two of them—each about the size of a Thanksgiving turkey. First, he will squeeze one showing how squeezing can damage the skin and tissue. Then he’ll lance the other one. He pushes and pushes and suddenly a geyser of white creamy material erupts out of the center.

Eewwwwww! There’s a chorus of groans and laughter.

Even the director, unseen in the control room, can be heard exclaiming over the intercom, “Nasty!”

“Diann, that’s brilliant!” declares Oz, as he learns the white filling is actually coconut cream. She raises her arms in mock victory and gets a little applause. She has made four of these monstrous blemishes. Two for this rehearsal, and two for the real show that will start in a few minutes.

Oz goes from segment to segment, listening to the segment producers, getting instructions about timing, position, props and visual aids, quietly and quickly taking it all in.

“He’s new to hosting, but he’s a sponge,” Amy says simply about his ability to absorb massive amounts of material.

The show has, in addition to the conventional writers, producers, director, and technical staff, a medical unit consisting of six people, three of them medical students from Columbia University. They do research and assist Oz so he accurately presents the most current medical information available.

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It’s when the medical issues cross over into the news that Amy is fully in her element. “I’m a news person.

I’m constantly checking for the red light, the pager, the vibrator on the Blackberry. While I may be on a talk show, I can’t help but be involved with the news; it’s how I’m wired.” Recently when a task force from the U.S. Department of Health contradicted earlier recommendations and advised that mammograms should start later and perhaps not occur so frequently, the women of America were thrown into confusion. Who better than Dr. Oz to address the issue in a timely manner?

“To me, nothing is better than breaking news,” Amy says. “I think that’s when I really come alive.” They decided to devote 15 minutes of the show to the issue and to bring in oncologists and to provide the definitive word on this issue that everyone was concerned about.

Oz’s recommendation fell between the old guidelines and the new guidelines. If women have risk factors like a family history, he believes they should start at 40, but if women have no risk factors, 50 is an appropriate time to start getting mammograms.

“It’s a fascinating thing to have conference calls with oncologist Dr. Susan Love, the preeminent breast cancer researcher, who happened to be in Amsterdam. Tracking down all the right characters. Deciding what was the right information and how we could be responsible and get at the upset women felt. Those are moments that I love.”

After the show on this day concludes, Amy is satisfied.

“Things were tight today,” she says. Keeping a multisegmented, hour-long show running smoothly, on time, with multiple guests and a live audience is no small feat.

Amy is like the director of a complicated little opera.

“I love an efficient ship,” she says. “We are constantly tweaking the process, watching the clock.”

She’s proud that in the two months they’ve been on air, they are already the #3 talk show. “So that’s really huge. Everyone is really happy with it. This is the kind of show a station likes. Because of its newsy content, it ties nicely into their newscasts.”

It’s true Harpo Productions and Sony Television have invested a lot in this show. But so has Amy. A launch takes a massive time commitment, and Amy admits her free time is pretty much shot and her personal life has suffered, as is common with any career in television.

Amy, who is 36 years old and single, often doesn’t even have time for her dog, a poodle named Napoleon. So she’s worked out a co-dog-owning relationship with her sister, Victoria ’00, who lives nearby.

“You can only have one baby at a time, and this year, it’s the show.” ■

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A sculpture handcarved

by Dr. Seuss hangs above the mantel in the conference room at Sirius Thinking, Ltd.

My dog has fleas. Did you know these four words can be sung in the four notes necessary to correctly tune a ukulele A, D, F#, B. And sung they are, many times, as ukuleles are tuned and strummed during the children’s show Lomax: The Hound of Music.

In the episode “Flea Bath” we learn that Lomax does indeed have fleas. Two of them to be exact—named Louise and Clark—and these particular fleas are prone to doing the hula and sliding down his hair follicles as if on a barber pole.

Lomax is a puppet, as are Louise and Clark, as is Delta the cat. They are part of the regular cast of this popular new television series produced for PBS. Just finishing its first season on television, Lomax: The Hound of Music, has garnered much praise for its inventive writing and puppetry, and for its mission of encouraging children’s musicality.

The premise of the show is that a young musicologist named Amy travels around the country in the caboose of an old-fashioned steam engine with her dog, a “melody hound” named Lomax, and her cat, Delta. Lomax uses his doggy tracking ability and sniffs out tunes. So for instance, they go to Buffalo and find and sing “Buffalo Gals.”

On this particular episode, Lomax gets a sudsy bath while everyone sings the old song “There Ain’t No Bugs on Me” accompanied by an itinerant ukulele player named Avocado Jane. (Louise and Clark have taken refuge during the bath in waterproof HazMat suits.)

