Visiting My Past.

Sometimes I have trouble getting myself out of the house. By now I should have learned that invariably I have a good time when I go out. But last Thursday instead of packing my suitcase and heading to New York for my high school reunion, I answered emails, did voice-over auditions, and generally dragged my heels before finally hitting the road - at just the right time for Manhattan rush hour – and I got a less-than-ideal parking spot as well. But once I was in the city, back at the family apartment and surrounded by familiar books and furnishings and all on my own, it was very relaxing to be away from the studio for the first time in months. The next morning I took the alumni tour of “Little Dalton” (the building that houses the preschool through third grade) and “Big Dalton” (4th through 12th grades) and had a blast. I sometimes dream about my old school and thought it was time to update the dream template since I had not seen most of it since I graduated (actually, I didn’t graduate, I dropped out after 11th grade and then went to college a year later - but I'm still considered a member of my graduating class). Joining me on the tour was someone I had not seen since I left Dalton – she had been a good friend, but she had married a Frenchman and lived in France, Morocco and Jordan so there wasn’t much opportunity to get together and we lost touch. We had lunch together after the tour and talked a blue streak. That evening at our class dinner I renewed my acquaintance with people I’d seen 5 years ago at the last reunion, as well as some I had not seen at all in the decades since leaving school.

I was astonished to discover how deep those roots are. Whether it’s just the formative nature of the middle and high school years, or something about these particular people and my school (very progressive) or the tumultous epoch in which I grew up, but I found I now have even more in common with many of the people I went to school with than I did when I first knew them. After staying well beyond the time when our reunion dinner was supposed to end, four of us went out to a restaurant and sipped tea or wine and talked for another two hours. I will definitely be staying in closer touch with these people. And, it doesn’t hurt that some of them are filmmakers!

Close on the heels of this trip down Memory Lane I had another opportunity to see an old friend with whom I’d lost touch. And again I dragged my feet – it was a hot night and I had trouble getting myself out the door. But get out I did. The featured speaker at last night’s meeting of the Hampshire Bird Club had been a good friend when I was an undergraduate and he a graduate student at Princeton. Bruce Beehler has been studying the birds of New Guinea ever since I've known him; now his research is part of his job at Conservation International. A trip to New Guinea in 2005 yielded so many new species of plants and animals that it got considerable media attention, and the 60 Minutes crew persuaded Bruce to take them back with him in 2007. They produced a 12 minute segment that was well received in December 2007, and Jay Leno even spoofed it last week! The original segment can be seen below, with a shorter segment showing the courtship dance of the golden-fronted bowerbird.

Someone videotaped Bruce’s talk last night, and I spoke with the videographer, who plans to produce a piece about it for community access television and he invited me to narrate it. I love finding ways to blend my current career in voice-over with my previous one as a biologist, and this is definitely one of those ways.

The moral of this story: Always, always say yes to opportunities to get out of the studio and be among people. You’ll almost always have fun, and you never know where it might lead.