Shanti Fry

— 5th — (1978) Jimmy Carter

After eighteen months doing community organizing in Uganda and Kenya, I returned home and became a manager at the Cambridge Food Coop. For the past three years, I've worked with cooperatives and am currently directing a national study in cooperatives for Action and am lobbying for the Coop Bank Bill in Washington, D.C.

— 10th — (1983) Ronald Reagan

I am living happily in Washington, D.C. My husband, Jeff, has just started business school at Columbia so we are getting to know New York on weekends. I am the director of the Marketing Division of the National Consumer Cooperative Bank and as such, oversee the bank's extensive activities in research and development of new markets for consumer cooperatives as well as handling more traditional bank marketing activities. Life since graduation has included volunteer jobs in Uganda and Kenya, management positions in cooperatives and exciting lobbying work to establish the National Consumer Cooperative Bank.

— 15th — (1988) Ronald Reagan

Jeff and I completed M.B.A. degrees by commuting between D.C., NYC and Boston for three years. We finally landed back in Cambridge with the express interest of living more stable lives. We purchased an old house nicknamed the "Mausoleum," (something is always dying), which is rarely without a house guest or five. Somewhat coincidentally, we embarked upon careers at the Bank of Boston, where we occasionally encounter the dilemma of telling a potential client that his proposed commercial banker (Jeff) and his proposed investment banker (me) are married to each other. In the remaining hours of the week, I fund raise, mainly for Democratic women candidates and look for other ways, such as the Radcliffe mentor program, by which a banker can redeem her profession.

In contrast to the preceding years, which were dominated by my dedication to consumer cooperatives, life is indeed more stable and certainly more boring. I hope that the day will reappear when the term meaningful employment will no longer seem merely a relic of the sixties and postsixties era. In the meantime, I plan to enliven the scene with political activities, more guests, and children.

— 20th — (1993) Bill Clinton

Not much has changed in the last five years — same house, same job, same husband, same political persuasion and, thank goodness, mostly the same friends. Since all of the above are loved and/or appreciated, this lack of change falls in the category of good news. My laundry list of desired changes in the next five years — children, the mayoralty of Boston (I'm finance chair for a Boston city councilor) and enough time to rescue the garden from neighborhood disgrace.

— 25th — (1998) Bill Clinton

LIFE changed, dramatically and for the better, with the adoption of our daughter, Victoria, in China thus ending the seemingly endless years of childlessness. Although parenthood transforms everyone, an international adoption offered some unusual twists on motherhood which have added to my intimate pleasure in this most traditional of roles. As president of Families with Children from China/New England, I have met with State Department officials, appeared on The Today Show and attended the New York Chinese Consulate's party marking the transition in Hong Kong. Those moments are the fun parts of a volunteer job which also includes the more arduous tasks of establishing a preschool Chinese summer program and starting a foundation that supports the children who remain behind in China's orphanages.

On the more conventional side, Jeff and I are still married after sixteen years — thank goodness and much thanks to Jeff for sticking it out through the worst of infertility treatments. I am still in the same job, investment banking at BancBoston Securities, that I took upon after leaving Harvard Business School twelve years ago. I have the dubious distinction of being the longest surviving professional in my department and the secretary who works with me is the longest surviving administrative person — a not unrelated fact for those of you cognizant of the power of the grapevine. Jeff and I are still in the same old house near Radcliffe and are still renovating it. We still get our cats and dogs from the animal shelter and have house guests (human) that stay for months. As one of my friends remarked, "The only thing that Shanti can't forgive her twelve best friends is that they don't live with her." I would have that remark carved on my gravestone except that surviving friends might take it the wrong way.

Jeff and I participate in various do-good activities. My focus is fundraising for women running for office, (Democrats, of course). I am also active with the Big Sister Association and did the fundraising for the opening of the Roxbury office serving girls of color. Jeff's activities have centered around low income housing and job creation. He works at First Community Bank which is BankBoston's bank within a bank operating in six inner-city neighborhoods. It is a model among commercial bank Community Reinvestment Act programs.