This all happens on the train, on the way home from a journey to San Francisco, the place where, Amy tells us, the ukulele was played for the first time on the mainland. Along the way, they’ve met a ukuleleplaying goat, who taught them an old African-American song, “Bill Grogan’s Goat,” and then later Avocado Jane teaches them to sing the Hawaiian classic, “Aloha Oe,” and they and the kids at home learned how to dance the hula.

A lot goes on during one episode of Lomax: The Hound of Music. A lot of music, a lot of fun, some bad punning, and unbeknownst to the kids at home who are busy singing along, or clapping or dancing around, there’s a lot of learning, too.

The creative minds behind this show are Christopher Cerf, formerly editor at Random House and a renowned songwriter for Sesame Street, and Norman Stiles, longtime head writer for Sesame Street. Their multimedia production company, Sirius Thinking, Ltd.,

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produces children’s television shows, and they are the cocreators of Between the Lions, a show in its ninth season on PBS with 10 Emmy Awards, and now, Lomax, in its first season.

The go-to person behind the scene is Victoria Chiaro ’00. As production assistant at Sirius Thinking, Ltd., for the last two years, she has handled all the day-to-day tasks involved with keeping the business and production end of the operation up and running.

Victoria feels particularly in synch with the goals and vision of Sirius and these shows. At Emma, she says, she found direction from Jack Easterling, “whose passion for art history and architecture really inspired me.” That fueled her creative instincts, and she went on to major in English and art history at SUNY Albany. During college, she interned at Cosmopolitan magazine and at NBC’s Today show, Weekend Edition. She worked at Self magazine for two years and completed the Columbia Publishing program. But in spite of her eclectic job and internship history, nothing prepared her for the wildly diverse tasks she’d be taking on at Sirius.

She copyedits and helps prepare scripts for each show.

She’s learned about budgeting and scheduling. She deals with royalty issues. She designs DVD and CD covers.

She does the producing for shows and live events.

“I get the puppeteers there, get the puppets there, and get my boss there. Make sure everyone has the scripts. Make sure the scripts are written. Any detail work, I do it.”

And she does it in a beautiful 100-year-old brownstone on the Upper East Side. The first floor, the hallways, and even the bathroom are filled with paintings, drawings, cartoons, and other mementos of Cerf ’s long career in the arts in New York. Above the mantel in the dining/conference room is a sculpture hand-carved

by Dr. Seuss (Theodore Seuss Geisel), which goes well with the Miss Piggy sculpture posed like Degas’s Little Dancer. A spiral staircase leads to the second floor and Victoria’s office, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and a marble fireplace, as well as an impressive selection of rubber ducks, snakes, and toads. Above that is a floor for the Cerf private residence. It is as beautiful and interesting a workplace as one could imagine—filled with history and personality.

Though her bosses are veterans in show business, Victoria is still young enough to remember her days as a Sesame Street fan. She loved it then, and she loves it now. And she can’t quite believe her luck that Cerf, the man who wrote some of her favorite Sesame Street songs, like “Born to Add” and “Put Down the Duckie,” is now

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I get to watch Sesame Street videos! it’s research! her boss. Plus, required research often includes watching YouTube clips of early Sesame Street skits.

“It’s research! I get to watch Sesame Street videos!” she exclaims.

Between the Lions, a daily show in its ninth season on PBS, helps preschoolers acquire beginning reading skills and a love of reading. Each episode, using the premise of four lion puppets that run a library, presents a variety of animation, puppetry, live action, music video, and graphic segments.

With Lomax, the production team hopes to encourage children’s musical skills and to introduce them to a range of music they might not otherwise have access to. “We’re basically teaching children to be more musical,” says Victoria. “That’s actually something we talked about in Ms. Harrison’s neurology course at Emma.

The younger you introduce kids to music, the better sense of melody and rhythm they’ll have when they’re older.” They use the Feierabend curriculum, a system created by a respected music educator who worked with the Hartt School.

“We stuck with American folk music,” says Victoria, “like ‘There Ain’t No Bugs On Me’ or ‘I Had a Rooster.’

It’s great because we’re introducing these songs to kids— old traditional American songs that some kids aren’t hearing as much as you would think.”

The particular spin put on these songs can take some crazy turns, as when they created a duet sung in all meows between Delta the puppet cat and Amy dressed as her own grandmother wearing a bear costume, on the mountain. (Don’t ask—it sounds complicated, but it all makes sense if you watch it.)

“It’s beautiful,” exclaims Victoria, chuckling at the memory. “It is orchestrated. And it’s all meows. You can set a scene that is so silly and so preposterous and make it so educational.

That’s the brilliance of my bosses.”

