Week 1: Shopping, strawberries, and...Dr. Niles Crane?!

Week 1 of senior year second semester, and things are pretty busy already! My roomie Sara and I were in charge of dessert for Mellon Forum this week, so we decided to make chocolate-covered strawberries/pineapple/pretzels. A trip to Shaws and 3 hours of dipping later, ta-da!

A lovely display of deliciousness

TWO trays of chocolate-covered strawberries
(and that's not even including the pineapple)

Let's just say dessert disappeared quickly...Master K even joked that she should start hiring us to cater her events! Isn't it wonderful when you get to have fun and make yummy stuff on Yale's dime?

In terms of classes, I have to finish up both majors, so I came in with a pretty good idea of what I had to take. Senior Essay in HSHM is one credit, and I was planning to take Epidemics and Society as my fourth term course. For psych, I'm writing my senior essay through a seminar with Marvin Chun entitled "Mind, Brain, and Society," a mix of neuroscience, ethics, law, philosophy, and psych, so it should be pretty awesome.

After some debate, I also decided to take Abnormal Psychology over Biotechnology because I heard (from my roommate) that Abnormal Psych was a good course, and I figured I would get enough science in med school starting next year. The final question (still unresolved) is what I'm going to take for my fifth class, a seminar of some sort to be my final HSHM elective. Choices:

1) PLSC 248: Politics of Health Care - a Political Science seminar with William Kissick, who is a Yale alum and taught at UPenn for many years. He's one of the guys who helped draft Medicare, way back in the day. I'm hoping to go into public health as well as practicing medicine, so this would be very useful information.
2) HSHM 447: History of Chinese Science - a HSHM seminar with William Summers, whom I also had for Perspectives on Science one semester freshman year (he also teaches Philosophy in the Directed Studies program - a true Renissance Man!). Alternative medicine (e.g. accupuncture) is becoming a huge movement, so I figured it would be a good idea for me to learn about this too.
3) NBIO 535: History of Neuroscience - a grad-level Neurobio course with a historical twist...this would seem to be the perfect intersection of my two majors!

To get some (indirect) advice, I decided to attend a Master's Tea with David Hyde Pierce, a 1981 Silliman alum and now a famous actor. TV buffs will know him as Dr. Niles Crane from Frasier (a 4-time Emmy-winning role), while theater folks may know him better from the original casts of Spamalot and Curtains (for which he won a Tony in 2007)

Master's Teas usually begin with the guest telling us students something about their lives - how they got to where they are, and where they hope to go next - but Mr. Pierce simply opened the floor: "I have absolutely nothing to say, so just ask me questions!" What followed was a wonderful 90 minutes of intimate conversation touching on everything from how he got started in acting (he was originally a music major intending to become a concert pianist), to his first disappointment (auditioning for the Yale School of Drama and not being accepted).

He also had some hysterical show anecdotes, e.g. touring with a production of The Cherry Orchard in Japan: "Every night in the theater, we would hear this pitter-patter noise, kind of like rain. We couldn't figure out what on earth it was, until the wife of one of the actors came from the States to watch the production. Afterwards, she came backstage and told us that all the Japanese audience members had these headset-thingies that provided instant translation so they could understand what was going on, but as they would fall asleep, they would all drop their sets, and that was the pitter-patter noise we heard every night! In some sense, I guess that was the first feedback I had from an international audience!"

While at Yale, Mr. Pierce double-majored in Theater Studies and English: "When I chose to double-major, I guess I was subliminally listening to my mother's advice to always get a liberal education base. An English major seemed to be about the vaguest thing you could be...besides a philosophy major." Now as a successful actor, he's trying to branch out into different areas, such as trying musical roles, and he has even returned to playing piano, recently performing with Victoria Clark. His advice for students: "Always do scary things when you're old!"

With that in mind, off to tackle my first week of reading...

Return to Childhood

The last couple Master's Teas that I went to made me feel like a child at heart again: first the author Lois Lowry and then the singer/songwriter Raffi Cavoukian, better known by just his first name, Raffi. Both of them were super-crowded: we had to move into the Trumbull dining hall and the Silliman common room to fit everyone!

Just half of the Silliman common room, full of people waiting to hear Raffi...

