Friday Morning in Midtown: Borough of Manhattan Community College Commencement at Madison Square Garden

Saturday Afternoon in Greenwich Village:The GiNYU Force presents Breaks U: Senior Year Collegiate Bboy Jam at NYU's Kimmel Center

(Videos courtesy Tavvon Reynolds) (Video courtesy Tim Zhongill) (Video courtesy Bboy Network) (Video courtesy Moose M)

Thursday Morning in Tribeca: Lab/Shul & Storahtelling Rosh Hashana Services at Borough of Manhattan Community College Tribeca Performing Arts Center

(Video courtesy procontra)

Late Wednesday Afternoon in Tribeca: The View from Borough of Manhattan Community College Campus at Chambers Street

We've always loved the early evening and night view of lower Manhattan as we exit the Borough of Manhattan Community College's main building on Chambers Street near West Street. It looked particularly nice at 4:45 p.m. today.

Tuesday Afternoon in Tribeca: Looking Out at One World Trade Center from the Ninth Floor of Fiterman Hall

This semester the new Fiterman Hall at Borough of Manhattan Community College opened -- the old Fiterman Hall building was so heavily damaged from the collapse of 7 World Trade Center on 9/11 that it had to be demolished -- and we've been teaching our wonderful creative writing workshop there on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. On the Barclay Street side of the building on the ninth floor, they have some comfortable swivel chairs placed at the floor-to-ceiling windows, and on this very chilly, rainy/snowy afternoon before class, we watched the still-not-complete One World Trade Center and all the construction by the PATH terminal (just opened again after the hurricane) below.

Wednesday Night in Tribeca: At the Chambers Street Station, A Sign Announces the H Train Returns to Rockaway

After meeting with our wonderful Wednesday evening English 101 class at the Borough of Manhattan Community College's Murray Street building, we went down to wait for the A train at Chambers Street and found this sign, nostalgic to all those of us who remember the HH train in the Rockaways (and the CC to Rockaway Park before that).

To replace some of the service, since the Jamaica Bay tracks were destroyed by Superstorm Sandy, a free H train shuttle will run from Far Rockaway (the last stop, now served by a bus shuttle from Howard Beach/JFK) to Beach 90th Street along the rarely used Hammels Wye.

(Photo by the great Nathan Kensinger, whose amazing work we first came across in 2009 with "Abandoned Brooklyn.")

Wednesday Afternoon in Tribeca: View of the Hudson River

On this warm, overcast early October afternoon, we traveled among some of the great colleges we're teaching at this semester: from the School of Visual Arts to Fashion Institute of Technology to Borough of Manhattan Community College, where we snapped this pic of the river from the third floor bridge at the 199 Chambers Street main building.

Tuesday Afternoon in Lower Manhattan: Port Authority Police Bagpipers Commemorate September 11, 2001

At 1:20 p.m. we were coming out of the subway on Murray and Church Streets on our way to teach creative writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College when we stopped to watch and listen to the mournful sounds of the Port Authority police bagpipe band commemorate the dead of September 11, 2001.

Our class meets at the newly rebuilt Fiterman Hall, which opened two weeks ago, replacing the old Fiterman Hall, which was damaged beyond repair by the collapse of 7 World Trade Center.  It was very hard not to think about that day eleven years ago.

Sunday Afternoon in Tribeca: Opera on the Terrace with BMCC Downtown Symphony and "La Forza del Destino" at Borough of Manhattan Community College

We had the incredible good fortune to be able to catch much of today's 19th Annual Opera on the Terrace, with the BMCC Downtown Symphony performing a concert version Verdi's La Forza del Destino, a favorite opera, with Douglas Anderson doing a remarkable job as conductor, and with the participation of our excellent BMCC Downtown Chorus and and BMCC Select Chorus.

It was our last Sunday of the long spring semester, in which we taught seven classes at three schools, and this is finals week at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Finished with one class just before 3 p.m., we got to the Richard Harris Terrace on the second floor in time for the opera to begin

The featured singers, who were wonderful, were John Uehlein, Cynthia Simeone, Lars Woodrul, David Gordon, Andrea Saposnik, Melissa Gerstein, and Mark Victor Smith.

