Melissa Christensen n n n n Hillary Rhodes n n n Elena See PHC bade farewell to three young staff members on the Tanglewood show and two of them came out on stage during the Irving Berlin song "What'll I Do (When You Are Faraway And I Am Blue)?" to bask in the sunshine of showbiz after working so long in the dark cave of backstage. (The third was in Chicago, in the dark cave of grad school.)
Melissa Christensen has been our whiz-kid logistician and all-purpose producer, managing the large Miscellaneous drawer of the show, working on the Webcast, travel, site research, etc. Melissa is leaving us to move to Australia as soon as she gets her commercial pilot's license. Someday you may be flying Qantas and hear a Midwestern voice from the cockpit telling you about the flying time to Perth and that'll be our Melissa at the controls. A smart, capable, confident person.
Hillary Rhodes produced The Writers Almanac and did research for PHC. She has gone off to Northwestern to get a master's degree in journalism which she has decided is the field for her. You may see her byline in a few years in the Washington Post, over a story about malfeasance and skullduggery in high places, written with merciless accuracy and utter clarity.
Elena See was our producer in charge of scripts, who also managed our Web sites and handled other business. She is off to the University of Maine to go into a doctoral program and write a thesis on Jane Austen. Someday your children will come home from college raving about a course in 19th Century lit and their red-haired professor and her passion for her field and that'll be Elena.
We were lucky to claim a year or two of their youth for our creaky old show and we're glad to send them off to exciting new ventures. Youth is not supposed to get stuck in a job, youth is supposed to bounce from one good spot to a better one and gad about and see the world and gain new experiences, and these three young women are doing that. They were terrific employees and we wish them all the very best and we take vicarious pleasure in their freedom, we ink-stained wretches slaving away in the galleys of radio, and we await news of their further adventures.
~ Garrison Keillor