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< Back Terry's Story 00:00 / 03:54 My name is Terry Zuckerman, and I live in Northampton now. And I'm retired. I'm old older. And, I'm enjoying this so much. It's good for my brain, and it's nice to meet Imani and everyone. So, I'm liking it. But it's a little hard to condense a story into, like, three or four minutes, but I worked on it a bit. So here we go. So, my story is about taking off. It's 1999, closing in on a new century. I had been working in IT for over thirty years and married for even longer. Our sweet daughter, Jessica, was grown 25 and on her own. Immediately after she was born in 1974, my husband, Jeff, ran out to buy our first sailboat. For just years, just about every weekend and summer vacation, and whenever we could, we spent time on the boat. I loved sailing, the exploring, the sunsets, the water, and it was great. Meanwhile, we were often talking and thinking about doing some real cruising, some learn long term cruising, and it was time to take the plunge. So now I committed to a major lifestyle change. There was much to prepare mentally and physically. We needed to sharpen our skills such as navigation, reading the weather, the first aid, boat repairs, radio communications, the cell phone, we're not quite there yet, and hooking up with the queues cruising community. We already owned a 42 foot center cockpit sailboat. It sounds big, but it's small. A major downsize was required. We cleaned out and whittled down our possessions and sold our house in Port Washington, New York, put some of our things in storage, got rid of our car, and moved aboard. It sounds easy, but it was hard. Every week, I felt lighter and lighter. For five years, we lived twenty four seven on Ariel, our Moody four nineteen. We sailed down the coast from New York and onto Florida. Then we crossed the Gulf Stream to The Bahamas when we hit basically our only major storm, so that was a challenge. But we kept going. From there, over time, we made our way south and east, beating into the wind and onward to the Caribbean. We went as far south as Tobago, totally immersed in different cultures, customs, and food. I'm glad to be telling this story, not just for you, but for me too, to remind me of all I learned from my cruising years. The importance of slowing down, the importance of downsizing and making do with less, how it both simplified and expanded my left life, realizing the everyday things that matter, things you might take for granted on land like getting water, electricity, finding and getting to a market, doing laundry, etcetera. The satisfaction of facing new challenges, crossing the stream, beating across the Mona Passage to Puerto Rico, etcetera, and thinking out of the box, looking at cultures and people in new ways. We relied on other cruisers from all over, sharing common challenges. We met an amazing array of fellow cruisers and forged many friendships we have to this day as well. Towards the end of our adventure, I wrote this entry in our logbook. In a tiny space on a vast ocean, cooperating and participating and still talking to each other, a true test of our bond and a great adventure. Our space is small, but our life is big. Previous Next

< Back Susy's Story, 2021 Susy’s adventurous, independent lifestyle quickly transitioned into a nurturing one when she found herself longing for a baby. After adopting her son from Peru, she instantly knew she had made the right choice. 00:00 / 03:04 I chose as my major transition going from achievement orientated, professional, thriving and that’s all that was important to me to becoming a mother! It totally transformed me on many levels. I belonged to a support group that was a career support group for people that wanted to change careers. It was an intense support group and we had a retreat at my house and after about a day, the leader of the group who was a social worker said to me ‘you know, Susan, I see you’re interested in your work but what we’re hearing from you is you really want a baby.’ So, I began this journey and I chose adoption to have my baby… I got the call I’d been waiting for. I even feel emotional saying it but I had decided to adopt from Peru in South America and my contact called me from Peru. She said to me ‘hi Susan, how do you feel about boy babies?’ I just sat there and some inner voice said to me ‘just sit here quietly and think but don’t say anything’ so that’s what I did. It just came out of my heart when I said ‘sure. Boy babies are fine!’ My whole body was on getting this child. Um, my real mothering began when I found myself in front of the sink washing bottles and changing diapers and wondering how I was going to feed myself. But nevertheless, I was enchanted and obsessed but the mothering journey began and it continues today. The real challenge is how to keep up–it’s been the challenge all along and it still is–the real challenge is how to keep up with your child’s transitions from infant hood to–you know, you have to change to mothering with every level and it still continues, of course. My son graduated from college and began working and he became an adult! Now when I’m ill he comes to take care of me so that’s a transition. So, um, it’s like a whole other level of living. I wouldn't have missed this for the world… Previous Next