Dr. Eugenia Oi Yan Yau directed the BMCC Downtown Chorus and the BMCC Select Chorus; the latter are outstanding music students from voice and chorus class. Like the BMCC Downtown Chorus, the BMCC Downtown Symphony is made up of students, faculty and staff as well as members of the downtown business and residential communities.

On a cool, grey, drizzly day during which we had to be on campus for nine hours, it was such a treat to listen to Verdi's sublime music and be taken away to another time and place and captivated by the beauty of the music.

Here's the great tenor Richard Tucker, whom we were named after (Tucker knew our uncle, Dave Tarras), singing "La vita è inferno" from La Forza del Destino:

We're grateful we got to be at the annual Opera on the Terrace this Sunday.

Sunday Afternoon in Tribeca: Parents and Kids in Washington Market Park

Winter returned soon after the springlike lull of Thursday and Friday, but despite the frigid weather on Sunday afternoon, little kids and their parents were out having fun at Washington Market Park, at the corner of Greenwich and Chambers Streets in Tribeca. It's especially popular with kids.

This semester our weekend teaching for the wonderful Borough of Manhattan Community College is on Sundays at the Chambers Street main building, which is between the park and Stuyvesant High School. Between our 12 noon-3 p.m. and 5 p.m.-8 p.m. classes, we have an office hour and then a free hour at 4 p.m. when we usually go out to have an early dinner, and this afternoon We walked down the steps into the park. That's One World Trade Center going up in the background.

One boy was playing kickball with his mom, off camera view to the left.

This little girl seemed to be new to a two-wheeler but she was getting good. In a few seconds she was on the ground and needed her mom to right her, but she seemed sanguine and in another half-minute was telling us to get out of her way as she biked past.

There's a little train, like the one in East River State Park, and this mom was putting her kids on it.

And this dad was having a lot of fun on the playground equipment, delighting his kids by acting like a scary monster or something.

Snow is expected tonight. Spring is still one month -- four weeks -- away.

Thursday Afternoon in Tribeca: Sheryl St. Germain at Borough of Manhattan Community College

This afternoon we had the privilege of attending a poetry reading at Borough of Manhattan Community College featuring Sheryl St. Germain, a poet whose work we've admired for decades.

She connected incredibly well with the audience of community college students, something not every writer can do. (At other community colleges we've taught at, some who also connected really well are our friends Peter Meinke, Geoffrey Philp and Judith Ortiz Cofer at Broward Community College and Kate Gale at Mesa Community College.) The BMCC students asked highly intelligent questions, maybe two dozen of them: it was probably the best Q & A period we've seen after a reading in our last four years in New York.

A native of New Orleans, Sheryl St. Germain has taught creative writing at The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Knox College and Iowa State University. She currently directs the MFA program in Creative Writing at Chatham University where she also teaches poetry and creative nonfiction. Her work has received several awards, including two NEA Fellowships, an NEH Fellowship, the Dobie-Paisano Fellowship, the Ki Davis Award from the Aspen Writers Foundation, and most recently the William Faulkner Award for the personal essay.

Her books include Going Home, The Mask of Medusa, Making Bread at Midnight, How Heavy the Breath of God, and The Journals of Scheherazade. She has also published a book of translations of the Cajun poet Jean Arceneaux, Je Suis Cadien. A book of lyric essays, Swamp Songs: the Making of an Unruly Woman, was published in 2003 by The University of Utah Press. Her most recent book is Let it Be a Dark Roux: New and Selected Poems, published by Autumn House Press in 2007.

Sheryl was incredibly personable and both eloquent and plain-spoken. Her first reading was of an essay about her girlhood in her native city, a city we loved from our many visits from 1981 to about 1995 as a guest teacher in Tom Whalen's superb creative writing program for gifted high school students at the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts. Here's an excerpt from Sheryl's essay:

Our parish, our church and school were named after St. Lawrence the Martyr, one of the Roman Church deacons who fell victim to the persecution of Valarian in the year 258. The nuns told us different stories about how St. Lawrence met his death, most of which involved eventual decapitation, but the one I liked best was the story about how, when commanded to surrender the church's treasures to Valerian, he distributed the wealth to the poor instead, and at the end presented those poor to Valerian as the wealth of the church. Valerian, infuriated, initiated a series of tortures, the last of which was to roast him on a gridiron. It is said that during his roasting he joked with his torturer, saying "One side has been roasted, turn me over and eat it."

