Rumor – and fact! – has it that this is the year in which most 71ers turn 60. In honor of that fact, our Reunion was mildly transformed into a birthday celebration of sorts.
More specifically, the dinner at Prospect on Saturday night was marked by several celebratory touches. There was a gift bag for each classmate, including a bag of specially marked candies; a “Happy Birthday” rendition from Shere Khan, the campus a capella group that has serenaded us at recent class events; and a CD giveaway of rock and pop tunes, many of them totems of our generation ...
For Alan Holmer ’71 and his wife, Joan *73, cystic fibrosis is a lot more than a title on an appeal envelope that comes once a year. It’s a disease they’ve lived with for almost 30 years, since both of their children – now in their late 20s – have had it since birth.
“It’s one of the ‘orphan diseases,’” says Alan, and carries a life expectancy of just 37. That’s considerably higher than it was a generation ago, when it was only 18. Those with the disease gradually lose lung function when a defective gene causes mucus and related secretions to become thick and sticky. These secretions plug up tubes, ducts and passageways, especially in the pancreas and lungs, and victims generally die of respiratory failure or related problems. Essentially, patients suffocate to death; imagine contemplating that for your child.
Ask a classmate about his or her favorite music, and you’d get a range of answers, but most would probably cluster around Classic Rock, Motown, folk/pop and perhaps classical. Or maybe jazz. But you wouldn’t find many takers for the Broadway and pop standards of an earlier generation, the work of Cole Porter, Rogers and Hart, Harold Arlen and Hoagy Carmichael.
Those are among the central musical inspirations for Peter Robinson ’71, who gets to play from their repertoire several nights a week at the Fairfax Hotel, on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C. He plays there in the Fairfax Lounge, Wednesdays through Saturdays, and works on his own compositions by day from his home in nearby Bethesda, Md.
