Psychologist Jonathan Adler ’00 talks with Kati Vecsey of the theater department during his lecture at Bates in 2008. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

“Remember, one of the primary reasons we have emotions in the first place is to help us evaluate our experiences,” says Adler, an assistant professor of psychology at Olin College.

Rodriguez describes how Adler and a colleague investigated the link between mixed emotional experience and psychological welfare in a group of people undergoing 12 sessions of psychotherapy.

Participants who said they felt cheerful and dejected at the same time (for example, by expressing the notion that “I feel sad at times because of everything I’ve been through, but I’m also happy and hopeful because I’m working through my issues”) preceded improvements in their sense of well-being.

“Taking the good and the bad together may detoxify the bad experiences, allowing you to make meaning out of them in a way that supports psychological well-being,” the researchers found.

• View story from Scientific American

So far, it’s worked out well, says reporter Bob Keyes of the Maine Sunday Telegram.

In April, a composer Cyr championed won a Juno Award, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy.

Composer Vivian Fung won Classical Composition of the Year for her violin concerto, which Cyr recorded with the Metropolis Ensemble and released last fall on the Naxon label imprint Canadian Classics.

Video of the 2011 world premiere of Vivian Fung’s Violin Concerto, performed by violinist Kristin Lee and the Metropolis Ensemble, with Cyr conducting.

Ambrosino, who has the role of Gabey (Gene Kelly’s part in the 1949 film version of the Broadway play), tells Boston Spirit Magazine blog that while he recalls being “enthralled by the performances”  when he watched the movie as a boy, no one should expect him to channel Kelly.

Chip (Phil Tayler), Ozzie (Zachary Eisenstat) and Gabey (John Ambrosino ’01) in a scene from the Lyric Theater’s production of On the Town. Photograph by Mark S. Howard.

“I’m going to stay away from the movie now and let [director] Spiro [Veloudos] lead us down the road.”

Thus far, media reviews of the play have been positive.

Ambrosino says the Lyric is taking an “awesome artistic risk” by staging the play that was first produced on Broadway in 1944. “It’s so infrequently done because it’s a difficult show to do,” says Ambrosino.

• View post on the Boston Spirit Magazine blog, May 5, 2013.

Kinney, a Bates trustee for 27 years, including 17 as chair, was considered a creative entrepreneur and model corporate leader who, when appointed CEO of General Mills in 1973, was praised for his “good, gutsy Maine business sense” by his predecessor.

As a corporate leader, he said that he took the advice of a business mentor back in Bar Harbor, Maine, by throwing himself into service to the nonprofit world, especially to Bates.

As Kinney received a Bates honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1985, then-President Hedley Reynolds lauded him for being “always thoughtful for the needs of others, always ready to serve, always ready with a helping hand.”

Born in Burnham, Maine, and raised in Pittsfield, Kinney was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate who earned money for college by working and living in the home of Lewiston mill industrialist Scott Libbey Sr.

Kinney received $500 in scholarships from Bates. At the time of his death, he was the college’s most generous living donor.

He also received about $500 in scholarship support from Bates, prompting Kinney to tell Dean of the College Harry Rowe, at graduation, that “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I’ll try to pay you back the scholarship money.”

At the time of his death, he was the college’s most generous living donor.

In 1942 while doing a Works Projects Administration study along the Maine coast, Kinney approached Matthew Highlands, a legendary University of Maine food scientist, with a crab question. Crabs could be had for a penny each — lobstermen were just tossing them from their traps — so could anything be done with them?

“You can cook them, process them and put them in hermetically sealed cans,” Highlands said. With World War II interrupting the supply of crab meat from Japan, the demand was rising.

Kinney learned the business at home, a few cans at a time. By the 1950s his North Atlantic Packing Co. was a $2 million-a-year business selling canned crab and other products and employing 400 in Bar Harbor.

Kinney then joined Gorton’s. For a society more and more eager for convenience, Kinney again used emerging food technology to lead Gorton’s to expand its frozen, ready-to-cook fish products, including the iconic fish stick and, by the 1960s, the fish for McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish.

Under Kinney, Gorton’s earnings went from $122,000 on sales of $12.1 million in 1958 to $1.44 million on sales of $71.9 million in 1968.

In 1973, he took the helm of General Mills, which had acquired Gorton’s in 1968. He served as CEO of IDS Mutual Fund Group in the 1980s.

A “compelling example that commitment to the common weal is the indelible mark of liberal learning.”