Also brilliant is the way they use the puppets and how children imbue the puppet with a life of its own. Victoria has seen this firsthand in the many live shows they put on in schools.

She helps organize these events, where they sing songs and read books to children.

“These are so much fun,” she says. “The kids just scream with excitement at the puppets.

These are the same puppets they see on TV, and they were screaming like they were Elvis. You really see the impact it is having on the kids.

That’s the best.”

She remembers a particular show they did on the Essex Steam Train and Riverboat in Connecticut.

They used a type of puppeteering where the human puppeteer (known as a puppet wrangler) is visible. This was the protocol used in the Broadway show Avenue Q. “This goes against the Jim Henson philosophy,” says Victoria. “He was a real stickler about not ever seeing the puppeteers. But it really works. Peter Linz, who plays Lomax—the way he moves the dog, the kids don’t even notice him.”

Christopher Cerf told her a story about the puppeteer who plays Big Bird. “He said that between takes they’d pull the costume off of him, but he’d keep his Big Bird legs on. The kids would come over to him and start talking to his legs as if he was still Big Bird. Kids totally see past the puppeteer whose mouth is moving. It’s so cool.”

In spite of all the fun, Victoria has stretched in a different way from this job. “It has definitely taught me how to juggle a lot at the same time. And it has brought out the left-brain side of my habits that I didn’t know even existed—staying very organized, budgeting, and scheduling.”

But she does love the off-the-wall, creative side to the job and her bosses.

“They get these crazy ideas,” she laughs. “I like that funny, ironic tone. The bad puns. I love that about how they write the show. Just the quirky ideas these writers come up with. Every day, working with a group of people who are so creative has been so amazing.”

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connections Ways to Get Involved For the first time since my own Revels performance, I returned to campus to see the class of 2010 perform— I am so glad I did! In December, I flew to Boston for a holiday brunch at the home of Bonnie Scott Jelinek ’63.

What a blast! I can’t believe that for over 25 years I have been missing out on parties, performances, and conversations with so many incredible alumnae worldwide!

I realize we are all busy—careers, families, hobbies— but if you are not connected with the alumnae community, you are missing out on some wonderful experiences. Here are a few simple ways to connect: Wear your Emma ring. Many of you may have heard the story about the two alums who connected in a subway car while holding on to the strap hanger and seeing each other’s EWS rings; the Emma Willard world is a small one.

Sign up to be an Emma Link. The AAC sponsors a program connecting alumnae to recent Emma Willard graduates attending college in their area.

“Links” offer advice, home-cooked meals, or simply serve as a resource.

Wear an Emma t-shirt. If you haven’t visited the school store or the Web site recently, the school has some great items for all ages and sizes to promote our crown jewel.

Recycle the Emma magazine. Everywhere I go people are talking about how the school has really hit a homerun with the new design and focus of the Emma magazine. How about sharing it with a prospective student or leaving it behind at your doctor’s office, bank, or other public place.

Use the Directory. As you are traveling on business or pleasure, phone a friend (an Emma alum) and make plans for tea, dinner, or some sort of get together.

I hope you will take this list and build on it, and if you want to get involved, just email alumnae@ emmawillard.org, and we can help you with whatever appeals to you.

Sheila Stenhouse Lee ’81 President, Alumnae Association Council

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01 London: Miró Cassetta ’07, Kathryn Dennett ’07, and Alexis Steinberg ’07 served as young alumnae panelists at Emma Willard’s event in London.

02 CO 1: Durban Swartz ’03, Liz Toohey ’03, Jacqueline Wood ’03, Bethany Dupont Bilbrey ’87, and Athena Nagi Mays ’87 kick off the Colorado Emmies group.

03 DC Emmies: Priscilla Smart Weck ’51, Nan Anderson Coughlin ’56, Betsy Gifford Gross ’72, Bonnie Casper Winston ’66, Beverly Burke Gunther ’60, and Erika Ling ’75 of the DC Emmies enjoyed a book discussion of Geraldine Brooks’s book March.

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04 Wellesley brunch: Alumnae gathered for the third annual holiday brunch at the home of Bonnie Scott Jelinek ’63. Front row: Sheila Stenhouse Lee ’81, Wendy Xu ’09, Barbara Nash ’70; Second row: Frances Wheeler Gratz ’67, Jane Cohen Freedman ’86 and Julia, Deborah Johansen Harris ’65, Eve Bartle Lesses ’63, Sue Koerner Pearson ’83; Top row: Alice Forstall Dana ’44, P ’72, Evelyn Reading ’50, Betsy Caney ’63, Genevieve Goldleaf ’08, Adrienne Graves Southgate ’69, Elizabeth Patterson Gardner ’46, Margaret McKelvy Speranza ’82, P’12, Catherine Dana Pappas ’72, Margaret Bownes Johnson ’83, Hillary Denton Kohler ’83, P’13, Genevieve Gadenne ’05, Kendra Stearns O’Donnell ’60, P’88, Kristi Vainu Chenvainu ’83, Linda Passaretti ’84.