< Back Catherine's Story Catherine Grella (21) talks with a friend, Susan Martins (77) about her close relationship with her two sisters, her childhood, and the family dynamics that have shaped her into the woman that she is today. 00:00 / 04:51 The order of the siblings is that Abby is the firstborn. She is about two and a half years older than me, and then I am next. And then Sophia is my younger sister, and then my younger brother is Ben. Sofia is about two and a half years younger than me, too. So the spacing between us is like, pretty equal, which is good because it's so we've met us so close, and he's the only boy. Sophie and I did gymnastics together. I remember I told you about that. And sometimes we trained so hard at such a young age. We were so fascinated by gymnastics that we would go probably 13 to 15 hours a week. And when you're like nine or ten, that's a lot of commitment. Like, think a young gymnast body going 13 to 15 hours a week in training and running and doing strength and conditioning. And it built our bodies to be very strong, which is something I'm thankful for. But in a way, it took away part of our childhood because we didn't get to see friends as much. And we really became so close, and we became each other's best friends because of all that time we would spend in the gym together. But the one thing that I wanted to say was that when Sophie and I were younger, although we would go to gymnastics super late into the night, I think it was like we'd be getting out around 845, so we wouldn't be getting home until nine. And my whole entire family would wake up at 09:00 so that we could have family dinner every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. My poor father must have been so hungry by 09:00 Wednesday, Friday. But they did it because they loved us, and they did it because they thought that that was important for us to eat together. I'm really happy that they did that. And in so many of the ways that they made these accommodations in my life growing up, are ways that I want to incorporate into my own family when I have it, because they're really special. If you were to leave this interview for someone like, who would you leave it for? I would definitely leave this for my parents and just in honor of them and all they've done, in away, my mom and my dad always wanted to give us the things that they didn't have growing up. So my dad, when he was 40, he had to take up music lessons all by himself and learn how to play the guitar and learn how to play the piano. And he's so fantastic at it. He has that creative brain where he can hear a song on the radio and just play the chords on the piano. And it's so amazing. But that was all taught to him by himself. And he just thinks, how good could I have been if I was given this when I was young? So that was the philosophy he adopted when he enrolled us on piano lessons when we were in kindergarten, and they just never wanted to have any doubts of what our abilities could have been if we weren't given those tools. And I'm so thankful for that because I don't thank them enough, and I really, really should, but I should just sit down one day and say, thank you for always giving us all of the tools that you wanted us to have to be great in life and to find out what we loved. Even Sophie and Ben didn't stick with piano, but at least they were given that tool to explore. And the same thing with sports. I'm so thankful that there was never a sport that I brought up to my parents, and they turned it down and they said, no, you can't do soccer. You can't do this; you can't do that. They were always so willing to be accepting our interests and accommodate them in any way that they could and help us, and that was something so special. Of course, I leave this interview for my siblings too, for them to know all the ways that they impacted me in my life and will continue to impact me in my life. But a lot of it is for my parents too, because it's only when you get older that you really appreciate all of the ways to which they were such good parents. And at college, it's sad, but I think it's there were so many things about my childhood that I took for granted. And it's only when you're at college and you're not surrounded by your immediate family anymore that you realize the things that you miss. Previous Next

< Back Owen's Story Owen discusses how he went to college during the Vietnam War and what he learned from not only the education and the professors but also the people he attended the university with. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 03:11 When I was 19, approximately, there was something going on called the Vietnam War and you probably studied it in ancient history or something like that, but for those of us who didn't really want to get out there and get shot at we had to find ways to not do that. And we also didn’t believe that war was necessary. So I was a part of a group of people, there were many many of us, who said no this was not a good idea, and the only way I could stay out was to go to college. So I went to college. Another thing that was big in my life is when I went into college was meeting different people from different parts of the world and more so different parts of the country but I did meet a few people from outside the US. And some people have big influences on you, some people have small influences on you and some people you just dont understand. Part of the not understanding is