As I wrote earlier this week, during Sunday’s mini-reunion of editors and writers from my high-school newspaper, one of the attendees brought along a disk containing scans of many back issues of that student newspaper, Shorelines.

The cover of the October 22, 1971 issue—published when I was 16—featured the photo of me that you see at right in which I’m standing next to my social studies teacher, Daniel Weitz.

No story accompanied the photo; I guess the staff just thought that the sight of a student towering over his teacher was amusing.

The jacket I’m wearing—decorated with a “War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things” patch on one arm, a peace symbol made up of studs on the back, and other hippie fashion accoutrements (I think that’s a “Frodo Lives” button on my chest, though the photo is too grainy for me to tell for sure)—can be seen in other photos of the time.

Sadly, that jacket no long exists—though I do still have one of my dashikis and a few of my headbands. And with Halloween coming up, who knows? It might be time to wear them again!

As much as I enjoyed my brief visit to the annual meeting of the Lewis Carroll Society as recounted in my previous posts, the primary reason I’d headed into Manhattan occurred later that day—a mini-reunion of writers and editors from my high-school newspaper. I was part of the first graduating class of Brooklyn’s South Shore High School, which meant that it had no newspaper before we got there, and so it was up to us to invent the paper’s journalistic traditions instead of having any to follow. The writers and editors of that newspaper, which we dubbed Shorelines, were advised by a teacher named Ernie Seligmann who is no longer with us, but whom we all loved. We were a tight bunch then, but as the years went by, time, as usual, tore us apart.

For the last few years, we’ve been trying to arrange a reunion of those staffers, but until Sunday, we were never able to achieve even the smallest critical mass. Finally, four of us were able to be in Manhattan on the same day. We gathered at Marsielle restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen on 9th Avenue between 44th and 45th Streets to finally catch up. Below you can see Barry Chaiken, Donna Grant, me, and Marc Frons.

Though I’d seen Donna within the past year, I hadn’t seen Barry since 1993, and hadn’t seen Marc since 1985. (more…)

My high school friend turned bestselling author Donna Grant and her writing partner Virginia DeBerry have come up with a novel way to raise funds for Barack Obama, and I thought it was important to pass on their pitch while there’s still time for it to matter:

It’s no secret we are Obama women. We are committed to Barack Obama’s vision for America. We are committed to being a part of the process—or as we used to say ‘back in the day’ of protest marches and sit-ins—”If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

We had the amazing good fortune to meet Barack a year ago at the Barack on Broadway fundraiser in New York. Not just look at him from afar and cheer with the rest of the crowd—we actually had an up close, have a conversation meeting. OK, it wasn’t more than 5 minutes, but it was real. We were there! And although that encounter was brief, it left us even more convinced that he was the right person to lead our country in a new and brighter direction.

As part of that event, we had our picture taken with Barack, and we have proudly displayed it everywhere we could. We have seen many of you in person as we have toured with Gotta Keep on Tryin’ over the past year and have, without shame and with very little provocation, whipped out our cell phone copy of the photo. It’s on our MySpace and Facebook pages as well as our blog. Virginia’s mom carries her framed copy with her just in case someone hasn’t seen it yet.

We know that many of you are as committed as we are to electing Senator Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America. We wanted to find something concrete to do, and the one thing the campaign can use, in addition to our votes, is the money to continue both the grassroots and media outreach necessary to get people to the voting booths on November 4th, because that’s what really matters.

So in conjunction with Brett Deutsch, http://deutschphoto.com, the photographer who took the picture (and we fully admit right here that this was HIS idea) we have arranged to send you an 8X10 copy of the photo that has made our mamas proud, our photo with Barack Obama. It will be autographed by us—sorry, we don’t know Barack that well—yet. All for a campaign donation of $50.00.