At Commencement 1985, when he received an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Bates, then-Dean of the College Carl Benton Straub praised Kinney for “his compelling example that commitment to the common weal is the indelible mark of liberal learning.”

In 2008, Kinney received the college’s Benjamin Elijah Mays Medal, awarded for distinguished service to Bates and the larger community worldwide, and in 2005 he was a charter inductee into the Benjamin Bates Society, an honor accorded the college’s leading philanthropists.

Kinney provided major support for Pettengill Hall (1999), was instrumental in securing foundation grant funding for the Olin Arts Center (1986) and established an endowed professorship in history and a scholarship fund.

In Minnesota, Kinney served as a director of the Minnesota Symphony, the Guthrie Theater and the YMCA, among many others.

The commitment that I’ve had, emotionally and monetarily, was focused on Bates.”

Elsewhere in Maine, his support and service went many nonprofits, including the Bangor Theological Seminary, Maine Central Institute, Friends of Acadia National Park and The Jackson Laboratory. His Maine corporate board service included Hannaford Bros. Co., IDEXX Laboratories and Unum.

When Kinney offered his oral history to Bates’ Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library in 2005, he explained how a business mentor in Bar Harbor, a banker, encouraged him to make one or two meaningful commitments to organizations outside of business.

“The commitment that I’ve had, emotionally and monetarily, was focused on Bates,” Kinney said.

Kinney is also credited with significant reform of the Bates Board of Trustees in the 1980s when he introduced a resolution that mandated trustee retirement at age 70.

As he said in his oral history, “As smart as some people are when they’re 75 or 80 or whatever they may be…on the average you’ve got to have younger people. They stimulate the thinking…you want to renew, you need new blood.”

With support from the late U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie ’36, among other trustees, the resolution was approved.

“Youth will keep the organization healthy,” said Kinney, who backed up that idea by mentoring at least two generations of young business leaders in Maine.

Kinney is survived by his wife, Margaret (Margee) Kinney; daughters Jeanie Small and Isabella Keating; stepdaughter Lucy Thatcher Penfield; stepson Ford Thatcher; seven grandchildren, including Samantha Kinney Leone ’93; two step- grandchildren; 10 great-grandchildren; and his sister, Elizabeth Kinney Jones ’44. He was predeceased by his son, E. Robert Kinney Jr. ’70, who is survived by his widow, Sally Greenlaw Kinney ’69.

His memorial service is at 4 p.m. on Friday May 17 at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis.

GAME Day, which stands for “Gaining Athletic Mentors’ Experience,” is a collaborative effort put on by the Bates Career Development Center, the Friends of Bates Athletics and the Department of Athletics. At Saturday’s event, a panel of alumni shared how students can leverage their athletics experience for career success.

Postell Pringle ’98 (left, as Othello) and GQ (Iago) face off as Iago’s plot unfolds in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of “Othello: The Remix.” Photograph by Michael Brosilow.

Rapper, writer, actor and director Postell Pringle ’98 is winning rave reviews for his star turn this spring in the title role of Othello: The Remix at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

In March, Time Out Chicago named Pringle its Performer of the Week. In a Time Out Q-and-A , he discussed how working in theater at Bates sharpened his delivery as a rapper:

“My approach to the actual attack of the line and getting punchlines and the arc of the storytelling within the song was all different. I realized that it had to do with the fact that I had just been working on acting, working on playing characters. … I wouldn’t be as good of a rapper if I hadn’t spent all that time working on just acting and just theater.”

Othello: The Remix was adapted from Shakespeare’s tragedy by the Q Brothers — aka GQ and JQ, who with Pringle and a fourth member are also members of the rap group the Retar Crew. The entire Crew performs in The Remix.

The Q’s modus operandi, previously exercised on such works as The Bomb-itty of Errors, is to render Shakespeare’s entire text as rhyming couplets suitable for rap delivery. The Remix re-imagines the title character as “a hip-hop mogul whose life falls apart when he makes Iago the opener’s opener on a new tour,” writes Time Out blogger Oliver Sava.

“To cut to the chase: Othello: The Remix — the 90-minute, lightning-fast, hip-hop version of Shakespeare’s tragic tale of jealousy and self-doubt — is absolutely brilliant, and immense fun,” wrote Chicago Sun-Times theater critic Hedy Weiss.

