As for my whereabouts the last 40 years--where to start?
I graduated from Douglass with many of our alumnae and got an MSW from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Feminism and the anti-war movement hit me like a ton of bricks and I credit the women's movement with immeasurably changing my life for the better. After organizing tenants in Manhattan and welfare recipients in Cleveland and Boston, I moved to San Diego with a wonderful man with whom I lived for many years and who is currently like the sibling I never had. I then did the left coast--Seattle, San Francisco and now the People's Republic of Berkeley. I feel very much at home here even though I have to cross the bridge into San Francisco for good deli.
After social working I worked in the Graphic Arts field (my father was a printer at the Newark Evening News) and was the only woman in the San Diego local of the Graphic Communications International Union. I currently teach the graphics computer applications at a community college in Silicon Valley.
Unlike many of our classmates, whose most memorable experiences involve their children (although I lived with 3 in a former life and loved it), mine center around my stint as a volunteer desktop publishing trainer for the African National Congress in South Africa. This was right after Nelson Mandela got released from prison but before he was elected President and the country was very high from the successful struggle. An aside--about 85% of the white South Africans involved in fighting apartheid were Jewish--for example the couple portrayed in the movie A World Apart (4 stars!?)--Ruth First who was murdered by the apartheid regime by a parcel bomb and Joe Slovo, President of the South African Communist Party who was instrumental in achieving the ANC's triumph from forced exile.
Besides keeping very busy with work, community involvement, friends and cultural activities, I have become a swing dance fanatic (a.k.a. jitterbug or lindy). What a remarkable experience--dancing like crazy with twenty and thirty year olds. I haven't yet decided whether this makes me feel younger or older!? But whichever, it's a blast.
I'll close with a wish for the very best that life has to offer for you all.
I can be reached at normamark@aol.com (original, eh?).