In addition to teaching us the stories about the lives of the saints and having us memorize the appropriate answers to questions of faith, once we hit fifth grade the nuns also taught us about sex , or rather how to avoid it. Sister Gisela, a big, red-faced nun of an indeterminate age would lecture us on sex during religion class, pacing the hot, unairconditioned classroom, huffing, her face getting redder and redder, as she spoke, her black habit flying out behind her when she turned as if to whip into shape any kid who might have been behind her.

"Your body is the holy temple of the Holy Ghost," she'd say. She had a sometimes stiff way of speaking, and an accent I later learned was Cuban. "This means no kissing until you marry and no touching the holiest parts of your body until you marry!" At this point she would turn and glare at us, one by one, and I swear it seemed as if she could see right into my rotten, sex-crazed young soul. When she looked at me like that I knew that she knew those thoughts I had during Mass while I was pretending to pay attention.

Sometimes she would separate the boys from the girls. Father Schutten, our pastor, would talk to the boys, and she would talk to us.

"No wearing of shiny shoes!" she proclaimed one day. "The boys are looking into the shine of the shoes and seeing what is under there, that which they should not see until you are married." She was sweating on the day she told us this, and I remember how flushed her face was, how drenched she was. She wiped her forehead with a handkerchief. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," she whispered under her breath.

"And girls, you must look before you walk down the stairs in this building. I have discovered that the boys are waiting underneath the stairs to look up the skirts of the girls as they descend. This is a sin and it causes the Virgin Mary great sorrow when these sins are committed." We squirmed in our seats and my friend Maggie whispered to me "It's the boys' sin, not ours!"

Although I don't think it was the nuns' aim to teach us that our bodies were sinful-they meant to teach us they were holy-that was how we came to understand their lectures. The unclothed body was an unholy body, and anything we did with that body that felt good was probably a sin. We learned that lesson well, but that didn't mean we didn't still take pleasure in seduction. After all, sins of the flesh were not mortal sins.

My friend Maggie gave the first slumber party my mother ever allowed me to attend. We were both in seventh grade. St. Lawrence, not to mention Sister Gisela or Father Shutten, would have been displeased to know that we spent much of the night playing strip-tease music and undressing.

We spent the early part of the evening calling boys on the phone and hanging up. We made several calls to Brian Tizzard, the quiet, dark-haired boy we all had a crush on. At one point we snuck out of Maggie's bedroom window and ran the few blocks down the street to Brian's house where we threw rocks against a window we hoped was his bedroom window. When his mother's head appeared at the window we shrieked and ran back to Maggie's. By midnight Maggie's parents were asleep and we could begin our stripping. I had never seen my mother's naked body, or the unclothed body of any mature woman, for that matter. My breasts were just barely beginning to grow, but Maggie's were fully developed, and I wondered what they would look like.

Maggie went first; she had been practicing, she said. Setting the needle of her pink record player to the beginning of "The Stripper," which she had as a 45, she jumped up on top of her bed and threw her thick, dark hair back, looking at us with a look that reminded me of Sister Gisela's look, but this one knew something else. As the music began she pranced around the bed, tossing her hair this way and that, slowly unbuttoning the buttons of her cotton pajama top, which had, as I recall, blue elephants on it. Her breasts bounced as she danced. She turned away from us, dropped her pajama top, looked back at us and grinned, and with the music as loud as we dared (we didn't want to wake her parents) she jumped and turned toward us revealing herself to us in all her bounty. Hair falling over her face, olive skin glowing in the lamplight, she grabbed her breasts and held them out to us, kicking her legs out from side to side to the music. She represented at that moment all I knew of desire and its mysteries, and all I wanted. With her full brown breasts and their darker areolas and even darker nipples, Maggie's body was both enticing and frightening. Her gutsiness infected us all and soon we were all gyrating hips and waists, throwing our hair about and tossing off our pajamas.

We were fascinated with the strippers on Bourbon Street whom we'd only seen glimpses of thus far. During trips to the Quarter, set up by the church or our family to introduce us to its "history" and "architecture" we always wound up walking down Bourbon street, which I guess the adults thought was ok as long as it was day time. But the strip clubs rarely closed, and sometimes we'd get a peek when the men guarding the doors held them open briefly to entice passersby. The strippers, it seemed to me then, had a power over men I wanted to have. Years later, as a young woman, I would try to get a job as a dancer in a Fat City club, but when I learned stripping was expected I couldn't go through with it. By then I preferred a more intimate form of power and pleasure. I loved the way an orgasm would wash through my body like a flood, filling me, swelling me from my ear lobes down to the very spaces between my toes. To reach orgasm was to reach that place so like a swamp, to be filled in that way with such a diversity of flora and fauna and still, still water, to be awash with desire-this was what it was to be alive, I thought. At once swamped and lifted up above it all.