you just have to learn to accept people as they are. I would say the majority of kids that I was in classes with were white from middle class suburban cities around, middle class suburbs from large cities around the country. I went to school in St. Louis and I came from a suburb around Washington DC. There were so many people from so many other places that were similar to me, then I got to meet people who were different to me. I remember, one young woman came from Hawaii and she was native Hawaiian and that was cool. I had never met anyone from Hawaii before. One day it snowed, and she ran outside and she went absolutely berzerc running in between the snowflakes because she had read about it, seen it in movies, but she had never experienced snow before. And I thought, “Okay, this is cool.” You know, just trying to understand someone's frame of mind, especially when you grow up with snow. You know its like what's this snow. And this is like a life changing event for her. And I thought Okay, that’s cool. It is to be able to do that and not to judge someone based on things like that. And I grew up in a society where alot of people were not accepted as they were. Alot of minorities were looked down upon and legally discriminated against. You know that sort of has gone away but not entirely. There was no such thing as people who were openly gay, that just didn’t happen during that period of time. People did not date interracially. You know you never saw a white woman with ablack guy. It just didnt happen. So when you start meeting people that are different and meeting people that are a little outside your realm of experience you learn about them and learn to accept them. That was a huge thing for me. To transition from living with stereotypes which are reinforced by things like TV shows to getting to know people and understanding who the people were. And understanding a person as a person, not just put into a category- a stereotype. Part of going to school was that piece of education. Previous Next

McKenna's Story McKenna describes her love of gymnastics in this story. The lessons it taught her and the people she met along the way are invaluable to her, and she will carry these lessons with her throughout the rest of her life. Scroll to Listen McKenna's Story 00:00 / 03:21 McKenna: The reason that my mother put myself and my two younger siblings in gymnastics, um, was because my younger brother, who is three years younger than me, he always used to stand on his head in his car seat, um, like, as my mom would buckle everybody in. My siblings are twins, so getting everybody in the car was an ordeal because she didn't have enough hands to possibly buckle everyone in at once. And my brother would always slip on to his head in his booster seat and hold himself up there, and kind of swing around. And there were a couple close calls of him, you know, making some choices that maybe weren’t the safest for him. My mom put us into gymnastics, because she thought, you know, that this would be a safe place for them to learn how to be monkeys and not get hurt. Uh, and maybe not to put themselves in a headstand in the car seat. My brother, after - he did gymnastics only for a few years with us in the very beginning, and he quickly decided that that wasn't for him. And my mom for the most part was our chauffeur, here, there, and everywhere for gymnastics, um, although they both always made a point - sometimes, my sister and I had different meets, and we’d be in different places, so they would have to separate out for those meets. I think that, as I got older, a lot of my friends stopped doing it competitively, so I was - at one point I was like the oldest girl in the gym, other than one other girl who is a year younger than me by, like, a landslide. And, so. At that point in time - I don't know. I felt a little disconnected from my peers in that moment, but. Gymnastics is very physically demanding and, I mean, I dislocated my hip when I was thirteen and I tore some tendons in my ankle at 17. And there were days that I - there were 100% days where I was like, “Why am I doing this? Why am I here? I could be with my friends, I could be doing this,” whatever that could be might have been. “Why am I here?” and I think the life lesson from pushing through those days, and looking back on it now, the character I have for that, and the grit that I learned to say, “Okay, I made this commitment.” Some of my very greatest life lessons-and I constantly reflect back on things I learned from doing gymnastics-as like, you know, okay, back up and take a breather and we approach the situation as like, life skills as opposed to just physical sports skills. I learned a lot from gymnastics in the physical sense but most in the, like emotional and mental well-being and awareness sense. That I, I think I was ready to part ways. I felt like I had, I had learned what I could as a person. And sure, I could have kept going and learned new skills, and sure, I could have, if I really wanted to, have gone further with it but I just, I came to a point that I knew my body was not gonna be able to keep going. But, gymnastics was the first place that had an understanding that family could be more than just blood related. You come to college and you kind of have your home away from home or your home in a person more so than a place kind of thing and I learned that from gymnastics.

