Dear Friends:
Like all things Kresge, the Reunion is taking its own time taking its own shape. But I wanted to get back to you with information, and a couple requests, and let you know where we are in planning.
The 30th Reunion Celebration will take place on Friday and Saturday, April 20 and 21, in conjunction with Banana Slug Spring Fair on campus. We'll begin Friday night with an informal get-together and panel featuring a lot of folks around at the beginning, and a few others who came in the intervening 30 years. On Saturday, we'll have a light breakfast in the morning before the all-campus luncheon, then another panel, followed by a reception, and an evening banquet with entertainment (still working out what, but we will try not to disappoint). In between we promise time for walking around campus, talking to old friends, meeting new ones, wandering the beach if you haven't for awhile.
One thing we're trying to do for the occasion is assemble a collection of images, memories, film, and whatever else that can give a sense of these passing thirty years, in your individual lives and in the campus life of the community here. For the panels, for example, we'd like to focus on what you take with you from your time at Kresge and UCSC, what you've (thankfully, or regretfully) left behind, what the years have taught you to rethink. More materially, we're interested in creating a video including photos, film clips, commentaries and comments, as well as a web link off the Kresge site where alumni can view some photos and exchange information about themselves. We have two student filmmakers here who will work with the material and, we hope, create a documentary for us all to look at come April; with enough material, we'll also fill the college with posters and other displays during that weekend.
So, a couple requests: Do you have any photographs or negatives, or film, or other visual stuff from your time here that you'd be willing to let us borrow? If you do, we promise to copy it quickly and get it back to you. If you have things on your computer, please send them that way (via email with attachments to kralumni@cats.ucsc.edu). If you have photographs or film, you can mail it to:
Kresge 30th Reunion, Kresge College, UCSC, Santa Cruz, CA 95064.We will return it promptly. If you know the identities of people in the photos, great; if not, great too. If you can give an approximate date, please do; otherwise, we'll have to make up our own history, which has its merits as well. Ideally, we'd love to have as much of this as we can by February 1; if that's impossible, Feb. 10 will do.
Second: If you have specific memories of things that mattered to you during your time here, from pranks and embarrassments and hassles and learning to cook in the apartments to teachers or classmates who said something you've never forgotten to realizing that the world was not what you thought it was (and so never will be again), try to write those out for us, and send along your anecdotes. No need to get fancy with these: let us know what happened, how or why it mattered that it happened. We'll figure out a way to make these a part of our program.
Third: In your emails, a number of you asked for contact information on other Kresge alums. The Alumni Association (alumni@cats.ucsc.edu) is able to help you track down old friends, whether or not you're a card-carrying member. We're hoping to develop a web-based place for such exchanges, but we can't without an OK from you that you want others to know who you are, where you are, and that you are. So if you do want to be part of a Kresge-focused site like this, please write or email back the briefest note, just saying you're fine with releasing contact information to other Kresge alums, we will start answering requests as we can. (If you are OK with email but not phone or address, please let us know that.)
Finally: A few of you had some very specific suggestions for what you want as part of the Reunion, or who you want to be here for the reunion in terms of teachers, events, themes or concerns that seem essential to you. If you do have suggestions, we're still in the planning stages and any and all thoughts are welcome. We'll try to work from your ideas as much as we can in creating the program.
That's it for now. Thanks again for your email, and for whatever you can do in relation to these requests. If you know of other Kresge alumni who might be receiving this by email, but would welcome the information, please pass it along as you see fit. I look forward to seeing as many of you as can come on April 20-21. Until then, please feel free to email or write.
Best,
Paul Skenazy
Provost, Kresge College
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