Her poems did for us what she told the students Kafka said writing should do, that famous line about "break[ing] the frozen sea within us." The first poem she read was "Getting Rid of the Accent," which her audience could relate to since the New York and New Orleans accents are so similar (our Brooklynese got mistaken there for Yat). Here's Sheryl's poem in full:

I thought I had gotten rid of it
after I moved to Texas; speech classes
and twelve years in another state--but I'd
still fall back into it like into the gutter
whenever I visited, even on the phone,
whenever my mother called, forgetting
I was a college graduate, forgetting
I was an English major, saying things
like wheah ya at sweethawt, or
dat doan mean nuttn, ya awta seen
da way she pawks dat caw, the sounds
I was fed like milk as a child, the aw
sound predominating as if it was just
too much work to pronounce the r.

I tried hard to get rid of it,
to make my voice sound
as if I had nothing to do with
the black smell of the Lake,
nothing to do with my mother's
beans and rice,
nothing to do with my father's breath,
my brother's track marks.

Once, after listening to me speak,
a friend snickered, "I can tell
you're from New Orleans
by the way you say room and leg."
I couldn't hear it at first, couldn't hear
that I was saying rum for room, and layg
for leg. It was the hardest part
of getting rid of the accent,
rum still sounds more right than room,
gets the job done quicker,
with less effort. Leg was hard too
because layg was in me like blood.
It was a word my mother used a lot,
get your laygs off there, Sheryl,
close your laygs, Sheryl, wash
out the tub when you shave your
laygs, Sheryl, but I practiced
and practiced it, the short e
of leg and the long o of room,
squinching my mouth
into the unnatural positions,
working my way from
the voice of my father,
the blood of my brother.

I was not going to sink
as my mother had, lower
and lower into this spongy
land, I would not have my words
sound like the drunken streets,
the ditch-water
that runs by our house still,
infectious, addictive,

when I sing of this place I love
unreasonably more than life
itself, I want the words to rise
strong and true, separate.

Sheryl also read poems about her family, her Cajun roots, and an "ars poetica" poem about her reasons for becoming a poet. Then came the enlightening question-and-answer session that was so fascinating that it was hard to believe the time had passed so quickly (not the norm, in our experience, at poetry readings). It was a wonderful event and we're grateful we got a chance to attend.

Saturday Morning in Midwood: Breakfast at Brooklyn College

Forty years after we started as a freshman at Brooklyn College in the fall of 1969 - we actually took our first course, Poli Sci 1, that summer - we were back on campus this morning as we have been on Saturday mornings since January 2008.

We're lucky enough to be teaching a 9 a.m. to noon class, The Short Story, for the wonderful Borough of Manhattan Community College's weekend BMCC@Brooklyn College program.

We've also been teaching classes for BMCC on the BC campus on Friday evenings - so we were here until 8:15 p.m. last night teaching a creative writing workshop. It's all been incredible, being back on this campus where long ago we had so many of our formative experiences.

We finished our B.A. in Poli Sci here in June 1973, then came back for the start of Brooklyn College's MFA program in creative writing from 1974 to June 1976. Before we moved to Florida, we taught day and evening sections of remedial writing for the English Department as well as the old Veterans Outreach Program and the Liberal Studies for Adults Program during the spring 1979 and fall 1980 semesters.

So all around us are memories. We took these pics on this damp silent morning as we made our way from the Hillel Gate to our classroom in Boylan Hall, stopping to sit on a bench and have a bite to eat.

Here's a view of parts of Gershwin Hall, the outdoor amphitheater and Whitman Hall. Our June 1965 graduation from Meyer Levin Junior High School (J.H.S. 285) at Whitman Auditorium was the first time we stepped on the campus.

Our friends from college who have not been at BC for years wouldn't recognize a lot of the campus. The library has expanded to what seems like four times its size in the old days, and these parts of the library are seamless additions to the old building we knew in the 70s.

