July 2, 1997
by Peter O. Safir
Well, we made it, we finally had a reunion where the weather held. And what a reunion it was – over 160 of us proved that life did not end at the 25th, the Grease Band still plays rock and roll, and roommates change ever so slowly. Special congratulations are in order to Bob Mayer for his brilliant organization of the reunion; John Claster for the entertainment; Tim and Tom Tulenko for a terrific effort on P-rade; Pete Holzer for a magnificently run headquarters; and, above all, Ted Todd for feeding us all in the style to which we would like to become accustomed and of which we have absolutely no memory from our days at Princeton.
We also elected new class officers for the next five years: Allen Adler again is president; Mike Wyatt, Carl Behnke, Frank Strasburger, and Bob Mayer, v.p.s; Pete Holzer, treasurer; and Dick Prentke will be joining me as co-class secretary.
Although there were too many highlights of the weekend to adequately describe in a column, I thought it would be appropriate to give those of you who were unable to come an excerpt from the moving invocation Frank Strasburger gave at our class dinner held in Madison Hall (Commons) on Friday night:
“How strange to find our transformed selves in this transformed place, in this room, at these tables, where we ate a thousand meals together so recently and so long ago, the food at best indifferent, each meal reputedly better than the next; the ambiance hardly anything anyone would really call “ambiance.” The site of a few of our most embarrassing tribal customs – what must it have been like for all those women who were spooned from one end of the hall to the other? Or was it worse for the ones who walked out in silence? Are any of them here? We should certainly pray for all of them. What a strange world we lived in, and it’s worth giving thanks for the natural censorship of memory – fortunately for all of us, Marc Anthony’s claim notwithstanding, it’s usually the good, not the evil, that lives on. What we shall never forget – and what these tables and this hall brings back to life is one another; that’s why we’re here.
“Yet we scan the room with mixed emotions, for there are friends we do not see. Forty-five of our number have marched in their last P-rade. Surely, though, they are with us tonight – even they could hardly resist the draw of one more Commons meal.”
© 1997 Peter O. Safir and The Princeton Alumni Weekly. Used by permission.
Douglas Penick ’67 Pens Opera
Douglas Penick ’67, a writer and a teacher of Buddhism, wrote the libretto for Ashoka’s Dream, a new opera which will be sung this summer by The Santa Fe Opera. In the opera, Ashoka, a third-century B.C. ruler in India, is transformed from a violent young warrior into an enlightened ruler. The two-act opera, with music composed by Peter Lieberson, shows Ashoka’s rise to power and his eventual establishment of a new order based on a code of justice whose central principles are tolerance, generosity, compassion, and nonaggression.
Penick also wrote The Warrior Song of King Gesar, (Wisdom Publications, 1996) an updated version of an epic tale of the Tibetan warrior king, Gesar of Ling. Gesar is another leader whose enlightenment affects how he rules his kingdom. Sections of Penick’s book became the libretto for the chamber opera King Gesar, also with music by Lieberson, which is available on CD (Sony).
Penick, who lives in Boulder, majored in English and philosophy at Princeton and believes that “enlightenment is not some exalted attainment, but is actually the natural state of human beings.” He is currently at work on the third in a series of works on enlightened rulership and societies.
-- from Class Notes Features of The Princeton Alumni Weekly
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