Suzie Brown ’96
Saving Lives, Playing Dives
Brown leads a double life. When she’s not healing hearts at Philadelphia’s Albert Einstein Medical Center, she’s singing the blues at venues around the city and the nation. Last spring she headed to Nashville, Tennessee, to record her third album with her idol, producer Oliver Wood of the sibling folk-blues duo, The Wood Brothers. She and Wood took a new approach with Almost There, trying to capture as much live energy as possible. “I wanted to capture a moment in time, a performance, and all the emotion that comes with that,” Brown says. The album charts the many stages of relationships, though “Receipt for Love”—one of three tracks co-written with Grammy Award-winning guitarist Scot Sax, who also happens to be her husband—was an unusual one to write, considering they’d penned it only a month after meeting. “If it’s all peaches and apple pie, you don’t feel the need to write a song,” she says. “It’s the conflict that makes you need the song.”

Shyness prevented Brown from pursuing her passion for music until her senior year in college. While studying for a physics exam in the Medical School library that fall, Brown received an e-mail about a cappella tryouts 15 minutes before they started. “I left all my books, ran over to the Hop, warmed up in a bathroom stall and tried out.” Despite “shaking like a leaf” during the audition, Brown won a spot as a member of the all-female Rockapellas. “I felt things I had never felt before when I was doing music. It definitely planted a seed,” she says.

Before starting at Harvard Medical School, Brown taught herself guitar and attended a music camp at Berklee College of Music. At Harvard she performed at open-mic sessions throughout Boston, and during her residency at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital she joined a cover band composed of residents and doctors. After moving to Philadelphia for a cardiology fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, she found herself with free nights and weekends to pursue songwriting.

“There’s something about a song that allows you to say things you’d never say in words,” Brown says. After playing open mics in Philly, Brown was “totally hooked.” In between shows she released the five-song EP Side Streets in 2009, followed by the acclaimed album Heartstrings in 2011. Her music has been played in Starbucks, Gap and Anthropologie stores, she has opened for Lyle Lovett and Livingston Taylor, and she was named “Best of Philly” byPhiladelphia Magazine. Almost There—due in October—is a fan-funded effort recorded live in seven days. “The result is an elegant yet unvarnished 11-song collection that harks back to the recordings of influences like Bonnie Raitt, Patty Griffin and, of course, The Wood Brothers,” according to World Café Live in Philadelphia.

Balancing cardiology and performance is not easy. Brown works one full-time week per month and two days per week for the other three, which allows her some flexibility to go on short tours. “The transitions are really hard,” she says. “Music is open and honest and emotional and vulnerable and medicine is kind of the opposite. If you open yourself up too much, you’ll just get crushed.” But she is grateful that her education and medical career have allowed her the freedom to pursue music. The secret to managing a passion and a career, she says, “is a mixture of keeping your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds.”

Lauren Vespoli, a former DAM intern, lives in New York City, where she works at a PR agency and continues to write.

Bridgette Hylton ’06
Behind the Seams
Hylton missed her five-year Dartmouth reunion, but she gave birth to a good excuse: her son. Now, along with fellow Harvard Law School grad Joana Florez, she is working on a Boston-based start-up that has become like a second child.

The pair has launched ShopRagHouse, an online “fashion collective” that allows members to submit and vote on user-created clothing designs. Winning styles are produced and then sold on the website, with designers receiving a percentage of the profits. Hylton, a Spanish and sociology double-major, wasn’t always going to be a fashion entrepreneur, but a stint as a corporate associate at a law firm made her realize the law wasn’t her calling. “I started to feel like I didn’t fit in pretty early on,” she says. “I strolled into the office in sky-high red stiletto Stuart Weitzman pumps only to have my secretary tell me that I should try to tone down my fashion choices.” Now, she’s playing them up on a virtual Project Runway. The pair—dubbed “the fairy godmothers of fashion” by Coco Magazine—plans to open the first entries for voting at ShopRagHouse.com this fall. “The start-up world is hard because there’s no one to tell you what’s right or wrong,” says Hylton. “You have to have a thick skin and really believe in your idea.” Though life as a fashion entrepreneur has its perks. “I shop for fabric way more than I care to talk about,” she admits. “All part of preparing for a seamless kick-start in the fall.”
—Rianna P. Starheim ’14

Jordan Fiorentini ’99
The Sweet Spot
Wine Spectator counts Fiorentini among the “young Zin makers who are keeping old hands on their toes,” and recently awarded 93 points (out of 100) to one of her 2010 blends. Fiorentini, who oversees all grape growing and winemaking at Epoch Estates Winery in West Paso Robles on California’s rugged central coast, has been encouraging some “bold and muscular” red wines, according to the magazine. The area’s growing conditions—warm days and cool nights combined with a largely limestone soil—“leave a special mark on our region’s wines,” Fiorentini says.

The Georgia native grew up in a wine-loving family and, after graduating with an A.B. in engineering and a minor in Italian, helped her parents start a winery in the north Georgia mountains. She then earned a master’s of viticulture and enology from the University of California Davis and worked at Italian and Napa Valley wineries before joining Epoch nearly four years ago. “Because we have such beautifully fractured soils where our vines’ roots can go deep, we practice as much ‘dry farming’ as possible and really try to not make our vines lazy in terms of eating and drinking from fertigation and irrigation,” says Fiorentini.