Tamar Shadur talks to Ngozi Okeke about how she would like to be remembered through the different ways in which she lived her life. She discusses her artistic passion for tapestry weaving and how it became a lifelong career. She was able to emphasize the different themes that have come out in her work and how she and her Mother have worked together to produce meaningful pieces. Tamar's Story Tamar Shadur talks to Ngozi Okeke about how she would like to be remembered through the different ways in which she lived her life. She discusses her artistic passion for tapestry weaving and how it became a lifelong career. She was able to emphasize the different themes that have come out in her work and how she and her Mother have worked together to produce meaningful pieces. Scroll to listen Tamar's Story 00:00 / 04:07 How would you like to be remembered? I want to be remembered I think for someone who has not been afraid to take risks. Because, you know, having such a kind of changeable lifestyle from a very early age I was a little insecure at times, you know because I was always in new situations. When I was growing up in the 50’s and early 60’s I thought, oh no problem you know, I’ll just get married and I don’t have to worry about anything, but reality kicks in when you’re in your early twenties and you realize that no, you have to have a profession, you have to support yourself. But, something saved me from, you know, really becoming discouraged about a lot of things, which was tapestry weaving. I dropped out of art school, I was an art major, and I became a tapestry weaver in the late seventies in Jerusalem and there was this studio and for two years I worked there. Learning this complex skill of weaving very fine tapestries, large mural size pieces with a weaving partner next to me and it's a whole culture that opened up a door to a whole art aesthetic and field of art that wasn’t very much known, but those days are kind of over today they don’t support these kinds of industries so much anymore. When I came to the U.S. later, it became my main career for a while with my ex-husband. We produced tapestries and we basically became tapestry artists. We wove tapestries that my Mother designed, that we designed, and that became my sort of strong hold for feeling grounded and having something to do if all else fails. But it didn’t really support me financially so I had to gain a career and support myself. So I finished two degrees, one in art education and one at the masters school of education at UMass and I became an ESL teacher. And I was a Hebrew teacher, and gave art workshops, for papercutting and tapestry weaving. So I developed a career as a teacher, and now that I am not doing that as much, I would like to be known as one who contributed to my community both in educational ways and as a volunteer. And now lately, that I have more opportunities to exhibit my work and my Mother’s work, and give talks about it, and in fact, right now this month, in May there is a show at Michaelson gallery, Northampton called “Generations” and my work, my tapestry work, is alongside my Mother’s papercuts. One of them is the largest and most complex mural tapestry that I have woven that my Mother designed called, “Yizkor Holocaust Memorial Tapestry”. Yizkor means remembrance, that’s the prayer said over the dead and over the victims of the Holocaust. On my website there is also a description of what this tapestry is about. This one is the major work that took many years for me to complete with all the interruptions in my life. And it’s sort of a memorial piece that symbolizes the life of Jews in Europe before the destruction by the Nazis, with a lot of Jewish symbols that my Mother incorporated in her papercuts and it includes my personal memorials of my own family members, including my brother who passed away early on when he was only 38, and my two parents, and there is a homage to 9/11 by the letters W.T.C., World Trade Center, on the top border. It’s all part of the memorial tapestry and the events that happened over the many years that this tapestry was on the loom that enabled me to commemorate my personal memorials beyond the memorial for the life of Jews in Europe, which was my Mothers intention in the design. Those are some main anecdotes in my life, I think, and who else knows what awaits me.