05 Connecticut: Connecticut and Rhode Island alumnae enjoyed a late summer cocktail reception at the beautiful home of Anno Bent Murphy ’69. Back row, L-R: Sarah Carter Davis ’79, Lucy Nolan ’75, Alison Morrisey Donahue ’82, Aimee Herriott Vincente ’82, Karen Murano ’84. Front row, L-R: Sally Platt Parker ’63, Amanda Oakes ’79, Anno Bent Murphy ’69, Sylvia Van Sinderen Abbate ’69, Cate Moffett ’69, Sousan Arafeh ’79, Katharine Mills Berry ’53, P’76, ’81.

Winter 2010

A n E m m a G i r l S ay s T h a n k Yo u

Robin MacKenzie Prout

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What will McKenzie “Kenzie” Smith ’10 remember most when she graduates?

Her 75 sisters.

If you would like more information on how to incorporate Emma Willard School into your financial plans, please contact Michele Susko, director of planned giving, at (518) 833-1788 or by email at msusko@ emmawillard.org.

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“Emma Willard is a lot more than a school; it’s a home, my home,” says Kenzie. “After four years, I’m leaving with 75 sisters. I had ‘I am Emma’ inscribed in my class ring so that I can take it off and look inside and remember that I am an ‘Emma girl.’ I know where I come from, and I know who I am.”

Kenzie’s mother, Jennifer Yezzi, has seen her daughter grow since she came to Emma: “Emma took the potential she already had and enhanced it by exposing her to new ideas and allowing a clear voice to emerge.”

When Jennifer read about an alumna who had named Emma Willard as a beneficiary in her will, she thought it was a good idea, but didn’t consider it again until her life insurance needs changed.

“That’s when I realized my coverage amount was substantial and inexpensive enough that allocating a small percentage of it to Emma would be a great way of doing something now to show my appreciation,” says Jennifer. “I wanted to say thank you. Thanks for making a place for her, thanks for making it affordable, and thanks for making her so strong in her convictions. I am very grateful Kenzie is, and always will be, an Emma girl.”

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women’s work Law and Order in Real Life Kate Browning Hendrickson ’75 Commonwealth’s Attorney, Kentucky I didn’t follow the traditional route. I got my degree in psychology from Cornell and then went to nursing school. I practiced nursing for 10 years, then opened a bookstore and ran it for four years. Then I went to law school after my fourth child was born. It was either that or have another baby.

I try cases. I present cases to the grand jury. I prepare cases for trial. There’s not a job duty in this office that I don’t do. I answer the phone.

We do everything from flagrant nonsupport to death penalty; Kentucky still has the death penalty.

I will often go to the crime scene so I get the feel of it. Because I’m ultimately going to have make the jury see that.

I may be out with a detective talking to witnesses.

Most people are intimidated by the courtroom, the jury; they might be intimidated by me.

It’s my responsibility always to consider the death penalty when it’s a death penalty eligible case.

Sometimes there are big surprises during prosecutions.

Somebody will get on the stand and testify to a statement I’m unaware of. That’s really bad! That most always leads to a mistrial. We call it Trial by Ambush.

Law and Order. I do watch those shows. I thoroughly enjoy them. They are completely unrealistic and as far from the reality in Kentucky as you can get.

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The forgotten party is the victim in our judicial system. Defendants have all the rights under the constitution and more rights by Supreme Court holdings.

Victims have very few rights, and they tend to get lost in the process.

When I have a child victim of sexual abuse and we can convict the rapist, that’s very satisfying, because I know that child will be protected and we will be able to provide that child some ongoing services.

We may be dealing with a murder case, burglary, or trafficking in a controlled substance, which is a large part of our caseload.

You need good oratorical skills. You have to gear your presentation for your audience. There are times, depending on my jury pool, where I’m going to be a lot more Kentucky. I’m going to use a lot more vernacular.

You have to be able to tell a story, to get your story across to the jury, so they can see the way you believe it should be perceived.

Preparation is key, but especially with closings, I’ll get up and whatever I’ve written is not what I end up using.

It will be more extemporaneous based on what has gone on during the trial.

You have to be able to think on your feet.

Most memorable day was the day I got elected. I’m the first woman to hold this position in this circuit.

emma willard school 285 Pawling Avenue Troy, NY 12180

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