“Growing the grapes is the first step to being able to achieve the expressive wines that I seek,” she told The Wine Write blog. “Then it’s lots of experimentation, patience and restraint from not doing too much to the wine.” Fiorentini often tastes wines with male colleagues from neighboring estates who describe wines by comparing them to women. She can play that game too, with a twist: She told Wine Spectator that her 2009 Grenache-Syrah-Mourvèdre blend reminds her of actress Marion Cotillard—“Get to know her and she might sing ‘La Vie en Rose’ for you”—although “Mourvèdre is a bit of a sweaty pool boy on its own, but it binds the other wines together.” Actress or pool boy, Fiorentini crafts wines with personality.
—Bonnie Barber

David Hamlin ’82
Elephant Man
When Hamlin started writing, directing and producing films for National Geographic TV nearly 17 years ago, the adventure filmmaker’s assignments took him to Mount Everest four times and on a walk across much of central Africa—the MegaTransect. “I think one of the reasons they hired me was because they knew they could put me in a tent for a month and let me suffer and I’d be happy,” says the now-independent filmmaker, who produced roughly 100 shows for the cable channel, including America the Wild, which started airing in August.

Hamlin was inspired to focus on natural history films after working with renowned primatologist Jane Goodall on the Last Wild Chimps and Chimps in Crisis in the late 1990s. This led to projects such as Great Migrations, the highest-rated natural history show in National Geographic TV history, and War Elephants, which earned a 2013 Emmy nomination for “Outstanding Nature Program.” (Hamlin has has won two Emmys and been nominated for six.)

Although every project is challenging, War Elephants was especially difficult. “We were deeply passionate about trying to help these elephants in Mozambique that were recovering from the civil war and struggling with PTSD,” Hamlin says. “But to tell their story meant putting ourselves potentially in harm’s way from an elephant that might still be frightened and hostile.” Hamlin came through filming in Africa unscathed, only to have an unpleasant encounter with a large bull elephant at the Pittsburgh Zoo in August. “He had just entered musth, which is when males get very aggressive and sexually charged,” says Hamlin. “And he made a perfect sphere of his own feces and hurled it at us with deadly accuracy.”

—Bonnie Barber

David’s Top 5 Nature videos

My Halcyon River
A wonderful story about a guy’s love affair with a river

My Life as a Turkey
The story of Joe Hutto, who spent a year living with wild turkeys in a very personal communion

Green
An experimental film about the flight of orangutans displaced by deforestation

Planet Earth
It utilized new technologies to really blow up filmmaking

Great Migrations 
It’s the work I’m proudest of

Ben Jones ’44
To the Rescue
In the Summer and fall New York’s oldest paramedic is on call around the clock for Shelter Island’s all-volunteer ambulance corps, which responded to 38 calls in July. “When we see Ben show up, we definitely breathe a sigh of relief,” Shelter Island Ambulance Corps chief Sam Case told The New York Times in June.

The 91-year-old Jones and his wife, Betty, spend winters in Florida, where he works two 12-hour shifts a week for the Stuart Fire Rescue. In honor of his 30-year career, Jones was recognized in April with a Lifetime Achievement Award for Outstanding Service in Emergency Medical Services by the James O. Page Charitable Foundation and the Journal of Emergency Medical Services.

Why did the former insurance executive become a paramedic? “Because it’s something that communities need,” says the World War II veteran. “After retiring I wasn’t going to settle down to golf, TV and bridge. This kind of work keeps you on your toes.”

He offers a few tips based on his years of responding to emergencies: “Drive at least five seconds behind the vehicle in front of you. Forty percent of accidents are caused by hitting the car in front of you. And when you have chest pains or an altered mental status, call 911 immediately. Getting medical attention quickly is often the key to having a successful outcome.”

—Bonnie Barber

Jared Thorne ’03
A Sense of Identity
“I love the Mets,” says photographer Thorne. “I can talk about the Mets all day.” His support is more than a blind following: His grandfather was a Yankees fan, but the family gave up on the team when it was slow to integrate. “The Mets were how I was raised,” Thorne says. “A sense of identity, a sense of purpose.”

Identity—and race’s role in it—is the focus of Thorne’s work. In college Thorne’s grappling with race and class would ultimately shape his future. “While I made lifelong friends at Dartmouth, being black in Hanover was awful at times,” he says. Photography became a way to channel this experience. “My work is intimately entangled with who I am and how blackness is constructed.”

Thorne, who has an M.F.A. from Columbia and has shown his work in San Francisco, New York City and Cape Town, South Africa, is now a photography professor in Cape Town. His 2012 portraiture show, Black Folk, was acclaimed by contemporary South African magazine Art South Africa as having “its metaphorical finger on the nation’s pulse point.” In his haunting Biggest Colored Show on Earth, Thorne questioned how black masculinity is sold to the public by photographing figurines of popular sports figures that he had disfigured and painted in blackface. Images can be found at www.jaredthorne.com.

Thorne has recently shifted to landscapes. Regardless of subject, he notes the importance of putting himself, metaphorically, into his photographs. “The more subjectivities represented, the better,” he says. “If I’m not in it, why am I taking this photograph?”
—Rianna P. Starheim ’14