With Bates classmate Erin Gottwald, a dancer and choreographer, Pringle returns to campus this spring to lead the longstanding Short Term unit Tour Teach Perform, in which students create a dance piece and teach it to pupils in local schools.

• See the Chicago Time Out story about Pringle from March 21, 2013.
• See the Chicago Sun-Times review.
• See Pringle and Gottwald in their collaborative piece “Last Chance.”

After Whitten’s blog post recommended Slave to Sensation, there was a run on the romance novel at Maine libraries.

In its profile of Sarah Whitten ’94, recently named Librarian of the Year by the country’s romance writers, the Bangor Daily News explains the influence Whitten wields over Maine’s romance readers.

An active blogger for the Bangor Public Library blog Not Your Ordinary Book Banter — “for readers who love popular fiction, edgy and uncensored” — Whitten announced in February 2011 that Nalini Singh’s Slave to Sensation was the blog’s top vote-getter for book of the month.

Within 24 hours of her post, every copy in the state library system had been borrowed.

The organization Romance Writers of America recognized Whitten as Librarian of the Year for “making a significant online library presence supporting the romance genre.”

Whitten, a circulation assistant at Bangor Public Library who several years ago co-founded the library’s Not Your Ordinary Book Club, tells reporter Ardeana Hamlin that her interest in romance novels was “kept that under wraps” at Bates, when the literary genre was anything but appreciated.

“People would be surprised by how much romance novels have changed,” Whitten says. “No longer does a woe-is-me heroine need to be rescued by the hero. Heroines are much more independent, confident and strong.”

• View story from the April 3, 2013, Bangor Daily News

Gunnar Manchester ’15 is Valentine Crambagge in the 17th-century comedy, performed at Bates March 21-24. Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

An uproarious 17th-century comedy that explores issues of marriage and gender while satirizing theatrical conventions of its time, The Swaggering Damsel appears in Bates College performances at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, March 21-23, and 2 p.m. Sunday, March 24, in Gannett Theater, 305 College St.

Admission is free, but reservations are recommended. For more information, please call 207-786-6161.

A play marked by “cross-dressing, sexual shenanigans, uppity servants and witty women,” in the words of one scholar, English playwright Robert Chamberlain’s 1640 The Swaggering Damsel reflects the preoccupations of a nation transitioning from a royal to a mercantile society.

Plotlines explore the financial, moral and social conditions that encumbered romance and marriage in Chamberlain’s time. The primary plot concerns a pair of lovers, Sabina and Valentine, whose affair encounters a series of roadblocks that they can overcome only after each has spent some time in the other’s shoes.

Portraying Valentine is Gunnar Manchester, a sophomore from Rehoboth, Mass. Sabina is played by Sarah Weinshal, a first-year student from Westport, Conn. All told, 10 Bates students are performing in the piece and one serves as stage manager.

Visiting Assistant Professor of English Matteo Pangallo ’03 directs “The Swaggering Damsel.” Photograph by Michael Bradley/Bates College.

The play has been performed rarely, if at all, since the 17th century, says director Matteo Pangallo, a visiting assistant professor of English and member of the Bates class of 2003. “This is a rediscovery” akin to a world premiere, he says.

Chamberlain was an amateur playwright, so Swaggering Damsel has always been a play peripheral to the theatrical and scholarly canon, Pangallo explains. “Chamberlain’s profession was joke-book writing, and Swaggering Damsel is a joke in five acts.”

He continues, “If we look at other romantic comedies from that period, we’ll get a sense of what the professional theater industry thought the audience wanted.” But Swaggering Damsel, instead, directly reflects the interests and perspective of an audience member.

“It’s not a conventional English Renaissance comedy,” Pangallo says. “Instead, it seems to lampoon and mock all the character types and clichéd plot twists that the theater of that era was churning out en masse.”

The Bates production jacks that tendency up a notch, reveling in an over-the-top theatricality. “We place a great deal of emphasis on the fact that these are actors taking on roles, and their roles are exaggerated,” says Pangallo.

Valentine is a parody of traditional romantic heroes (to the extent that he shares a name, as well as some plot points, with a character in Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona — produced at Bates just weeks before Damsel).

“Valentine’s speeches are way overblown, he spouts really bad poetry that he thinks is good poetry, he threatens to kill himself because he can’t have the woman of his dreams. All the characters on stage know that he is ridiculous, and the audience knows too.”

For the student performers and audiences alike, Pangallo says, The Swaggering Damsel offers a fresh take on a theatrical era dominated by Shakespeare — who, he points out, was in many ways atypical of English Renaissance playwrights.

