Love is in the aire
This is the story of two young opera stars who had a rule against dating cast members. So much for rules
by Larry Dendy (ABJ '65)
s Kendall Kookogey lay dying in Dallas Bono's arms, a real-life love story was born. Kookogey, who was playing the frail, consumption-ridden Mimi in "La Boheme," and Bono, as her lover Rodolfo, had audience members in tears during the opera's final scene early this year at Athens' Classic Center Theater.
What the audience didn't know was that the young singers weren't just acting. After meeting at the first rehearsal, Kookogey and Bono began a relationship that will lead to wedding bells in May in Titusville, Pa., her hometown.
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 From left, Kookogey (MFA '00) and Bono met and fell in love while starring in "La Boheme" for the new Athena Grand Opera Company. |
For Bono, a professional opera singer from Philadelphia, sparks flew immediately. "After the first rehearsal, we went out to dinner with some of the cast. I remember thinking, I'm going to marry her."
Kookogey, a soprano, has sung in many amateur and college operas and musicals, including the lead female role in a production of "The Marriage of Figaro" in Salzburg, Austria. Bono, a tenor, has performed in several operas since making his professional debut in 1999 in the New York Grand Opera production of "Don Carlo."
And both singers have always had a firm rule: don't get involved with cast members. "I was focused on my career and didn't want any distractions," says Kookogey. "The last thing I was looking for was somebody in my life."
Kookogey and Bono got rave reviews for their moving performances in "La Boheme," which was the third production of the Athena Grand Opera Company, a partnership formed in 1998 between The Classic Center, UGA's College of Arts and Sciences, and the UGA School of Music. The University Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Mark Cedel, provides the music, and professionals like Bono are brought in to anchor large casts that include UGA music students, faculty, staff, and townspeople. Stephanie Pierce, UGA's opera studies coordinator, is the director.
The company's first production was "The Magic Flute" in 1999, followed in 2000 by "Die Fledermaus," in which Kookogey also had a starring role. The 2002 production, Mozart's popular "Marriage of Figaro," will be performed on Feb. 15 and 17. More information about the production and the Athena Grand Opera Company can be found at: http://members.home.net/williampro/Opera/opera.htm.
Meanwhile, Kookogey and Bono are trying to figure out how to merge marriage and careers. Bono is booked for the Sarasota Opera's upcoming U.S. premiere of the French version of Verdi's "Il Trovatore." Kookogey will audition for apprenticeships with hopes of landing future opera roles. They know it will be challenging, but Bono doesn't sound worried.
"I'm a lyric tenor and Kendall is a lyric soprano," he says. "Puccini and Verdi wrote lots of opera for those voices. It will be wonderful to sing together."
Legacy of healing
Atlanta surgeon Zel Phillips (BS '70) is a soldier in the war against breast cancer
by Heather Summerville
he has all the trappings of the modern-day physician: pager and cell phone at arms reach and state-of-the-art computer at her desk. But Dr. Rogsbert "Zel" Phillips doesn't know the first thing about computers. What she understands are her patients.
"It's an emotional situation, and you get to know people at their weakest," explains Phillips (BS '70), a breast cancer specialist who was only the second woman—and the first African-American woman—to complete Emory University's general surgery program.
 Phillips' Breast Cancer Awareness Weekend drew a crowd of 1,000 to hear Maya Angelou. |
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Phillips is helping to develop a new procedure that she hopes will do for breast cancer what the Pap smear has done for cervical cancer. As recently as a year ago, Phillips was the sole Atlanta surgeon taking part in this experimental procedure called ductal lavage; now she is teaching it to other physicians in the Atlanta metro area. By inserting a small scope into the breast under a local anesthetic, Phillips is able to remove and test cells for abnormalities that could lead to cancer.
Sisters by Choice, a breast cancer support group for Atlanta area women, is a Phillips initiative aimed at empowering her patients. "It's been proven that women who are involved in some type of controlled support group, overall, do better dealing with breast cancer," says Phillips, who has also started an annual Breast Cancer Awareness Weekend. The highlight of this year's event, held in late September, was a talk given by author Maya Angelou, whose appearance drew a crowd of more than 1,000.
Sonjia Young, this year's event coordinator and a former patient, introduced Phillips to Angelou. "Dr. Angelou was taken aback by how special and enthusiastic Dr. Phillips is," says Young, who shares that feeling. "The moment I walked into her office, I knew this was someone who could help me."
Phillips' dedication to health care extends to homeless women, who can get a hot meal and be screened for breast cancer at Phillips' office in Decatur. She also has plans to start a breast cancer center in Antigua, where many women who have been diagnosed with breast cancer go untreated.
What drives Phillips, in part, is her amazement—and frustration—that no cure for cancer has been found. "When we made the commitment to land on the moon during the Kennedy administration, within four years we were there," she says. "Now we say to ourselves, 'How can we not find a cure for cancer?' We need that same commitment now."
Phillips was one of just a handful of black students in UGA's Class of '70. And while she recalls being subjected to racism on a daily basis, she says "it was from the University that I realized that I did, in fact, belong—that I no longer had to prove myself to anyone by always trying to be the best at everything I did."
That resolve has served Phillips well in her medical career, and what she wants from life is to leave behind a legacy: "I want someone to say, 'Zel Phillips was here, and she made a major contribution to breast care.'"
