Alumni Newsletter: Trying to Forget the Elephant

Alumni newsletters upset me, yet I read them. Why should I care that Rob Burnett from my graduating class was honored at Tufts University for an “outstanding career in the entertainment industry,” as executive producer of the David Letterman show?

I knew Rob very well. He lived on my floor freshman year. He arrived the second semester along with Nancy Jajinski from Ohio. They were both wait listed at Tufts and I guess a couple of freshman must not have made it back from winter break giving these two B+ students a crack at one of the universities in the “Most Competitive” column of the Barron’s.

Rob was a clown. A high energy, nonstop clown. I was also a clown but not so relentless. Plus, I had this darker brooding thing going on. And, I was best friends with Joe and Ed, and Rob tried to horn in.

Rob was not so much funny as he was bossy. And, he was non-handsome yet extremely confident. All that bad hair and a firm belief in the self? How did he do it?

Junior year of college, I studied in Paris for one semester. Nancy Jajinski was also there...in her cape. Rob, though not with the Tufts-in-Paris group, but with the American University in Paris, was living right around the corner from me. We went for a walk together one day through the Bois de Vincennes. He treated me to his very strong views on art. He was against anything abstract. He felt that the only true measure of an artist was whether or not he could paint someone’s face to likeness. No matter what I said about all other forms and styles of art, he would say loud and definitively, “But that’s not as good as someone who can really paint a face or a place that really looks like a face or a place.” A complete literalist, I just rolled my eyes and thought, “Fuck. This person is bullying me with his opinion and he just won’t see my point of view at all. And we all know that the amazing art that was made since the impressionists onward is so important. I mean, come on.”

Deaf to me, we ended our walk and he went back home to his apartment on Boulevard Picpus. And I went back to mine on Boulevard Soult. And I did not see him again for the rest of the semester. But I did see Nancy...in her cape. She hated me. Being one of those very serious blond haired, blue eyed Jewish girls from Ohio, holding on tightly to the idea that she was a proper WASP, shunning anything expressive or vulnerable or creative, in her eyes I was but a riff raff.

So, Rob and Nancy, those wait listed slide-ins, do not figure positively in my life. And there on the cover of my Department of Drama and Dance, Tufts University newsletter, “In the Round” (Our theatre was The Arena Theatre, thus the name), I have to look at Rob’s face with his hand clutching a metal elephant with four other honorees (the elephant is the Tufts mascot—P.T. Barnum gave Tufts his dead elephant, Jumbo, which was stuffed and placed in the Biology building lobby. When the Biology building burned down, so did the taxidermy pachyderm).

I rail. Of course, I’m just jealous.