“When you’re playing Hamlet, and you get to the ‘to be or not to be’ speech, you look out into the audience and see all the mouths flapping because everybody is saying it along with you. And the degree of pressure that creates to do something new can sometimes have negative effects on actors, because they start pursuing novelty for the sake of novelty.

“You don’t have that when you do a production of The Swaggering Damsel because it is novel. Its freshness, I think, is a virtue.”

“What did you learn at Bates that you have used in the workplace?”

Nugent, a poet and motivational speaker, posed his top-of-mind question to four Bates alumni panelists who’ve built, and are building, their careers in the Lewiston-Auburn community.

Michael Creedon ’15 and Jonah Greenawalt ’16 react to panelists at Beyond Intellectual Profit, a symposium on navigating diversity in the workplace. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

The panel, composed of Sarah Davis ’10, Nate Libby ’07, Julia Sleeper ’08 and John Jenkins ’74, was one of several discussions during the March 2 Bates symposium Beyond Intellectual Profit: Using Classroom Knowledge in the Workplace, coordinated by Therí Pickens, assistant professor of English, and facilitated by Nugent.

Motivational speaker and facilitator Kirk Nugent encouraged conversation between the panelists and audiences. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/Bates College.

Sarah Davis ’10

Davis said she experienced a “seamless connection” between Bates and her work with Welcoming Maine, an organization that supports community integration for immigrants and refugees. She began working directly with the Lewiston community through the Harward Center in her first semester and went on to design her own major around social justice. Bates gave her the freedom to connect theory and practice.

Nate Libby ’07

Libby pays the bills as a property manager and nonprofit consultant but is deeply involved in local politics as a Lewiston city councilor and state representative to the Maine Legislature. A history major at Bates, he credits the Short Term unit “Introduction to Historical Methods” — aka “History Hell” — with teaching him to think critically and evaluate information. As a scholar, politician and consumer of information, he says, “You must be skeptical of what you read and what you hear.”

Julia Sleeper ’08

Sleeper came to Bates expecting to major in biology only to discover a passion for education. A placement at nearby Lewiston Middle School exposed her to the range of challenges faced by local youth, particularly those from immigrant and refugee families. Like Davis, she used the classroom as a place to better understand her work in the community, and vice versa. She has since co-founded Tree Street Youth in Lewiston, a community center that empowers youth to make healthy choices through academics, athletics and the arts.

John Jenkins ’74

When Jenkins arrived on the Bates campus in 1969, he was one of only a handful of students of color. He jokes that he didn’t notice — he was too busy keeping up with his grades. Bates, he says, is “relentless in teaching you to persevere.” Bates helped him become a “citizen of the world” and taught him to take initiative, which certainly served him well in his role as a community leader. Now a public speaker, Jenkins is the former mayor of Lewiston and Auburn as well as a state senator.

In this scene from the play Christmas in Hanoi, members of the Ganley family, including grandson Lou (Joseph Kim ’96, left) visit a spirit medium to deal with hauntings in their family. Photo by Michael Lamont.

In her Los Angeles Times review, F. Katherine Foley notes that the play, staged by the East West Players, “is very much a family drama, but echoes of the catastrophic ‘American War,’ as it is known in Vietnam, reverberate.”

Alumni in Entertainment Panel

After the March 10 performance of Christmas in Hanoi, actor Joseph Kim ’96 joins Chris Donovan ’92, senior VP with The CW network; John Murchison, vice president, miniseries, HBO; and Marco Black ’92, line producer and unit production manager for CSI: Miami and CSI: Vegas,
for a discussion about their work.

• Discounted tickets are available through the East West Players website or call 213-625-7000. Use ticket code Bates26.
• For more information: Office of Alumni Engagement at alumni@bates.edu.

Kim, who performs under the stage name Joseph Daugherty, plays the American-born grandson of a Vietnamese grandfather, George. Years before, George fled his native country with his daughter, Oanh (who has since died but who haunts her family), and Oanh’s American husband, Philip Ganley.

In the play, George, Philip, Lou, and Lou’s sister, Winnie, return to Vietnam.

“Spirits of Vietnamese war dead – ‘angry ghosts’ deprived of ritual and resting places – drift around the play’s periphery,” Foley writes. “And when those angry ghosts fix their fury in the person of Philip, creepy events unfold.”

• Read the review in the Los Angeles Times, Feb. 18, 2013.