St Anthony Association of North Carolina

Mentoring has been a big buzzword lately – from business mentoring, to youth mentoring, and so on. One reads a great deal about “intentional interactions” and “mentee development”. Part of the reason that it’s popping up so much is that it works – although, interestingly enough, it appears to work better when conducted on an informal basis. (See Taking a Hard Look at Formal Mentoring). The St Anthony Association of North Carolina Mentoring Program is designed to be a structured but informal way for Hall members to connect to folks who are not only working in (or retired from) a field they might be interested in but who they might not regularly encounter in their day-to-day.

The pilot group for the SAANC mentoring program will be about 5 or 6 pairs of brothers and sisters. If you are interested in being a part of this group – either now or in the future – please sign up here!

St. As and friends of all stripes are invited out to enjoy the company of Brother Mark O’Slotnick X’85 and friends this Labor Day weekend to groove at the GETDOWN Music Festival & Campout. Online ticket sales have ended but admission is still available at the gate. Located just north of Hillsborough in Efland, the weekend promises to be full of good vibes and great times.

Home of the iconic “Bowl of Cheese” among other questionable gastronomic items, the Ramshead Rathskeller returns to Franklin Street.

Though I personally had never been much of a patron of the Rat, I enjoyed knowing it was there – that someone of my parent’s generation or my grandparent’s generation could have gone there for a meal, or a beer, or just to carve their name in the wall. That I could eat in the same place which once might have hosted Brooke Gardiner or George Strong or Skip Awalt. One of those great college-town establishments that has become harder and harder to find over the years.

Brother Kurt Davies X’08 is traveling through the Balkans before arriving in Kyrgyzstan to begin his year-long Fulbright residency studying post-Soviet language policy and its effects on the Kyrgyz education system. When he’s able to do so, he’ll be updating friends and family on his journeys at kurtinkstan.wordpress.com. Expect colourful, intelligent commentary. Feedback is welcome and invited!

Having successfully set up residence in Sydney, Australia, our own Sister Leigh Tuckman X’05 has established an online shop through Etsy where you can order prints of her colourful posters. “It’s only got a few poster designs in it now, but I have plans to add more soon,” she says. Check it out!

Sister Andrea Young X’91 and her husband Khaled Hegazzi are founders and editors of the bilingual journal Meena. Today, it was featured on the PRI newsmagazine The World. You can listen to the segment online or download the MP3 for future enjoyment. Congrats Andy!

Bro. Dave Wright was incredibly generous and hosted the SAANC Summer Solstice Party at his house gorgeous house this year.  A number of St. A’s trekked out to the wilds west of Carrboro and partook of burgers and dogs – both foodstuff and four-legged – and chilled.  Sis. Rosenthal told us about her recent time in Israel; Sis. Jacobson gave me the straight dirt on a favorite old campfire story, that of the boa constrictor that may or may not have lived in the walls of the Annex; I got to see a number of St. A’s I haven’t seen in way too long and next year can’t come soon enough.

The point of all this is, of course, that I took some photos when I wasn’t gums-deep in a burger.  Lovely mental image, I know, but in comparison my photos will look great and that’s the point.  Even better:  some photos I took in June of flowers in the Hall’s front yard gardens.

Lots and lots of Xi’s (and a couple of other chapters?) rolled up on Top of the Hill at the corner of Colombia and Franklin Streets in Chapel Hill this year.  There were many drinks and dinners and a lot of great conversation.  Who would have guessed that the undergrads are into Steeplechase races?  Not me, and I had a fascinating conversation about them with Sis. Joy Jennings, the current Alumni Correspondent for Xi chapter.

I did my best to document the occasion but the toasting part made it awfully difficult to hold the camera still for long periods of time.  Still, I thought you’d like to see the photos I took, even if one of them involves a particularly pronounced motion blur.

In a letter dated October 24, 1978, Bro. Bill Bamberger describes a number of new initiatives – as well as old ones rekindled – the undergraduate chapter was undertaking at the time.  This is something I grabbed completely at random from amongst the unsorted material in the chapter archives and it turned out to describe the infancy or rebirth of probably a dozen different traditions still in place at the Hall:  pledge tests, the Tattler, guest speakers, maintaining the general registry, inviting alumni to meet at the Hall around Homecoming, Parents Dinner, and on and on.  I found the frankness of this letter – and its fond praise of Bro. Skip Awalt, so recently deceased – surprising and refreshing, a candid account of a time when the Hall’s long-term health and sense of self sounds especially tenuous.  I was also struck by how many of the names he mentions are readily familiar to anyone involved in the last three decades of Hall life.

In the course of the first page of the letter, Bro. Bamberger used a term we do not allow to be recorded and I obscured it through application of a removable “sticky” tab and some magic marker applied in turn to that tab.  The texts and materials of course remain whole in the document itself and I take special pleasure in the anonymous circle someone later penciled around that word to mark the taboo.  The letter’s second page includes the full text excerpted above regarding thirty one bids.  I was active the semester we handed out twenty one and had always assumed that was the record, but no, not even close.  The third scan from this letter includes a carbon-copy list that reads like a Who’s Who of Xi:  Hop Swift, Skip Awalt, Herb Bodman and many others.

There are a lot of documents like this waiting to be preserved.  The work of the siblings has been magnificent when it comes to preserving this ourselves and I say that with absolute sincerity.  There are decades of history inviting us to peruse them, sitting in the vault – much of it already sorted and organized! – and it’s my hope to be able to make all of that available to you as best I can.  Many, many snaps to Bro. Peter Pendergrass, Sis. Courtney Rosenthal, Sis. Fiona Matthews, Sis. Kelly Garner and countless others who have sorted and organized and scanned and otherwise made the vault a significantly less scary place than it could be.  We are truly lucky, as an organization, to have these materials available and it is incumbent upon us to figure out the best way to preserve them so that future generations of Xi can look back and realize abruptly that this or that innocuous document may be the only portrait of whatever features loom large in the chapter’s future life.

A new book from Sis. Melanie Sumner will be coming out in July 2010. You can read an excerpt from The Ghost of Milagro Creek at Melanie’s website. Copies may be ordered via her site as well. Advance reviews point to a well-rounded story with thoughtful consideration of clashing cultures.

Melanie is also a 2010 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship for Creative Writing. Congratulations on the book and the award!