Indie man
Larry Estes (ABJ '76) got hooked on films at UGA, and that's the goal of his new distribution company
by Gardner Linn (ABJ '01, AB '01)
lthough he lives in Seattle, Larry Estes has been making inroads in the movie business for some time now. When home video exploded and changed the industry, Estes was right in the middle of things. When future Oscar-nominated director Steven Soderbergh was sleeping on a couch at an editing facility while finishing his debut film, "sex, lies and videotape," Estes was there to help finance the groundbreaking indie. And with his new distribution company, Estes is poised to become an important player in the independent film scene.
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 Estes (center), flanked by writer-director Sherman Alexie and actor Leo Rossi, is producing "The Business of Fancydancing." |
Estes began his career as a cinematic outrider while still a student at UGA. In 1971, his freshman year, he saw a handful of films—"The Last Picture Show," "A Clockwork Orange," "The French Connection," and "Slaughterhouse-Five"—that made him want to abandon his newspaper journalism major and concentrate on film. He started working for University Union's Cinematic Arts division, which booked films for viewing on campus. Cinematic Arts showed classics, art flicks, and retrospectives. From that experience, Estes got a job offer from the film distributor that provided films to Cinematic Arts.
By the mid-1980s, Estes had risen to senior vice president of feature film acquisition at RCA/Columbia Pictures. These were times of great change for the film industry, thanks to the rise of home video—and Estes took advantage of it. He started out by showing classic and obscure films to students who could not see them elsewhere, ultimately acquiring the rights to some of those films himself for release on video—which enabled students to rent those classic and obscure films whenever they wanted.
By 1985, the video business was booming, and Estes realized he could use some of the money available for film acquisition to finance small films, including 1989's "sex, lies and videotape," which is widely regarded as the film that launched the independent film boom of the 1990s.
Estes left Columbia in 1993, just as the company was being purchased by Coca-Cola, to concentrate on producing independent films. He still wants to keep his hand in that area, but his newest venture, Outrider, is a distribution company—and that no longer means theaters exclusively; some of Outrider's films come out only on DVD, video, or over the Internet.
Outrider's first film is "The Dream Catcher," which opened in Chicago in August, with plans to expand to other cities. Other films on the slate, says Estes, include "Bartleby," starring Crispin Glover, and "The Business of Fancydancing," which Estes is producing. After nearly two decades in Hollywood, Estes is back where he started as a college student: finding new films and showing them to as many people as he can.
Gardner Linn is a former editorial assistant at Georgia Magazine.
Red Sorrow
Nanchu Li's new book is a painful, moving history lesson of what life was like inside Chairman Mao's Chinese Cultural Revolution
by Alex Crevar (AB '93)
anchu Li (MA '88) used her entire life savings, 10 years of faithful hoarding, to come to America. The self-described participant and victim of Mao Tse-tung's Chinese Cultural Revolution arrived in Athens, Ga., in September 1986 with $21 to her name and no return ticket. But she wasn't frightened. Even when no one met her at Hartsfield International Airport and then, while riding alone on a Greyhound bus into the sticky Georgia night, Nanchu wasn't scared. She was through with fear.
Nanchu (her streamlined nom de plume) retells her life's story in Red Sorrow, published by Arcade earlier this year. Her memoir details the timeline of events that plagued a Chinese generation: "Misfortune followed us step by step." Nanchu recounts her time as a junior Red Guard leader, military farm worker on the frozen Sino-Soviet border, and then as an academic during Chairman Mao's regime of planned anarchy and terror. The last portion of the book follows her to UGA, as a speech communications graduate student, after China relaxed its study-abroad restrictions.
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 Nanchu, who became a Junior Red Guard leader as a means of self-preservation, was abused to prove her loyalty to Mao. |
"The people of my generation did not lead normal lives," she says. "Mao was trying to create a New World without classes, which was unprecedented in history. Everything turned upside down overnight. When Mao died, those who worked for him were suddenly politically dangerous and purged from our positions. We were denounced as small running dogs, running after our masters."
Nanchu was chosen to attend the East China Normal University in Shanghai, at the age of 20, as part of Mao's worker-peasant-soldier student program. In 1976, the year of Mao's death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, Nanchu became an English teacher at Shanghai University, where she spent 10 years, during which time she married and had a son.
In 1986, Nanchu, who had taken an interest in speech communications as a way to "put language into real daily life instead of just learning the foreign word for pencil or cat for knowledge's sake," found a book about stateside speech communication departments. Fate had a hand in her becoming a bulldog, or more accurately, it was the first page she opened to in the book.
"On an old typewriter with cheap paper I wrote to the late Dr. Dale Leathers, the speech communications graduate coordinator," remembers Nanchu, who lived in Mary Lyndon Hall and earned an assistantship to cover University costs. "He was interested enough to write back. I told him that I didn't have enough money to take the GRE and he said I could just come on a provisional basis."
But Nanchu's feelings about coming to the U.S. were mixed.
"My first feeling was sadness because I was leaving my son," says Nanchu. Her husband and son, now a UGA honor business student, have both lived in the U.S. since 1988. "But I wanted to leave the past behind and forget China. When I got off the plane, I bent down to touch the carpet to make it real. I saw many different colors of people and I realized that I wasn't scared. I knew I could make it here."