< Back Rachel's Story Rachel discusses feeling like she didn’t belong in her hometown community or as she transitioned to college.She talks about her social anxiety and reflects on what it was like to break free from this. She wants people to pay attention to college students’ mental health. Scroll to listen 00:00 / 05:31 Previous Next

< Back Sophia's Story 00:00 / 04:30 I feel like mostly where I really saw change and how I saw myself was in my senior year. Halfway through freshman year, I decided to transfer by myself to my local public school, and that is where I would say everything started to crumble and fall apart. I really struggled with making any friends, especially since it was halfway through the school year. Everybody already had their established friend groups. Then I'm also a very shy person, so that just all compounded into me not having anyone to be with in my classes. I would avoid going to lunch and eating, and that manifested itself into me, staying home from school. I would not go for days at a time, and I ended up almost failing every single class in my freshman year. And this repeated itself, this process of me staying home for weeks at a time for my sophomore and my junior year, all the way up until my senior year where I really felt hopeless. That that entire the entire process of me, like, not going to school, from freshman year onwards caused me to develop pretty severe depression and anxiety, which that high school experience really brought the depression out. I ended up, in my junior year making an attempt on my life because of the loneliness, because I had saw online, on social media that all of my friends were hanging out on a day that I had decided to stay home. And that was really just, like, my breaking point, and I felt like everything was pointless and hopeless. Like, seeing the amount of people that came for me that cared about me really showed me that my life was valuable, but I still struggle to find the value. I felt broken. I felt like something was truly wrong with me. I felt like I wasn't meant to live a good life. I remember I wrote that in my journal. Like, I'm not meant maybe I'm meant to just be unhappy. My guidance counselors had to step in, and they had to place me into this alternative program that my high school offered. And I had gone from honors classes to being put into the college prep. I was I connected myself worth to my academic success. And seeing that I like, I couldn't handle the work of the honors classes, that just really made me feel just cemented the fact that I was different from my friends, that I was that I wasn't well, that I was not doing well mentally, and that just really broke me. When I first got put into the program, I knew that it was going to help me. I knew that I was put into it to help me. That's what all my counselors said, my teachers, my mom. That's what they all said to me. So, I started going through the program. I had a lot of support, particular from the program. I director, her name was miss Mac, and she would always give me kindness and give me grace. There would be days where I would go for just an hour, and I would get overwhelmed and anxious. And I would ask to leave, or I wouldn't come in until noon. She still always welcomed me into the program with old open arms. With her help and also with the help of my teachers, they talked to them about how I was feeling. I felt like they wouldn't give me any grace, but they were the most, they were so understanding. And I think just having their grace, having their kindness, just knowing that they wanted me to succeed really helped give me the hope that I could actually graduate, on time with all of my classmates and all of my peers, that I could actually do the things that I had set out for myself to do at the beginning of the year when I thought that I couldn't get through it, when I thought that I couldn't even, like, make it out of bed. For senior year, me at the end of the year versus senior year, me at the beginning of the year, completely different people. By the end of the year, I saw that all of my hard work actually did pay off and that I actually was going to be able to walk with all of my friends, to graduate with all of my friends. I felt like, at the beginning, I felt like I wasn't doing anything with my life, but not but towards the end, I felt like there was something that I could be that I could do. Like, even though I had gone through all of this gone through all of this suffering that I could, in fact, get it all done. So, I'm really thankful to those people in my life, that senior year because without them, I don't think I would have managed to graduate on time. I don't think I would have even been able to start my college career when I did. It just taught me that it's hard for me to rely on people, but I do need to rely on people in order to succeed. Previous Next

< Back Candace's Story Candace shares what it means for her to live her best self and how she continues to learn through her experiences. 00:00 / 05:17 Candace: I like my own company. And I guess that was something of a surprise. I've tended my whole life to be very social. And all of a sudden, because I couldn't be, I started to do maybe more internal work, deeper dives internally. Being alone did not necessarily feel lonely to me. Candace: I'm 77. So with, I certainly hope, I've learned over that many years, a bunch of stuff. And, trying to get to the place where it's one thing or one more most important thing, or one thing that is a basket for everything else, right. And I think what it comes down to for me, is that everything counts. And the older I get, the more I see it. It's not that you have to always make brilliant choices, you can't, you know, and in fact, I think our failures may be certainly as important, maybe even more important than our successes. The choice part comes about, when you see how you deal with events in your life, or how you deal with what comes at you, or how, what you use to make choices, or even things like who you