Scored an update from Heather Nolan off Facebook. She’s looking forward to trading in Davis, California, for Los Angeles in the fall. Heather will be relocating there along with her husband, John, and their 3-year-old son Django in time for her to start a master’s program at UCLA in cinema and new media studies. I suppose this makes us bitter SoCal University film rivals (having studied at USC myself) but I think our shared Dartmouth heritage can help me overcome that. My one question for Heather as she becomes a Bruin is if USC students drag stuffed bears around on the ground in honor of the rivalry, what do UCLA students drag around? The USC mascot is the Trojan….


Received an e-mail from Alissa Peck that she and husband Jeremy Fader welcomed son Max Henry Fader to their family, where he joins big sister Amanda. Born May 12, Max weighed in at 8 pounds, 3 ounces. Congrats!


I also received the following amazing and amazingly concise missive, considering the incredible places he’s both coming from and going to, from Dan Polta: “After living in Islamabad, Pakistan, for five years and working as the principal of the International School of Islamabad, I’m moving to Guatemala to be the secondary principal at Colegio Maya.”


I couldn’t just let that go, so I wrote Dan back and begged him to tell me more; he was kind enough to elaborate about his experience these past few years in Islamabad: “In some ways it is very boring as a city and at the same times very unpredictable. There have been times when terrorist activities seem like they will shut down the city but things seem to keep going. When I arrived the country was on an upswing. Following a major bombing three years ago, the expat presence reduced significantly. Things were quite bad after that with repeated attacks on police bunkers in the city. The situation seems to have ‘stabilized’ but anything can happen. At school we monitor the news and security situation daily; sometimes we go on virtual school and keep the students at home.” We hope Dan’s move goes smoothly and can’t wait to hear more from his new post.


And I awoke this morning to a last-minute reprieve from Kevin Williams, who heeded my desperate news-fishing post on Facebook last night. “I just received a master’s in library science from Catholic University in May, which, I have to say, was made particularly interesting by the fact that I had to commute two and a half hours from Richmond, Virginia, to D.C. for some of my classes, and that my wife gave birth to not one but two little girls during the course of my time in the program. All of this while playing stay-at-home dad by day, club DJ by night. Needless to say, four hours made for a good night’s sleep for me. That said, school is done, the youngest (6 months) has been sleeping through the night, I’m looking for a library job and I now consistently get six hours of sleep a night. Ahhh….”


On the home front, husband Andrew Hyman tossed a piece of paper in my overflowing inbox to let me know he’d been selected for inclusion in the to-be-published Super Lawyers magazine’s 2011 New York Rising Stars list. Cool. Now if only my 3-year-old would stop referring to himself as ‘Dopey’ (as in the dwarf) things would be going pretty well around here.


—Suzie Fromer, 26 Irving Ave., Tarrytown, NY 10591; suziefromer@gmail.com