The great thing about Master's Teas is the feel of a close, casual conversation with these fascinating people. The speakers aren't always well-known, but they have all led very interesting lives. Earlier this year I attended a Tea with one of the World Fellows, Sharmila Nebhrajani, then got to have dinner with her afterwards at Master K's house.

Besides being Chief Operating Officer of BBC Future Media and Technology, she also works with the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (sticking with the British spelling) on bioethical issues, like the creation of human-animal chimeras for research. On top of that, she's a single mother with two young children, who apparently enjoyed themselves immensely on Halloween =D

Second cool thing about Master's Teas: They're all organized by students! In general, students are the ones who initiate the contact with the proposed speaker and then talk to their residential college master to see if they're interested in sponsoring the tea. For Yale Scientific Magazine, we've had science writer Carl Zimmer and John Rennie '86, the editor-in-chief of Scientific American. Freshman year, my friend Sudipta arranged for Arthur Levine (the American editor of Harry Potter) to come; this time, fellow URCs Rosh and Roshan helped arrange both the Lois Lowry and the Raffi teas for YUM (Yale Undergraduate Magazine) and UNICEF, respectively.

You see all sorts of quirky details, like Lois Lowry's insistence on having Earl Grey tea and how she used her own family as semi-models for some of the books. Her daughter, then a college student, even helped her write some of the dialogue for the Anastasia series, since Anastasia's father is a college English professor.

Another interesting topic was book censorship, since Lowry's works are both some of the most lauded and the most challenged literature in the school systems. I remember reading Number the Stars for fifth grade and The Giver on my own around the same time...even though I'm twice as old now as I was back then (wow, that sounds strange to say), the lessons the books taught and the "deep" questions they brought up are certainly still relevant today.

Lois Lowry with her Earl Grey tea =)

I also had no idea that Lowry was also a photographer! Did you know she took the photos that appear on the covers of The Giver and Number the Stars?

You also never know what might happen afterwards...in this case, a friend emailed me a photo taken by Lowry's iPhone - you can also see it on her blog post here: The Tables Down at Mory's

See if you can find the girl with the striped red sweater...that's me!

The other cool thing is getting to hear about the speakers' current work, like Lois Lowry's upcoming book The Willoughbys. She even brought a proof and read us the first few tantalizing lines...it sounded something like Roald Dahl's The Twits and Matilda combined, with a bit of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket (who came for Master's Tea freshman year!).

The basic storyline is that there are these absolutely horrible parents who hatch a plan to get rid of their children, but at the same time, their very bright children are trying to rid themselves of these horrible parents. [Potential spoiler - highlight to read] Perhaps the best moment was when Ms. Lowry dryly stated, "Yes, by the end of the book, the parents are dead."

Raffi turned out to be an incredibly charismatic speaker with a wide range of interests and fun stories, though I should have expected it from some of his tongue-in-cheek lyrics. Nothing seemed off-limits, like he told us about quitting college and traveling around Canada playing coffeehouses. After that, he wrote a song for his former high school sweetheart (ironically a cheerleader for the rival school), invited her to come hear him play, and they eventually ended up getting married!

She was a teacher so he got involved with children's music, which is certainly how all of us in the room knew him. He even had the good grace to sing for us, which brought a sense of nostalgia to all us "Beluga Grads":

Nowadays, however, he's working on something slightly more serious but still very touching: a philosophy that he calls "Child Honoring." The basic idea is that children are people in their own right, but they're the most vulnerable members of the population since they're still growing and developing, mentally as well as physically.

Therefore, we should try to provide a safe, nurturing environment for all children so they can grow and learn to become productive, caring adults. The emphasis is on the child and the family, not any sort of political party, religion, or specific culture, which is one of the things that makes it so idealistically powerful. Now he's become a children's troubadour of another sort, even meeting with people such as the Dalai Lama and Al Gore.

Raffi reading the "Covenant for Honoring Children"

Third great thing about Master's Teas: how inspiring they are. From dinner with Sharmila I saw how it's possible to follow the topics you're really interested in, even if they're completely different. From tea with Raffi, I saw there were still plenty of forces for good, even though all we hear about on the news seems to be bad.

Perhaps with enough work and a little creativity, maybe one day I'll be asked to come back to Silliman for tea, cookies, and good conversation =)