Friday, February 10, 2012

Once upon a time

Thirty years ago this August (can that be true?) I left home to go to the United World College of the American West, an international baccalaureate college in Montezuma, New Mexico. It was the inaugural year for the school, the sixth member of the United World College family, and we were a hundred students from forty-six countries. An amazing experience all around! I went back for the tenth and twentieth graduation reunions in 1994 and 2004 but missed the twenty-fifth in 2009. Nobody wants to wait until the thirtieth, however, so we're having a reunion in New York this May for our class and the two classes which came after us. Lots of folks are coming, and people have started posting photos from back in the day. Here's one I'm delighted to see again, the cast of a movie shot during "Project Week" in Spring of 1983, a historical drama of forbidden love, class differences and murder. The cast hailed from France, England, the Netherlands, Venezuela, New Zealand, France, Ecuador, Jamaica, Belgium and the US. I wrote the script, full of heavy-handed metaphors, but happily nobody had time to learn it!