I don't wish to give the impression that everything is fine or even under control. I overcommit regularly, tear my hair out and live on the cellular phone. I flunk any ideal woman test to be the model Betty Crocker or Betty Friedan. During the adoption process I became aware how little avocations for multimillion dollar deals and Boston politics fit the image of a prospective mother. Sometimes I feel like a weed that grows between the cracks of the contradictory roles ascribed to women. I take comfort that my life is like that of many other women I know — mostly happy, always frantic and still somewhat unpredictable.

— 30th — (2003) George W. Bush

Classmates are packing their kids off to college; we are still organizing pony rides at the school fair and will be doing so for a few more years. We added another daughter to our family when I was forty-eight and Jeff fifty-two.

Julia Fuchun Addison Zinsmeyer was the great challenge of the last five years. I met Julia while touring the orphanages for a washer and dryer project. Adopted months later at age three, she could not be separated from me for longer than ten minutes for the first five months; I was rarely able to sleep longer than two hours at a time. A year later, the other mothers at school told me how truly awful I looked during this period. Julia is now charming and beautiful and scores at Einstein levels of emotional IQ. To the dads in her first grade class that tell me their sons are quite taken by Julia, I warn them that she already has four fiancés.

During the time that Julia and I were bonding (an antiseptic term that actually meant braving some of humankind's most violent tests of maternal love while Julia got various traumas out of her system), the little Bank Boston investment banking department in which I had been a director and private placement specialist for fifteen years was taken over first by Robertson Stephens and then by Fleet. I had been the champion survivor of countless reorganizations, but this cat finally reached the last of her nine lives when Fleet eradicated the department.

To have glimpsed the light at the end of the tunnel, i.e. family complete, part-time job secured, husband still around, only to have it snuffed out by corporate acquisition was beyond annoying. I had it all — for about five minutes.

When I was ten years old, I wrote an essay about my future that included the apparently prophetic idea that I would have a career first and then become a grandmother. Take the "grand" off of "grandmother" and here I am. The mother part is truly grand, and I will work again. Much in my life remains the same. "Do you think we will stay married another twenty years?" I asked Jeff on our anniversary. Ever the joker I love he replied, "Let's just take it one day at a time." The 850 family adoption organization that I head is instrumental in launching a national fundraising campaign for Chinese orphanages. Victoria, Julia, and I have taken up ice skating, for which Victoria shows talent. Despite disappointment, I remain active in politics. The girls seem to have acquired my support for women Democratic candidates. While watching a gubernatorial debate, I asked them whom they were for. "The girl, " they replied, as if that were obvious. Needless to say, I feel that there is hope for the next generation.

Best and warmest wishes to my classmates.

— 35th — (2008) George W. Bush

Jeff once asked me if we would have ugly children. I replied that they were sure to be tall and have big noses; other than that, we would have to hope for the best. Through the unpredictable shoals of adoption, we got otherwise impossibly beautiful children with small noses and — as a tall person, let me put this as diplomatically as possible — with a projected height in the case of our youngest that would give us good cause to break out the champagne should she reach the five-foot mark. No part of my adult life has been untouched by our journey to form a family, from its darkest hour to its hardest won achievements, and most of those extremes have been private.

My transition from paid work to volunteer work was largely involuntary as I lost my seemingly unique status as the only part-time investment banker I knew due to a corporate take over. The kids needed me too much to contemplate the kinds of extreme jobs I loved, and I reluctantly turned down startups, turnarounds, and full-time deal making, instead turning to volunteer fundraising for Chinese orphanages, political campaign finance work mainly for women (though classmate Al Franken now running for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota is an exception), running a thousand-family large adoption support group, and various school activities at which my quirky methods for problem solving causes no end of amusement as a class parent.

