Joanne Friedland:  

Hi, everybody! I'm pretty curious about all of you so I thought it only fair to give a short (can I really do short?) review of what has been going on in my life since high school. I went to Cornell (with a whole bunch of you) and majored in Anthropology because I was fascinated by cultural differences. As graduation neared, however, it became clear that anthropologists are weird in ways that are different from the ways in which I am weird, and I did not want to spend my life in New Guinea or, even worse, in academia. So I did what many of us did to make the world a better place, I applied to law school. I went to University of Chicago Law School, racked up student loans, and took a job at a large Chicago law firm, (Mayer, Brown) to pay them off. (What ever happened to making the world a better place? Well, at least I did not become a litigator.) I worked on huge financial deals, learned to really enjoy drafting (embarrassing to admit) and negotiation, and became a partner there. I retired from the firm after 17 years to devote more time to my family and to get a dog. What family? Well, at Cornell, I fell in love with Steven Marks (POBHS 1970) and we married after he and I graduated in 1974. We moved to Chicago to pursue our graduate studies and careers but divorced after seven years. I subsequently married Joel Friedland, one of my clients (scandalous!), and had three children, a daughter and twin boys. Sadly, in 1999, Joel died at the age of 44 after a short but awful battle with cancer. The kids were 15 and 12 at the time so I devoted the next several years to raising them and doing scads of volunteer work at their school. When my oldest went to college, I got a second dog. I threatened to get a pony when the boys went to college, but instead started spending my wi...Expand for more