choose to be your friends, or who whose shoulders do you choose to stand on, you know, I mean, we can't choose our family. And we certainly all stand on their shoulders at some point. But, but we do choose like, occupations and, and mentors and people we admire, those are the shoulders we stand on, and those choices feel important. Candace: And, as I've gotten older, one of the things that's been I've been so aware of is that choices that I made years ago, come back to me in ways that I never thought would be true. I don't believe that everything is fate. Or that necessarily everything happens for a good reason. Because some bad stuff happens, you know, but I do believe opportunity is put in front of us time after time after time. And that's what's laid out. And that, within that we make choices. And those choices, sometimes they're good choices. And sometimes they're like, “wow, that was a wrong choice”, in terms of how things have turned out, and “what am I going to do about that?” Are we going to be defeated by that? Am I going to be angry about that? Am I going to be a victim? Or am I gonna make something of it that turns it into a lesson of some kind? Candace: My purpose is to be my best self. And what do I mean by that? There's a poet who I like a lot named Mary Oliver. And the last line of one of her poems is, “I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.” So I think that's what I mean by being my best self. I want to live fully and passionately, and mindfully. In this present moment I want to find ways to be joyful and to share that joy with other people. I want to be a lifelong war learner. I want to love unconditionally, I want to hear people's stories and share those stories. I long to explore the outside world for sure. And to get back to traveling and that kind of thing. Also, from the pandemic. I've learned, I want to explore more inside. What's going on inside. And I think a new exploration place for me right now is I want to prepare myself and the people around me for my death, so that it can be, I hesitate to say good because I'm not sure that that's always the case. But that it can be fully experienced and then it can be okay. Previous Next

< Back Miriam's Story Miriam describes her experience studying the Hutterite community. She reflects on their sense of community and how it has been shown in her own life. 00:00 / 05:21 When I graduated from college, which is just where you are, I was able to know about and to actually, in that summer afterwards, go to study the Hutterites. The Hutterites and live communally. But what it means to live communally is that you're not really looking at what a lot of psychology looks at, which is sort of an individual lifespan, or tradition or whatever, of self, self, self. But these are people who live in a rural area, in a farming in the Midwest or in Canada, who came from east from Europe, decades go. This is a an agrarian farm thing. And these people learned from childhood there were a few people who moved into these communities but they've had plenty of children an average of 10 to 12 children, per family. Yeah. And I was amazed by how the world can be so different if you're living in a situation where you don't have money. Nobody has things. No, you don't own a house. This there's a car. But that's because the man who was in charge of the the farming things, he has to go to town and buy some equipment that can't be made, but the shoemaker lived there, and the people who made their clothes lived there. And there was a use of health care that people thought it was necessary. Nobody lived in individual house, nobody had their own fancy kitchens, everybody ate, breakfast, lunch, dinner together. Everybody went to school, but not outside, of course, they had their own teachers, they had their own churches, and they had their own process. Everybody went to church. Everybody wore the shoes that were made there. And everybody saw themselves as very much like the others. There were, there was a family or a couple who belong to the community, and they left. And that was a terrible thing for that community. Wow. Nobody ever left these communities. Right. Right. 2:49 Do you think it helped them in a way to have this really, really intense sense of community? Or did it almost become like a, like a total lack of individualism? 3:01 That's a very difficult question. Right. Right. I think that is the basic question. 3:07 In the United States, there's been sort of this push for, like, sort of extreme individualism, and it's sort of like, you rely on yourself, you get your toes, and that's, that's kinda like, where the line is drawn. We lost a sense of community in a lot of places, I think. So I wonder how we can find that happy medium, sort of where it's like, you still like feel like your own person, and you have this autonomy, but to still feel grounded in your community, you know what I mean? 3:34 In fact, have a probably 30/40 years ago now, there were villages where older people were able to sort of join together and support each other. Because they were they really want to live in a nursing home. There's nothing about a nursing home that is desirable. And they've started it here five years ago, called Northampton neighbors, but it was for older people who and that's how come I happen to be sitting here with you. 4:10 Yes, yeah, exactly. 4:13 Could join together in some ways, but have the kind of autonomy and world of their very special interests, and biases and skills and so forth. And it has worked. Right? Right has worked amazingly well. So anybody could call and say, Ah, is it possible that somebody could get me to the doctor, you know, supposed to snow on Wednesday, and there'll be somebody who would volunteer to take the person. Previous Next