My two very different daughters agreed on one thing this year: mom's wardrobe had to go. Elevenyear- old Julia locked me in a dressing room in my favorite London department store and selected clothes for me. "It's your turn, mom," she explained with gratifying results. Thirteen-year-old Victoria handles my make up and purse selection. Expect to see a better dressed classmate with rather pinched feet, two gorgeous daughters, and a life that is simultaneously more conventional and less so than she ever expected.

— 40th — (2013) Barack Obama

I am very much looking forward to catching up with classmates at the Reunion which I have the honor, and fun, of co-chairing.

The brief five-year synopsis is more of the same: same husband, same dog (though barely), same house, same children; however, my various activities have shifted almost completely away from child-inspired activities to politics. I resigned, after seventeen years, as president of Families with Children from China-New England to become the finance co-chair of Elizabeth Warren for Massachusetts, the hottest Senate race in the country. Although I have been on various finance committees for twenty-five years, I became a full-time finance co-chair, first in the Martha Coakley- Scott Brown Senate special election to replace Ted Kennedy in 2010 and then for the Elizabeth Warren — Scott Brown Senate race in 2011.

Martha Coakley lost in a nationally watched special election campaign so denigrated that it was almost five months before I could leave the house without being accosted by angry Democrats for losing "Ted Kennedy's seat." In all my years of supporting worthy, but losing, liberal female candidates, nothing had prepared me for the aftermath of a race that Dems expected to win or for the devastating damage that losing a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate majority would bring to the country.

My family watched in disbelief as I lobbied hard to become the finance co-chair for Elizabeth Warren. They made many sacrifices, including vacations and social events, in the course of the campaign. Ultimately the finance team raised more money than any other nonresidential campaign — garnering national recognition — and Elizabeth won by seven points due to the strength of her stance on the issues.

My oldest has threatened to vote me out as Mom if I undertake another campaign. Fortunately she is at college and not aware of my sneak visits to Ed Markey's campaign office for another Senate special election; this time the campaign is to replace John Kerry. I am once again a finance co-chair for a US Senate race, seemingly now my niche. My special gratitude to classmates Amy Totenberg, Al Franken, Rob Sedgwick, Ned Notis-McConarty, and Ham Fish for their encouragement. I hope for the best and work for the worst, as anything can happen in politics.

— 45th — (2018) Donald Trump

In addition to my paid work, now as in the past, I spend many hours on politics and finding ways to help the women's movement, those two passions coinciding in my fundraising commitments to female candidates. I have served as finance or campaign co-chair for three US Senate races and two gubernatorial races, mostly, though not exclusively, for women candidates. At one point my GP fired me from his practice after my not scheduling physical exams for five years — the five years I worked on five different high-profile campaigns, an insane level of commitment, per my GP, who eventually relented and let me back in his practice.

After thirty-five years of such activity and much optimism, it's been a crushing year, seeing one program or hard-won regulation after another being destroyed by the White House. Watching

MeToo take down good men as well as egregious harassers has been agonizing, as some of those men, ones I count as friends and as proven allies of women, are no longer in a position to help both women and other groups in need of their assistance. Hard as it may be for aggrieved groups to uphold such tenets of civil society as due process, I believe it is absolutely necessary to make permanent progress that benefits us all. We will look back on this period as having aspects of the 1950s witch hunts I am barely old enough to remember — but remember the tragic damage of those years to family friends I do. Whatever our political persuasions, I hope I have the courage to stand up for democracy even when such a stance might not be to my immediate benefit.

Jeff and our daughters are doing well. Jeff has a deepening spiritual side, manifest in both his active membership in a local Episcopal church and a commitment to meditating and tai chi. My only regret about the children is that I don't have a few more, but adoption became increasingly difficult after we were fortunate enough to get our second daughter.

I remain Elizabeth Warren's finance co-chair; I am on the advisory board of the American Repertory Theater, the board of directors of the National Center for Learning Disabilities (neuroscience and education remains an interest), and the board of directors of The American Prospect magazine.

I close in wishing my classmates well and hoping that all of you will come to our Reunion. Cochairing our Fortieth Reunion with Jerry Murphy and Peter Mazareas was a joy.