We get here early on Saturday mornings, taking the B48 bus from the corner of Lorimer Street and Metropolitan Avenue around 7 a.m. The route takes us through the Latino and Hasidic south side of Williamsburg and then through Bedford-Stuyvesant and what we call Crown Heights but may be Prospect Heights.

Neighborhoods in Brooklyn don't have the same names we knew growing up in the 50s and 60s, or represent different parts of the borough. At Franklin Avenue and Eastern Parkway we get off the bus for the 2 train to the last stop, Flatbush Avenue-Brooklyn College.

Looking back to the Hillel Gate where we have to show our photo ID to the security guard, we can remember when anyone could get on any college campus without an ID. (The technology may not even have existed back then for photo IDs; our driver's licenses didn't have pics of us, either.)

As a junior and senior at Midwood High School in 1966-68, we'd often take a shortcut through the BC campus on our way from the Flatbush Avenue B41 bus or our Grandpa Herb's car on the days when he picked us up on his way to work at the Slack Bar on Fulton Street from his apartment in Rockaway.

We once went up to the bell tower of what used to be LaGuardia Hall late one Friday in the fall of 1970. A friend of a friend somehow had a set of keys to a lot of buildings and he took us up to the top, via a series of fire-escape-type ladders, at a time when the campus was otherwise deserted. Somehow we overcame our extreme fear of heights and were really impressed with the view. It was thrilling.

In those days, there was never any sound coming out of the bell tower. Now it chimes every fifteen minutes, and when we got out of our class at noon today, it played a long sweet melody. Brooklyn College stands in for Yale in the TV show Gossip Girl.

Although the Georgian buildings have the same dignity they did back in the day, like a lot of New York City, the campus was run-down and tacky in the 1970s.

This cat is one we've seen before. He used to be a lot skinnier.

Back in the late 60s and early 70s, kids who in retrospect look like hippies - um, that would be us - sat on the quadrangle and other places until it was mostly dirt and only patches of scraggly grass. The gingko trees and others seemed pretty but less majestic 35 years ago, and where the cat is standing there was one of four ugly temporary buildings to handle the overflow of baby-boomer students (more than twice as many as today).

The prefab temporary buildings were called T-1, T-2, T-3 and T-4 and we wrote in a school paper suggesting a "name that temp" contest to give them more memorable monikers. We suggested the one housing the Financial Aid offices should be called Monty Hall.

We can't tell if Whitehead Hall always had this much ivy or we just don't remember it. Back in the 60s and 70s, Whitehead, built in 1962, was the "new" building, and it held the social sciences departments like economics, poli sci, sociology ("sosh") and anthropology ("anthro").

In the Whitehead basement, about a month before our graduation, we were one of two students - our friend Carole Robinson was the other - who appeared along with Dean Nathaniel Jones and some alumni on a CUNY TV show about new careers or something. We wore a fake-velvet turquoise Edwardian sports jacket and came down with the chicken pox the next day.

When the show finally came on TV, our family and girlfriend were excitedly watching in our house's "finished" basement. At the first glimpse of ourselves, we ran upstairs screaming and only came back to watch after being coaxed that we didn't look or sound "that bad."

The Whitehead cafeteria was here when we were undergrads. The student radicals used to hang out here, as opposed to the fraternity and house plan kids who hung out in the much larger Boylan Cafeteria. By the time we were in grad school, it had become Kosher Country or maybe Kosher King, a low-rent, short-lived McDonald's/Burger King clone.

Now there's an addition to the building and all of it is the Library Cafe, open at all hours, with lots of computers for students. It's a comfy place with some tables, counters, and plush chairs and couches. They proudly serve Starbucks coffee here too, though never when we're there on Friday evenings and Saturdays.

This Saturday morning, we got our usual perfect oatmeal and venti unsweetened black iced tea at the Starbucks on the corner of Hillel Place and Kenilworth Place. It was the wonderful Greek greasy spoon Sugar Bowl in our day.

"Lime rickey for Blondie Boy," Andreas would say when we came in. (Old photos taken from the now-gone Brooklyn Junction blog.)

This looks toward the lower campus, to the quadrangle. This is Boylan Hall. It's pretty odd these past few terms to be teaching English for BMCC in rooms where decades before we took Afro-American Literature I with Prof. Dan Mayers or Dosteovsky in Translation with our favorite BC Russian professor, Spencer Roberts.

