WILDCAT ROUNDUP Williston alums are always up to something interesting. Here, we check in with a few.—BY KATE LAWLESS
HAPPY BEN CARLSON DAY! In San Francisco, July 22 honors Ben Carlson ’81. He explains why.
A WILD PAIR Ashley Gearing ’09 and her fiddle-playing collaborator deal out the fun
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wo Nashville musicians with talent in spades took their show on the road this season, hitting select venues in California and Massachusetts. The Wildcards, a duo of Ashley Gearing ’09 on vocals and guitar and Andrea Young on fiddle, play original songs that offer a “country-rock vibe, with some sweet ’90s pop moments,” Gearing says. The two met while touring worldwide with the band Farewell Angelina. They clicked right away, and fans started to notice that they were having their own separate party on stage. “One day someone said, ‘We know who the wildcards are in the band,’ and it stuck,” Gearing says. The two embrace their duality—and their singularity. While very different, they “can read each other’s minds in most situations,” she notes.
20 WILLISTON NORTHAMPTON SCHOOL
The musician’s life is not new to Gearing, who signed her first record deal with Disney at 12 and her second while a student at Williston. “I was in the middle of my freshman year when my record company told me I was going to need to be on a 60-station radio tour across the country and needed to be in Nashville part time as well,” she recalls. While a more extensive tour is in the works, it will have to wait for life post-COVID. However, now that playing live is a part of her life for good, Gearing is pretty happy about it. “Music has taken me to places I never thought I would be,” she says. “Ultimately, the first downbeat on the first song of the night is when I’m able to see the crowd having a blast and forgetting their troubles. That’s when I think to myself, ‘Is this really my life?’”
I moved to San Francisco after college, twirled around and threw my hat in the air. But the AIDS pandemic was steadily worsening. I set aside my career plans and worked for Mobilization Against AIDS, an organization that advocated for better public funding, policy, and awareness, and for the NAMES Project, which managed the AIDS Memorial Quilt, a tool for awareness, support, and healing. It was a time of intense activism. I’ve never felt a greater sense of mission. I met and worked with heroic people. In 1995, a new “cocktail” of combination antiretroviral drugs turned AIDS from a terminal illness to a manageable chronic disease for people with access to the therapy, and the death rate started to drop. The following year I decided to leave HIV/AIDS work and get back to pursuing a design career. The late, big-hearted Jerry Windley, chief aide to San Francisco Supervisor Angela Alioto, organized a very touching thing for me. July 22, 2021, was the 25th anniversary of Ben Carlson Day in San Francisco!
