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Q&A with Rumor’s Laura McCullagh

Chris Gorman from Rumors

This fall, the Williston Northampton Theater Program presents Rumors, a farce by Neil Simon. The play, which runs through the weekend of Oct. 27, examines the world of upper class New Yorkers through the lens of a high end anniversary party where everything that can go wrong, does. A few days before the play’s opening night, Williston’s student blogger Brendan Hellweg ’14 took a short break from Beyond the Binder to sit down with actor Laura McCullagh ’13 to talk about her role, her costume, and how she’d react if stuck in an elevator with her character, Chris Gorman.

BH: What do you like most about acting as your character?

I really love that she is very different from me as a person. I’m one of those people who in a crisis situation will sit down and think of every possible way to solve it and then figure out which way is the best to go about doing things and she just panics and everything goes out the window. It’s really fun to play with that aspect of her – that she’s absolutely crazy.

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Commencement 2012: Senior Awards

The following are the senior recipients of Williston Northampton’s top awards, including three awards presented in ceremonies earlier in the week, the senior awards that are presented each year during Commencement (and voted on by the full faculty), and Williston Northampton’s top three awards: Galbraith prize, the White Blazer award, and the Valedictory prize.

The Senior Athletic Awards, presented during the May 29 assembly, are given to outstanding young men and women for “General participation in athletics, with a special emphasis being placed upon faithful training, good sportsmanship, helpful spirit, and loyal devotion to the best interests of the school”

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Academic Awards 2012

“Students and teachers working together and inspiring one another is what makes Williston’s experience so transformative,” Head of School Robert W. Hill III told students and teachers during the annual Academic Awards Ceremony, held at the Athletic Center on May 29, 2012.

“It is an experience that should not be taken for granted when you consider how lucky we are to be here together,” Hill said. “You students work incredibly hard to achieve illustrious results, and so do your teachers.”

Read the full text of Bob Hill’s welcome here. View a photo gallery of the award winners here.

The following awards were presented during the awards ceremony.

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Photographer of His Time: Sam Abell at Williston

“Something is wrong with this picture,” Sam Abell said to his audience on May 9, during the final Photographers’ Lecture Series of the 2012-11 season.

Projected on the screen in the darkened Dodge Room was a photograph of two coffee cups on a tray and a glass of water. What was wrong? The audience strained to see.

Then the next slide appeared. Abell had turned the handle of a coffee mug, ever so slightly, to create a sliver of space between it and the shadow cast by the water.

Such small details have obsessed Abell throughout his long and illustrious career as a documentary photographer and on in-depth projects for National Geographic. As he noted in his artist’s statement, Abell “explores ways in which places can be purely recorded, with images simultaneously shaped by the photographer’s imagination.”

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Spotlight On The Gardening Club

Behind the middle school buildings, on a small plot of land, two students and their advisor were starting off activities period by smelling a large box of old banana peels, oranges, and apple cores.

“Phew!” said Joey Newlin ’12 as he peered into a large green barrel.

“Anarobic decomposition smells like this. It’s like a sewer smell,” said Jane Lucia, the gardening club’s faculty advisor.  “Turning actually mixes it, aerates it, and keeps that stench away.”

It was spring on The Williston Northampton School campus and the members of the gardening club were out to inspect their food garden, give the mulch a good turn, and transfer seedlings from the gutters where they had sprouted to the cold frame, where they’d grow into carrots, beets, and a cold weather lettuce called mache.

The club, which started in fall 2007, has a small, but dedicated, membership that gathers each year to experiment with growing and composting techniques, as well as encourage community involvement in gardening.

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