< Back Rebecca's Story Rebecca discusses the lasting influence of joining Science Olympiad in middle school on her relationships, as well as the way that it has shaped her goals and life to this day. 00:00 / 03:44 I just joined it initially because I wanted something to do, an extracurricular, and when I was in middle school we only had flag football or Science Olympiad. So, for me it was a pretty obvious choice, and I got put just at random in an event called “Disease Detectives” which is just very, very basic epidemiology. So the first time I did a practice exam it was on asthma prevalence in a school where the school was right next to a factory and you had to figure out what was causing high asthma prevalence. It sort of felt like it was solving puzzle, even though we were literally taking an exam. At the end, I just felt so cool—I just thought it was so cool that I could assemble all this evidence and present at the end: this is what happened, this is how it happened. I think it's something that has carried me even now to studying public health because that’s the reason that I chose to study public health is that I wanted to learn more about epidemiology, and I wanted to become a disease detective—as dorky as that may sound. One of my coaches, Senila, who just every single day would just push me, and at first I think she was someone who really scared me because she was so dedicated to her own academics. But, you know, I think her strictness had a love behind it too and so she really just—she inspired me to see what was possible in my future, and she showed me how to do it so I really have eternal gratitude for her for being such a positive influence in my life. A real beauty of Olympiad is that it really does inspire kids to go out into the world and do science. When it became my turn to coach later, I think my excitement and passion for it helped inspire kids to also feel passionate for it. I remember the first year I got, the coaches, got bowling shirts instead of normal t-shirts, and I remember the first time I had my name embroidered on the sleeve it just felt so, so cool. One of the, I think proudest moments of my life was, I worked with this one girl in the club almost every and we became really good friends honestly, and on the day of our actual competition her parents came up to me—and I had never met them before—and they asked me if I was Rebecca. And I said, yes, and they said, our daughter always talks about you. You’ve made her care so much about science and she really, really likes you. It's so important I think to teach people how to learn outside of the context of school. I think Science Olympiad was really, for me, it was that and for many of peers it was too. Really, it taught me to, you know, even if you’re not one hundred percent enthusiastic about something to try it because you honestly never know where it's going to take you. Because I didn’t really want to do Science Olympiad at the start and now it has truly shaped my whole young adult life. Previous Next

Laura's Story In this story, Laura reflects on her connection to modern dance and how it has followed her throughout her life. Scroll to Listen Laura's Story 00:00 / 05:28 Laura: I believe I was four and my mother in a creative movement class that was in the basement of this teacher’s home. She was just magical to me. She—her name was Roslyn Fidel. I have very vivid memories of being in this class at age four and growing like a flower, leaping over rivers, and just the magic of being in the presence of this captivating figure—this dance teacher. So, it never stopped after that. We moved further out of Long Island, and my mother found another wonderful teacher of modern dance. In my—I guess maybe my junior year—I would start taking the Long Island railroad into the city to take classes at the 92nd Street Y. In my senior, I started dancing with one of these pioneers of modern dance, his name was Charles Weidman, and would be in these performances on Friday nights. And then I became a dance major at Ohio State but didn’t last because I actually became ill with anorexia and left school and then there were different steps to where ended up. I was in very bad shape and this dance teacher from my teen years called me, and she said that she had heard another of the students in that group was at the University of Wisconsin and she was studying something called dance therapy. And she thought I might be interested in. She had heard I was having a hard time. So, within a week, I was enrolled at NYU in their dance therapy program. And it was such a lifesaver for me because I had been—there was such conflict, such yearning to dance; and I was so depressed and unable to dance; I didn’t have the strength, and it felt so far away—as soon as I walked into that first class of dance therapy I realized—I discovered that I could bring dance back into my life in a way that would also help other people and be really meaningful and meet me where I was at a person and give me this future. Dance actually didn’t end up becoming my main career. Actually, I got a master’s degree in social work. I managed to through missing dance and feeling that social work was never the appropriate—the best—career for me, I was not one to sit in a chair. I managed to discover a way to continue to dance indirectly through the social work because I was working with elders and discovered there was woman who—Liz Lerman—who had an intergenerational dance company. I saw a picture of her dancing with these older dancers in this Swan Lake lineup, and I was just captivated. You know, I once wrote something about this question of growing older as a dance. When I—often times—and it used to happen maybe more, I would dream about dance. Actually, I just had a dream where I could do amazing things in my dream. I could fly into the stars. I would take off from the ground and sail and wouldn’t come down—things like that. So, I had written this—it was an article actually for a magazine about growing older as a dancer, and this hope that those images when I closed my eyes and dream, that I would still have that capacity to conjure those. That they would still come to me. Because I think the imaginable life—the dream life—is another life and maybe that would be something that would be a gift in my dying days.