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Vol. LXII, No. 22
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Wednesday, May 28, 2008
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Vol. LXII, No. 22
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Wednesday, May 28, 2008
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 (Photo by E.J. Greenblat)
SCOUTS ON PARADE: Princeton’s Girl Scout troops enhanced Saturday’s Memorial Day parade. Among the three dozen other groups marching were area Boy Scouts, the MacGregor Pipe Band, the Colonial Musketeer Fife & Drum Corps, Little League and Girls Softball Association teams, and a patriotic bike brigade for Princeton school youngsters.
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The Princeton Regional School Board ratified the proposed terms of a 2008-2011 collective bargaining agreement with the Princeton Regional Education Association (PREA) by a unanimous vote at its meeting last Tuesday. The PREA had ratified the terms of the settlement earlier in the day.
Princeton Borough Council met last night (after Town Topics press time) for another closed session discussion of negotiations between the Borough and its developer Nassau HKT Urban Renewal Associates, LLC. (NHKT).
“We really intended for this building to be teen user-friendly,” said Princeton Public Library Board of Trustees President Katherine McGavern at last Tuesday’s meeting. Observing the end of the terms of several members of the library’s Teen Advisory Board, she thanked them for “all the energy and creativity that you bring to this place,” adding that they have fostered the “best practices for teen library programs that we could have asked for.”
A permanent neighborhood exhibition, with the Witherspoon-Jackson Neighborhood Quilt as its centerpiece, will take a place of pride when the Arts Council of Princeton opens the doors of its newly renovated and expanded Paul Robeson Center for the Arts next Thursday.
“Doctors have no borders as far as these kinds of gestures go,” said ophthalmologist and UMCP medical staff member Michael Y. Wong, MD, of the Princeton Eye Group. “It’s a wonderful part of why we are doctors.”
Alicia Soderberg was at Michigan State University in January giving a colloquium about the Swift satellite when she received an alert from the satellite itself. As a Hubble Postdoctoral Fellow and a Carnegie-Princeton Fellow at Princeton University, she had been studying Supernova 2007uy (supernovae are assigned names by year and letters) and had directed the Swift’s technologies to that site, when she spotted a new, “extremely luminous” object within the field of vision of the satellite. Realizing that something extraordinary was going on, she immediately alerted other astronomers around the world. They all turned their eyes, telescopes, and computers toward the light, and after about a day and a half collectively determined that the “nature of the source had to be [another] supernova.”
Kristin Haraldsdottir was born in Iceland, moved to Norway as a toddler, and ended up in Minnesota as a five-year-old.
While her family has stayed in Minnesota as her father has practiced medicine at the Mayo Clinic, Haraldsdottir has maintained close ties to Iceland since most of her extended family still lives there.
Despite her multi-cultural background, Haraldsdottir suffered culture shock when she came to Princeton University in 2004 as a prized recruit for the Tiger women’s open rowing program.
For Tarah Kirnan, the mission was clear as she began her senior year on the University of Pennsylvania women’s lacrosse team.
“From the day we came in last September, our motto this year has been ‘in it to win it,’” said Kirnan, a former Hun School standout and star defender for Penn.
As they headed to Mercer County Park last Thursday for the state Group III Final Four, the Princeton High boys’ tennis team was hoping to spend a long day on the courts.
The Little Tigers were starting the day by facing Millburn in the semifinals at 11 a.m. with the winner slated to advance to the championship match at 3 p.m.
PHS ended up going through a marathon, but not for the reasons it had hoped.
Although they were tired and in anguish, they listened to what the baker had to say. They nodded when the baker began to speak of loneliness, and of the sense of doubt and limitation that had come to him in his middle years.
—from Raymond Carver’s “A Small, Good Thing”
My favorite Raymond Carver moment comes when the baker in “A Small, Good Thing” feeds fresh-baked rolls to the bereaved couple he’d been plaguing with crank phone calls. If you look for this pivotal sequence from Carver’s work in What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the collection he intended it to appear in, you won’t find it because the author’s editor at Knopf, Gordon Lish, dispensed with it when he “minimalized” the story and retitled it, “The Bath.”
Composer Peter Westergaard has been busy this spring. Just two months ago, his two-person opera The Ever Present Present received a staged premiere in Philadelphia, and this past week, the Princeton University Music Department and New York’s Center for Contemporary Opera collaborated to premiere Dr. Westergaard’s ensemble opera based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Seven singers portraying all the characters in the story performed the multi-scene opera in Richardson Auditorium on Thursday night; the entire production will subsequently move to New York’s Symphony Space for additional performances the first week in June.