[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!
Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.
In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.
I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.
Robin Kropf has indeed had a “checkered career” and a topsy-turvy life ranging from her birth in Honolulu only months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, through 3 years early schooling in a dusty small country town now submerged under Six Flags Over Texas. “If you did anything remotely naughty on the way back from school, your mom and the entire telephone party line knew about it before you got home.” Contrast that with junior high years uniformed into a French girls’ school outside of Paris and a Swiss girls’ school above Lake Geneva, only to return to Washington, DC, and a public American high school of 3000 — the proverbial Blackboard Jungle. Nevertheless happily befriended there by other Army and Navy brats some fine teachers and an astute guidance counselor she managed to access her dream college. In addition to a great time, a great education, and great friends she appropriately fell in love senior year with a Duke med-school intern.
As that could not work out, for family reasons (his not hers), she obediently returned home in Emily Dickinson mode. Eventually consoled by a dashing fighter pilot, she entered the Top Gun era right out of the movie. Hundreds of hours of volunteer work, 2 kids, 10 moves, 3 tours in Vietnam (his not hers) later, she found herself gratefully divorced walking the sonorous halls of Capitol Hill looking for a job while carrying a rather thin resume. Luckily immediately hired by a Texas congressman, who happened to have begun life as a dean at Duke, she at last knew why she had taken all those Political Science courses.
For 10 years as House then Senate staff, she served two Democrats and a liberal Republican (on his superb investigative committee for the elderly), coupled with 15 more Washington years, first a lobbyist for the American Medical Association. (That put her fantastic kids through four years each at private universities.) And then a decade as Senior Policy Coordinator for the Legislative and Policy Director of AARP. All this was interspersed with a mid-career masters from the Harvard Kennedy School, and 10 years consulting in the San Francisco/Lake Tahoe region, including a rare office on a 47 ft. boat in Sausalito Harbor.
The AARP years meant she got to work on helping pass the legislation adding Prescription Drugs to Medicare, the effort to keep the Bush Administration from privatizing Social Security, and the passage of the Affordable Care Act better known as Obamacare. “Yes!” she says, “I’m one of the people you can blame for Obamacare.” At 70 she retired to Cambridge, Massachusetts where she has delighted in four grandchildren, with two more just a 45-minute flight away in Toronto. Both of the oldest girls who made her grandmother in 2002 will graduate from high school this June 2020. She’ll be 79 in July.