Sometime in 1971, a student came up to our second-floor LaGuardia Hall office of The Ol' Spigot, the day session (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, "CLAS") student government newspaper, to complain that his bike had been stolen from the unlocked bicycle racks here. We were assigned to write an article and found a bunch of students whose bikes were also stolen.

Both student papers published editorials calling for better security, and the college created a little guardhouse for one of the Wackenhuts - the BC-contracted private security force back then - to stand watch over the bicycles.

In August 2002, when the 2003 edition of The Best 345 Colleges, published by the Princeton Review, ranked Brooklyn College number one in the country for the beauty of its campus, it caused much hilarity among our friends from undergrad days, who thought the designation must be a joke.

Most of our friends have lived outside New York for years - back in the 1970s we'd all sit around talking how none of us could wait to leave the city (we waited till January 1981, when suburban Fort Lauderdale and a job at Broward Community College beckoned). We tell them it's a lot prettier these days than it used to be. Whoever did the landscaping performed the highest of mitzvahs.

This is the front entrance to the library. In our day, in a different form - no side door, no grand steps, just a creaky revolving door in the entrance to the tattered lobby where we hung out amid forlorn-looking chairs and lumpy discount couches - this was the entrance to LaGuardia Hall.

LaGuardia housed the student affairs offices and student organizations - student government, newspapers, yearbook, etc. - and some random college offices as well as the day-care center our friends successfully fought for in 1970.

BC didn't have dorms, of course - it will soon have one - but LaGuardia Hall was basically where we lived from 1969 to 1975 or so. A lot of our current close friends, including our BFF whose family's Williamsburg house serves as Dumbo Books HQ, we met in LaGuardia Hall. This plaque is really the only thing left to indicate that LaGuardia Hall existed.

At the base of the bell tower is the clock, which didn't work that well back when Lindsay and Beame were mayors and John W. Kneller, who passed away recently, was Brooklyn College president.

It was most famous because a ball was stuck between two numerals - I think it was within "III" - and was visible in every photograph. How they got it out - or when - we have no idea. In the two years we've been working on campus, the clock has been working perfectly.

So we sit on our bench in front of the former LaGuardia Hall with 40 minutes to go before class - teachers really need to be in the room at least ten minutes early to set up and put stuff on the board - with our oatmeal and iced tea and have our breakfast.

The campus is mostly still at this hour on a Saturday morning, the only sounds occasional chirping by birds. Back in the 60s and 70s, there were never any classes on weekends, and we came only for the library and special events like films, plays, and sit-in strikes.

As we get up to leave, we can look towards Bedford Avenue to see the brand-new West Quad and the new big building across the street. While we were students here in the 70s, they built an overpass over Bedford Avenue and steps leading to the quad (now, we suppose, the "east quad," destroying the Bedford Gate entrance. (Photo courtesy the indispensible Forgotten New York.)

A hideous cubelike structure called the Plaza Building went up. (Old overpass pic courtesy of the great Flatbush Pigeon blog.)

When we taught a class in the Plaza Building's basement in the fall of 1980, we'd sometimes have to walk through an inch or more of water as it flooded frequently. The only nice thing about the structure was the view of the campus from the overpass, as in this pic Jeffrey W. posted to Yelp:

The Plaza Building and overpass were demolished four or five years ago, replaced by the West Quad building, which is a big improvement.

The pics here are only from a small part of the campus, the part we traveled on our way to class. There are many more beautiful places on the Brooklyn College campus, like the lily pond - again, back in our day it wasn't as pretty as in this pic from the BC website.

On the G train going home after class, we saw a hipster with a Gators T-shirt and asked him who UF was playing today. "Troy," he told us. "It will be a slaughter." He had been, of course, a University of Florida undergrad; we went to law school there and later worked at UF, so we go "Go Gators!" too.

But we're pretty loyal to Brooklyn College and we even served on the Board of Directors of the Alumni Association and wrote the "Class Notes" for its bulletin from our graduation in 1973 till when we moved to Florida in 1981. (There's stuff about that from 1978 in our new book, Autumn in Brooklyn.)

So we're really grateful to Borough of Manhattan Community College (we've taught at seven community colleges in three states and BMCC is really well-run: start there, go anywhere) for giving us the privilege of coming back to the Brooklyn College campus to teach.